There's an entrepreneur right now, scared to death, making excuses, saying, 'It's not the right time just yet.' 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.
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.
One of our first customers asked me how big we want to be. I said I want to be really big. Later, it bothered me that I answered that way. Now I say I just want to be a great company.
Motivation, passion, and focus have to come from the top.
Great brands are like great stories. And every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And our job is to make sure that every chapter of our stories makes sense to the one in front of it and make sense to the one after it. There is no such thing as an overnight success. You have to get up and put your work boots on every single day.
I'm a big advocate of the power of positive thinking, particularly for small businesses.
The sports apparel industry was dominated by the big shoe companies. But there was a void in apparel and I decided to fill it.
Any self-respecting entrepreneur has borrowed money from their mother at some point.
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.
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.
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?'
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.
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.
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.
Where can we take no the product, but the idea?
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.
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.
Best merchants are the ones who dictate cool, not those who try to predict it!
We need to stop making wide-body seats on airplanes, stop accommodating that, because it's not healthy.
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.
