05.06.2022

Charting Our Path Forward

An Update on Under Armour’s Growth Strategy from CEO Patrik Frisk

As Under Armour officially closes out the transition quarter and marks the beginning of our FY23 (which started on April 1, 2022), I wanted to provide an update on Under Armour’s future including the incredible long-term capabilities we continue to build as a company. Now, more than ever, we are well-positioned to compete and fulfill our mission to Make Athletes Better.

 

At our core, we are a growth company. Over the past few years, we have undergone a multi-year transformation focusing on recentering our strategy, operations, and financial discipline. Our teammates have worked diligently to focus our priorities and ensure that our work is steeped in purpose, putting our values at the center of our strategy.

 

Because of this hard work, we’ve not only strengthened our brand but also delivered higher-quality revenue and are managing our business for improved profitability – top-line growth being the priority.

 

Our direct-to-consumer, footwear, women’s lines, and international businesses will drive this growth over the long term. Across these drivers, our growth strategy is anchored in five platforms that will accelerate our ability to scale and grow the Under Armour brand. These include:

 

  • Consumer Centricity: This lies at the core of our values. To activate our purpose of empowering those who strive for more, we are committed to having a deep understanding of our athletes, from their functional and emotional needs to their behaviors and preferences as they complete their journey from discovery to purchase and advocacy. We are committed to evolving with our consumers by incorporating insights, data, and analytics to ensure that we are connected with their evolving needs.
  • Product Engine: Our product development is the creation of industry-leading innovations. This enables our athletes to train, compete and recover at the highest levels possible. Leveraging consumer insights ensures our product is optimized not just for performance, but also style and functionality. Through our Train, Compete and Recover architecture, our constant focus is on delivering tangible performance advantages to drive loyalty – always ensuring we deliver products that athletes didn’t know they needed, and now, can’t imagine living without.
  • Go-to-Market: This platform is how we manage the marketplace – balancing product creation, storytelling, and experiences with strong commercial relationships among our wholesale partners. We’ve made considerable progress here by optimizing our work process calendar, delivering increasingly better segmentation, and ultimately ensuring that wherever and whenever we show up – consumers are engaging with us in a brand-right and premium way.
  • End-to-End Planning: As we work to streamline product creation and lifecycle management, sustainability, logistics, and financial forecasting – we’re collaborating on ways to bring supply chain discipline, company functions, suppliers, and customers in sync to create the most optimal ecosystem possible. Having completed work on many of the individual components of this effort, we are now focused on connecting them to get even sharper and more efficient as we grow.
  • Omni-channel Excellence: Omni-channel excellence targets delivering a seamless premium experience across all brand touchpoints. By establishing a voice-of-the-consumer capability, we’re utilizing a channel-agnostic approach to map an athlete’s purchase journey – identifying and reducing friction points along the way. We will harness the power of our eCommerce platform to improve performance, speed and drive a more enjoyable digital experience.

Underpinning these five platforms is the consistent thread of Acting Sustainably – a core value that we continue to invest in and improve upon. We are building a new global headquarters here in Baltimore which will help fuel our next chapter of growth and our goal of using 80% renewable energy by 2025 and a 30% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Within sustainability, we are focused on three main areas:

 

  • Materials: Redefining yarns to include fabrics that have improved stretch, dry faster, perform better, and, most importantly, are 100% recyclable.
  • Chemistry: Leveraging solutions and high efficiency dying processes that yield improved colors while reducing water usage and improving wastewater quality.
  • Circularity Model: We continue to utilize even more recycled material in our manufacturing methods. We are working hard to establish a circularity model to ensure we’re leaving our home field cleaner and less depleted than before. More will come on this when we release our 2022 Sustainability report, which is expected this fall.

Despite near-term headwinds, I am confident that we are well-positioned to deliver on our promise of growth as we work through 2023 and beyond. All of this is thanks to our teammates across the world, who carry the spirit of Under Armour into their work. We’ve proven our resiliency in challenging moments, and I have full faith that our teamwork will continue to drive us towards bettering our products and our athletes. Together, we will continue to grow Under Armour into an eternal brand.