“Brand is not a product, that’s for sure; it’s not one item. It’s an idea, it’s a theory, it’s a meaning, it’s how you carry yourself. It’s aspirational, it’s inspirational.”
― Kevin Plank
“I believe people change. I think that they can learn from mistakes.”
― Kevin Plank
“The purpose of Disneyland is to make people smile.”
― Kevin Plank
“Brands are all about trust. That trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.”
― Kevin Plank
“Brands are about editing.”
― Kevin Plank
“Your attitude is contagious.”
― Kevin Plank
“My love of horses began in College Park, with me and 10 friends on two couches and a keg of beer in the back of a truck, heading to Pimlico at 6 A.M. to mark our place in the middle of the Preakness infield, where we never saw a horse run.”
― Kevin Plank
“I want people to believe in themselves. I want intellectual curiosity. I want someone who realizes that they don’t know it all and that they’re dying to learn.”
― Kevin Plank
“Motivation, passion, and focus have to come from the top.”
― Kevin Plank
“Every great brand is like a great story.”
― Kevin Plank
“I’ve always been a hustler.”
― Kevin Plank
“When you’re winning, you’re creating a dynasty.”
― Kevin Plank
“Maryland is one of the greatest schools that we have in this country.”
― Kevin Plank
“I don’t like my competition. At all.”
― Kevin Plank
“I can’t imagine trying to operate a company banking on the fact that my logo is cooler than somebody else’s logo.”
― Kevin Plank
“When I tell you it’s an Under Armour T-shirt, your question should be, ‘What’s it do?’”
― Kevin Plank
“There’s no such thing as a good time. I started an apparel-manufacturing business in the tech-boom years. I mean, come on. Get out of your garage and go take a chance and start your business.”
― Kevin Plank
“I realized early on that I was pretty good at organizing. A lot of it was about control. While my friends were out getting hammered at concerts, I was making money. I am a control freak.”
― Kevin Plank
“We need to stop making wide-body seats on airplanes, stop accommodating that, because it’s not healthy.”
― Kevin Plank
“I’m a big advocate of the power of positive thinking, particularly for small businesses.”
― Kevin Plank
“We want to shine a light on this great city of Baltimore. I can tell you, I love this city.”
― Kevin Plank
“The world cannot continue to build larger health care systems where you just sit around and wait for people to get sick.”
― Kevin Plank
“Blowing people’s minds is one of my favorite things to do.”
― Kevin Plank
“Wipe the tears away, stand up, be a man, run your business, find a way.”
― Kevin Plank
“Randy Edsall is a good, strong, decent man who is working his tail off on behalf of the University of Maryland. And there are more people that want to spend their days burning things down than building it up. At least just stop rooting against him. You know, give the guy a chance.”
― Kevin Plank
“I was a not-big-enough, not-fast-enough football player who wanted a little bit of an edge on the field. I figured my own sweat, if I could get that off my body, and more importantly, the weight that stood behind it, that would help.”
― Kevin Plank
“People look great in leggings and shorts and athletic clothes.”
― Kevin Plank
“I wanted to make the world’s greatest football undershirt. But I realized that no team sport had equipment for apparel. Apparel was an afterthought.”
― Kevin Plank
“I was a general business major, which meant that in any business school and particularly at Smith School, which is a very good school, you do a lot of team projects. Well I was the guy who gave the presentations for the team projects.”
― Kevin Plank
“It’s a fire, it’s a passion to get out and to create and to innovate. And that I’ve always enjoyed and I’ve always been very proud of is that the people I’ve done business with, the people around me have always made money.”
― Kevin Plank
“My first real business was bootlegging T-shirts – I was just a dumb kid. You go to a concert and pay $25 for a cotton T-shirt that says ‘Rolling Stones,’ ‘Lollapalooza,’ or whatever. On the outside they’re 10 or 15 bucks. We were the guys selling them for 10 or 15 bucks.”
― Kevin Plank
“You need to put your hands around the throat of your business, and you need to run it. There’s no other way.”
― Kevin Plank
“I was always telling people I was doing great, even if I wasn’t.”
― Kevin Plank
“I’m usually a pretty intense person. Give me an inch, and I’m going to go.”
― Kevin Plank
“I’ve got a pretty addictive personality.”
― Kevin Plank
“The sports apparel industry was dominated by the big shoe companies. But there was a void in apparel and I decided to fill it.”
― Kevin Plank
“All we’re trying to do is change how people think about fitness. And build Under Armour into the biggest brand in the entire land.”
― Kevin Plank
“When you see most companies get big, they want to shout about all they’ve done. But the consumer wants to know: ‘What have you done for me lately?’”
― Kevin Plank
“As foreign as it would be for you to go running in regular shoes, I want it to be just as foreign for you not to work out in your Under Armour.”
― Kevin Plank
“Before Under Armour, the only choices you had were to wear a short-sleeved cotton T-shirt in the summer or a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt in the winter. Why not make a better piece of equipment for underneath the shoulder pads?”
― Kevin Plank
“You’re convincing these big, tough football players to wear what was essentially women’s lingerie. There was a little bit of a Jedi mind trick that needed to take place. The product really spoke for itself once guys felt it and touched it.”
― Kevin Plank
“Any self-respecting entrepreneur has borrowed money from their mother at some point.”
― Kevin Plank
“I wake up in the morning and I think about one brand. I don’t have enough time to wake up twice and think about two.”
― Kevin Plank
“It’s key to become ‘famous’ for one thing first, and that will give you the credibility to go into other areas once your ready… which generally means a long time and a lot of perfecting!”
― Kevin Plank
“Employees get things done. Partners get things done done. But owners get things done done done.”
― Kevin Plank
“People like being on winning teams.”
― Kevin Plank
“Everyone must have a voice, and everyone deserves clarity.”
― Kevin Plank
“In getting Under Armour started, like any business, I think, number one, you need a great idea.”
― Kevin Plank
“The markets are efficient over time.”
― Kevin Plank
“At Under Armour, we’ve created a very strong culture, a culture that first and foremost is built on people.”
― Kevin Plank
“Leadership is… to make sure you never limit the idea or opportunity.”
― Kevin Plank
“Data is the new oil.”
― Kevin Plank
“The companies that do well are the companies that use math.”
― Kevin Plank
“I don’t want to be characterized as the big booster guy.”
― Kevin Plank
“People of Baltimore, if you want to simply learn a new trade, if you want to join the Foundry, it’s a membership. It’s like joining a gym, and you can go and meet other entrepreneurs like you. You can talk about how to get financing. You can take a class on how to sew. You can take a class and say, ‘I want to be an electrician.’”
― Kevin Plank
“Great companies have to manage the cadence of what they do.”
― Kevin Plank
“I was always… naive enough to not know what I could not accomplish.”
― Kevin Plank
“If I had been out in the industry instead of being a college kid who had an idea for another T-shirt, I would have been too scared to do anything.”
― Kevin Plank
“I didn’t like the way a wet cotton T-shirt felt under my equipment. There had to be something better.”
― Kevin Plank
“If Facebook owns social, if LinkedIn owns business, who owns your health?”
― Kevin Plank
“I don’t have the option of getting fat. I like to try as much of our products as I can. Our sample size is size large, and I can’t fit into our samples unless I’m at that size.”
― Kevin Plank
“We don’t care which products you like, but you should be using UnderArmour.com – which is now MapMyFitness – and having a reason to visit us every day.”
― Kevin Plank
“We are not going to do ourselves any favors by buying into what’s printed in newspapers.”
― Kevin Plank
“We don’t tell a 17-year-old kid that Nike sucks, because the fact of the matter is, Nike doesn’t suck. They’re actually very good at what they do.”
― Kevin Plank
“There is some little boy and some little girl out there, somewhere, who believe that when they put Under Armour on, they can do just a little bit more.”
― Kevin Plank
“In my industry, a shirt and a shoe are still made the exact same way they were 80 years ago.”
― Kevin Plank
“I don’t believe in flagship retail, because the definition of flagship retail is that it’s a marketing expense, and it’s going to lose money.”
― Kevin Plank
“The ability to touch people and literally change lives is incredibly relevant in a consumer-products company.”
― Kevin Plank
“The best merchants in the world aren’t the ones predicting what’s cool next; we’re the ones dictating what’s cool next.”
― Kevin Plank
“Great brands are meant to be great aggregators.”
― Kevin Plank
“My kids have been watching a lot of ‘My Little Pony,’ and it’s rubbing off on me.”
― Kevin Plank
“People say they’ll pay more for something made in the U.S., but they won’t actually do it.”
― Kevin Plank
“If you’re going to start a company, it’s not going to be in the millions of dollars, but it’s going to be something – for a lot of these kids – out of the trunk of their car, the same way that I did.”
― Kevin Plank
“The Small Business Administration was fundamental in helping our company. There’s great initiative from the government if you know the right places to look.”
― Kevin Plank
“Everybody is an expert. But at Under Armour, I want people to control what they can control. Leave the pontificating to everyone else. Leave all that negative talk to everyone else.”
― Kevin Plank
“Winning, I believe, is a culture just as much as losing is.”
― Kevin Plank
“Nothing ever surprises me about the market.”
― Kevin Plank
“The idea of insider information to me is almost, like, laughable.”
― Kevin Plank
“San Francisco is one of the worst-dressed cities in the world, bar none.”
― Kevin Plank
“Stop with the stupid messages. I don’t need a message that says, ‘Go on, you can do it today.’ What does that mean?!”
― Kevin Plank
“I run five miles three times a week; I log everything. I look up routes when I travel.”
― Kevin Plank
“I’m a sporting goods guy.”
― Kevin Plank
“I love Monopoly. You know why? When I play Monopoly with you, I’m going to buy everything from Baltic Avenue to Marvin Gardens. If you get to my side of the board, you’d better roll boxcars, or you’re going to pay rent.”
― Kevin Plank
“It’s absurd that you know more about your car than you know about your body.”
― Kevin Plank
“I like people who go. I love energy.”
― Kevin Plank
“Being green means preventing waste.”
― Kevin Plank
“In getting Under Armour started, like any business, I think, number one, you need a great idea. But it’s also about who you know.”
― Kevin Plank
“Go find out if you can make your product. Once you make it, stop projecting what’s going to happen and go find out whether your product can sell. Find out whether someone is willing to take hard-earned cash out of their pocket and exchange it for your product.”
― Kevin Plank
“Don’t ever, ever devalue your product. Ever. It’s the worst thing anyone can do to hurt your brand.”
― Kevin Plank
“Success doesn’t happen quickly. It happens from doing the same thing over and over, becoming great at it, and delivering great value to consumers.”
― Kevin Plank
“I love Under Armour, and I would like stockholders to know that I am very committed to our company.”
― Kevin Plank
“I want Baltimore to be the coolest city in the world.”
― Kevin Plank
“At some point in your life, you’ll find yourself in a similar position: Surrounded by people who are smarter, faster, who have more experience and more money – and you’ll just have to find a way. And you’ll have to do it with passion.”
― Kevin Plank
“Passion means finding a way.”
― Kevin Plank
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