As Cohen pointed out, Abercrombie and Fitch gets more attention as the beloved of the hotties, but regular guys need brands to love, too.
“I just saw someone walking down the street in Las Vegas wearing a long-sleeve Under Armour shirt,” he said. “It was 100 degrees out, and I asked him why he was wearing it. He said, ‘I love it — it makes me feel like I just worked out.’ And — how do we say this? — this guy didn’t look like he had been lifting weights any time recently.”
The worked-out fantasy has also endeared it to a fan base most likely to carry it into the future as a major lifestyle brand: teenage boys.
“This is the brand for them,” Beth Boyle, the senior public relations manager for NPD, said of her two sons, ages 13 and 15. “Even if I say to them, ‘If we get the cheaper brand, you can have two,’ they say, ‘No, I’d rather have just one.’”
Teenage boys and their heroes may have made the brand what it is, but Under Armour is now thinking outside the gridiron. Women’s wear was introduced in 2005, and the company has sponsored women athletes and teams. Plank said he hopes the sector will be bigger than men’s wear, though it has yet to inspire the kind of loyalty that the men’s wear has.
The company’s first mainstream athletic shoe, a cross-trainer, was introduced two months ago (after being previewed in the company’s first Super Bowl ad) and has done well, selling roughly 500,000 pairs, according to Omar Saad, a retail analyst at Credit Suisse. He forecast that the brand would sell a million pairs by the end of the year. And this year the company opened its first two stores, in malls in Annapolis, Maryland, and Aurora, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago; and a third one opens this week, at a mall in Natick, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.
Suzanne Karkus, a veteran of Calvin Klein and Izod, was recently brought in to oversee apparel, much of which is either very tight or very baggy, and appeals to men who answer those descriptions as well. (A new intermediate “fitted” style is coming in spring 2009, she said, as are more up-to-date color selections.)
Only time will tell if the Under Armour formula can propel it to the size of Nike. Mincarelli, the Fashion Institute of Technology professor, is not sure. While he likes to wear Under Armour at the gym, he doesn’t feel the urge to wear it anywhere else.
“I’d love to see the brand images of Under Armour go head to head with Abercrombie,” he said, chuckling. “I think Under Armour would crush them. But you know, I’d rather own the shirt from Abercrombie.”
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