Kevin Plank may not ring the same bell as a Bill Gates or the Larry Page-Sergey Brin duo or even a Mark Zuckerberg but the entrepreneurial journey of the founder of Under Armour, Inc. (NYSE:UA) has all the elements of an inspiring tale of building a business from scratch and transforming it into a billion-dollar business.
He dared to dream and did not merely rest on it but put in the hard miles. And the results are for all to see.
The Spark: Plank, who was a walk-on football player at Maryland, had good networking at a very young age, and it came in handy, the entrepreneur said in a video clip shared by a user of the X platform. “Where does it begin? And it always begins with the people whom you do know, the things that are closest to you and to your heart,” he said.
For Plank, it was the 50-60 guys who were playing in the National Football League that he knew that served as the starting point. They were “just athletes and they had this limited window of time where they were gonna be with cameras in their face and making all this money,” he said.
It was then the billionaire hit upon the idea of creating something good that wouldn’t cost them anything but would be easy, and more importantly, would help them in their craft. Now he had the product concept.
As an athlete at the University of Maryland, he was always bothered by the t-shirts athletes wore and asked why someone didn’t make better alternatives. Before Under Armour, nobody ever invented and innovation was always limited to shoes and equipment, Plank said. Apparel was secondary, it was just the cloth covering that was used to designate the team, he added.
When an athlete wears a cotton t-shirt for about six hours, once it becomes saturated it could be anywhere between 2-1/2 to 3 pounds and feel heavy, he said. This could inconvenience an athlete, who are competing in sports, which are always games of inches, he added.
Sensing a huge unaddressed opportunity, Plank decided that he was not going to work for someone else. The next step is scouting for capital. During his freshmen years, he became a wholesale rose guy around the time of Valentine’s Day at college and made a profit of $17,000 a year through his college years.
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