Good morning, everyone.
If we could everyone take a seat and get settled here, we're going
to kick start the day.
My name is Tom Shaw, Director of Investor Relations, and I want to thank everybody for joining us both here live today as well as on the webcast. A couple of housekeeping items and
then we'll kick the show off first. As always, please check your phones
and make sure they're on mute so we can avoid some of those little nasty disruptions that we tend to get. 2nd, a couple of people have been asking about WiFi. We have WiFi, guest house is what you want to select. There is no password that's needed. There's also charging stations outside if you have trouble finding an outlet here in the room.
Finally, everybody's favorite part here, the forward looking statements. Just wanted to note this for everybody to look at, slide behind me and also on the webcast.
So with that, we'll kick start the
day in just a moment. Thanks and enjoy.
It's okay. It's okay. You can clap. How are you and welcome. It is great to have all of you here at at Under Armour.
We already had a quick introduction across the street. And in order to get here, we forced you to cross a freight train line and walk by a tank. So with that, you've already demonstrated your commitment to the company and that we're appreciative of. It's a great day for us to be here, 2015 Investor Day, because it's been a couple of years since the last time you're here. And one of my favorite stories is from my partner, Shueishi Asudo, better known as Shu, who runs Dome Corporation, which is our Japanese licensee and distributor in Japan and have built that business to more than 300 $1,000,000 year to date.
We've been partners for a very long time. And one of my favorite quotes from him is he says, the best part of Under Armour is every time we come back here, and he's here probably every 3 to 5 months or so, there's always something different. There's always something new. There's always a crane in the sky. There's always more people.
There's always new faces. There's always a new project going on. And I think that you'll get a great sense of what that's like for our company being a growth business and being the way that we see our opportunity today and moving forward. In those 2 years, that idea of being different is something that you'll feel today because we are a very, very different company than just a couple of years ago. When you were here last in 2013, we were a $2,000,000,000 revenue brand with ambitions to double by 2016.
As we stand in 2015, those ambitions have become reality. And today, we're going to showcase how Under Armour is a growth company with no plans of slowing down. This morning, I plan to cover 3 main points: who we are, where we're going and frankly, how we plan to win. And there's a reason that I say how we plan to win instead of saying how we plan to keep on winning is because we don't believe that we're entitled to keep winning. We don't believe that what brought us here or got us here are the things that will actually move us forward.
And I want you to know that we are going to lay out for you today with our management team that I couldn't be more proud of that we've been able to assemble over the last 20 years. The clear and articulate strategy that we have of how we expect to run hard and win from here going forward. So this is not a day about patting ourselves in the back as much as this day of laying out the next 3 years and giving you an indication of what the next 10 years looks like, very much like the 1st 10 years of our time as a public company. And then following my remarks, you're going to hear from our team. And then I'll return with a few members of my management team to answer questions at the end of the day.
So at Under Armour, we have strategies and thoughts for us as a business, and we call them our lessons. We call them our whiteboards. These are the things that are in my office. I keep them 3 panels across, 5 panels deep, And I use this to discuss sort of the culture, the energy, the passion of the day, and we write things down on them. They say things like overpromise and deliver, dictate the tempo, walk with a purpose.
All these things are themes that all frankly help shape the narrative of Under Armour. They help shape our story. And we like to say at Under Armour is that great brands are like great stories and every great story has a beginning, middle and an end. Our job as a company and we realize that every athlete we sign, every product we build, every team that we're affiliated or associated with is like a chapter in the book of that story. And our job is to manage it, to secure it, to make sure that Chapter 1 makes sense to Chapter 2 to Chapter 3 to Chapter 4.
And frankly, we're not jumping too far ahead and there's something to build on from where we begin to where we are and especially to where we are going. As we manage and curate that because we think about what the role of great brands are and brands are meant to be thoughtful, but they're not just meant to hypothesize. Brands are meant to have a point of view. And that's one thing you will feel from this company is that we always have a point of view. Brands are aspirational.
Brands are meant to be inspirational. So what does that mean? It means that people don't buy our logo just because it happens to be hot or cool at any one particular time. It's about everything that goes into the brand, every detail considered. When you walk here, when you come here, whether it's the game last night, to your arrival this morning, everything had been considered.
Whether we did or we didn't, we thought about it. And we know that, that is
the impression of what is a company.
And that's from the marketing all the way down to the product. And that's what builds brand. I did an interview several years ago with a candidate. You may have heard me tell this story before, but I think it's really important. It's descriptive of our company.
And I was trying to compel them to come join our team. And they were working out on the West Coast, Pacific Northwest kind of place. And I remember I was talking in the interview and I was like, you got to come help. We need this. You could be such a great asset and you'll do this and you'll do this.
Like your expertise, the way like everything you've done in your life has led you to this moment, you'll be perfect for us. And I remember them just pausing and she sort of stops her chair and she goes, what do you why are you so like crazy passionate about this? It's not exactly like you're curing cancer here. And I remember her saying that to me and me sort of having this like, like what does that mean? My God, like question the meaning of life.
What am I doing every day? We just like checking out T shirts and the kids and stuff and what's the value of our company? And it was a few weeks later that I was actually out shopping and I was in a store. And like we do is in late afternoon, probably around 4 o'clock in the afternoon, and I'm watching people shop. And I'm standing by the Under Armour section.
In and she's got these 2 little boys with her 1.8 maybe 10 years old, they're both holding her hand. All of a sudden they walk up and they're standing like at the end of the power aisle and the mom little boy just stops the 8 year old grabs his mom and just goes, mom, stop. He goes, look, look, look, Under Armour, Under Armour, Under Armour. And the mom sort of like pauses, she gives that look like, don't go over there, that stuff is expensive, we didn't come here to get that. And I'm watching it happen, I'm giving the boy, I'm like, go, go, go.
So sure enough, the mom gets the shack, the little boy breaks away. He runs over the section. He grabs 1 of our compression shirts off the rack. He's still wearing his school shirt with the collar on afterwards. He pulls the compression over his head, sticks his little arms through it, pulls it down on himself and he looks up at his mom and he just stands out in the pile.
He goes, hey, mom, he goes, look at me, I'm wearing Under Armour, I can do anything like this. And it reminded me, more importantly, it's taught me like what is a brand? What does a brand do? It's all those things that lead into that we can never let this little boy down. It's all those things that lead into that we can never let this little boy down because the fact of the matter is that he believed that when he put that shirt on, he just got a lot better.
And the thing is what brands do is that whether you thought
you could do this, now
you believe you do this. So whether he thought he could make varsity, whether he thought he was even good enough to go out for the team, maybe he was just nervous when he walked into the lunchroom and stood there in the cafeteria with a tray in his hand and saying, am I ready to sit down at the cool kid table? Well, today he had something different because today he was wearing Under Armour. That is brand. And it goes into every product that we make, and we never ever violate that trust.
So this kid had an edge and that edge was Under Armour. And the idea that he's invincible is not just made up in his head either. It's something that's believed. As we think about what that means, it comes from the product that doesn't come down to like people making decisions that make sure every product really counts or matters. It comes down to what hopefully you feel when you come to this campus is you feel culture.
It's because in great brands and great companies, it's not people that make decisions, it becomes and it evolves to culture. It is the culture that ultimately makes those decisions for you. That's what we aspire to be. Later today, you're going to hear more about our brand. In fact, our brand will be bleeding through every presentation that you hear.
But it will be articulated most clearly when Adrienne Lofton stands up here to lay out some of the things about where we are and of course, where we are going as a company. But like every great brand, brand start and they need a central purpose. And for us, that purpose is called And our mission is incredibly simple, make all athletes better. And as we say to do it through passion, design and relentless pursuit of innovation. And I can tell and I can promise you there's a reason why the word passion comes first.
It's no accident. It's because passion is infused in every single thing that we do. Today, you're going to hear from an incredibly passionate management team. And as you think about the passion of leadership that we have in our team, all that always comes from the top. And for our top, it begins with our Board of Directors.
I'm very proud, I think, of some of the diversity we brought on our directors and some of the new opinions and perspectives we brought recently. 1st and foremost, we brought on George Bodenheimer, the former President and Executive Chairman of ESPN Inc. And formerly ABC Sports Division. We also brought on Karen Katz, the President and CEO of Neiman Marcus Group, who just filed their S-one to go public, so be nice to her. She's a good person and she gives me a lot of great counsel.
And as I think about like the way that we apply to leadership, legal leadership as a company, I think about just how different the last 10 years, our first 10 years as a public company has been, an anniversary we celebrate November of this year. We've seen a lot of change, and I'm going to take you through some of the puts and takes of what the last 10 years have been like for us. But I've also done a good job, I think, of finding ways to lean on our management team, to lean on our Board of Directors at the appropriate time. And what I can tell you is the way that leadership operates, the way that leadership reacts and hopefully the way that leadership anticipates comes from having really smart people around you. And sometimes it can be something as specific as a deliberate answer.
Here's a yes or no question. What you find is the great ones never really give you yes or no. They don't tell you it's black or white. They don't say left or right. They don't say up or down.
They typically just respond with things like, let me tell you a story. One of my favorite directors who does a great job of telling stories is probably one of our most under spoken directors and it's a guy named Admiral Eric Olson, retired. Eric was the 8th Commander of the U. S. Special Operations Command from 2007 to 2011.
He's the last one to remind you that during that time was when we actually captured Osama Bin Laden. He retired from active duty after more than 38 years of service, at which time he was designated the Bullfrog, which means he was the longest serving Navy SEAL on duty. You don't hear Eric's name a lot and it's curious because he was also the 1st Navy SEAL who ever reached the rank of 3 star admiral flags and then ultimately 4 star admiral for he retired. So Eric is one of those quiet leader actually published a paper called The Quiet Leader. But when he does speak, it's one of those things that you should listen to because there's always some brilliance in it that may seem a little more deep than maybe you just take it on the surface.
And one particular time I was speaking with Eric and I was asking, I say, we've got this issue right now and we had this plan and we were heading this direction, we were moving down the road, we were going this way and all of a sudden something happens, we're moving, blah, blah, blah. And we're trying to wonder, like, should we stick to plan? We go this way? What do you do? And Eric, in sort of only the way he could, in a very simplistic way, he just sort of reached back in his chair.
He sat and he paused for a second. He said, Kevin, one thing I always tell my troops is that we always found that when the map And you can think about the best laid plans. You can think about what we told you in 2,005 about what was going to happen. And then you can think about the reality of actually what has happened, of the ability of our team to not only react but to proactively work on solutions and things that help make us better. That idea of going with the terrain speaks to the management style of our leadership ranks.
I think we've demonstrated our ability to do that as well as anyone else and our track record of overpromising and delivering speaks to that. So as we talk about overpromising deliver, as much as we've done a good job, I think, of reacting to where the terrain takes us, we've also done a pretty good job of sticking to plan. In fact, the same message that we told you on our roadshow in 2,005 is essentially the same message that you're going to hear today. 5 specific growth drivers that will drive our business and grow our company. Quite simply, men's apparel, women's apparel, footwear, international and direct to consumer.
And the theory we had was some way to make our women's apparel business larger than our men's apparel business, which at the time was less than 20% of our total business, sounded crazy and nobody believed we could do it with this Jockey men's football brand. But then to take the collective apparel business of men's, women's and youth, which has been a rocket ship for us, and then at some point have our footwear business actually be larger than our apparel business, which at the time was completely crazy because we hadn't even launched footwear yet in 2,005. And then to take those product categories of apparel and footwear and tell those stories market by market across the globe. And when we don't find appropriate retail distribution, augment that with our own direct to consumer e commerce and retail channels. That's effectively what we've done and that model has driven us for the past 10 years.
And as you're going to hear, it's a model that will continue to drive us forward. So let me give you some then and now. Let's look back at 2,005. In 2,005, we were basically a compression company focusing on pioneering this new category. And you think about like what sporting goods was, like how can a new brand even come into the market?
There were these big massive players that existed there and the pie was only so big and they were tight about it and they were greedy about it. And so what we decided to do is we were looking at the pie and said we're not going to come in and try to take a slice of that. We're going to go make our own pie. And with it, we created this category called compression. And from our founding in 1996 to going public in 2,005, when we used to have 100% market share, by the time we went public, we had about 64% market share and compression, which basically comprised all of our revenues.
Today, as we've evolved and we've gone with the terrain as a company, that percentage is just 10%. And while still demonstrating market thought leadership and dominance in things like compression through category explosion like bringing in signing deals with DC Comics and Marvel and you see Supermans and Batmans and Ironman compression shirts, like what better person to wear compression than superheroes. And that superhero is something that we look to infuse into every product that we do. But now we're bolstered by a much bigger and broader company, made up of things like women's and footwear and loose fit apparel and shorts and accessories and all the other things that make us brand, that make us Under Armour. In 2,005, as I said, we were highly focused on our men's apparel category and it showed representing 72% of total sales and where women's was just again just a little bit less than 20% of our total business.
Today, we are a much more balanced company across our men's and have grown women's, youth and footwear, each in a business that's larger than the size of our complete company in 2,005. Henry Stafford is going to take you through some of our merchandising, what we're doing and then Kip Folks and Peter Rupee will be up on stage to take you beyond that. But beyond me and what you see happening right now is things that we had last year, we defined as the year of the woman in 2014 from our Will What I Want campaign. Where you think about this company, where we were a 20% company in women's, today our women's business accounts for nearly 30% of our revenue mix. And in that time, we've added over $3,500,000,000 so growing inside market as well as growing the overall pie.
You'll hear from Kelly Cortina later, who will expand on what's happening in our women's business specifically and how we're not happy with just being present in women's, but we still have that aspiration of women's someday being as large and even larger than our men's business. In 2005, we were not even in the footwear business yet. We hadn't launched or made our first pair of shoes. We're just announcing our intentions the following year to go after football cleats, which everyone laughed and scoffed at. And looking back on it, if you're going to start in a category that's going to take a 2 40 pound man who can run a 4.4 40, the amount of torque and energy that goes into building that shoe and making it great, was probably not as easy as anyone could imagine.
And we learned that. But after 10 years of being in the business, we're proud to report nearly 40% market share is the number 2 player in the space with eyes set on being the number 1 player in the very near future. Now I'm a young guy, so near future could be several years. But along the way, we weren't just making football cleats because it was football cleats in 'six, it was baseball cleats in 'seven, it was training shoes in 'eight, it was running shoes in 'nine, it's basketball shoes in 2,010, and this evolution of us as a company. And from where we launched and we first told you our first story of the vision that this company had, and we made no footwear, in 2015, we'll make nearly 30,000,000 pairs of shoes.
And you can think what is 30,000,000 pairs of shoes, compare that to our competition who makes nearly a half a 1000000000 pairs of shoes. And I can tell you we don't enjoy playing number 2 to anyone. So we continue to have our sights set on what we can be and what we can mean as a footwear company. This leaves us plenty of runway to grow. And again, Kip, my original partner, and Peter are going to take you through that in great detail.
In 2,005, we operated in just 4 countries: U. S, Japan, the United Kingdom and Canada, which is the drive. And you think about that and we called ourselves international doing business in those countries. Today, we're in over 60 countries. Our international business is on fire.
With Charlie Modoff at the helm, we grew 96% last year, 83% in just the first half of this year and we've increased our share to be nearly 12% of our total mix. At our last Investor Day, it was a goal to get to 12% by the end of 2016. So nearly 1 year early, we've already eclipsed that original goal. In 2,005, our direct to consumer business consisted of just a single U. S.
Website, as I told you, across the street. And again, we have those 4 domestic factory house stores. Today, there's 23 stores, the 24th are e commerce stores, the 24th opening tomorrow in Brazil and more than 300 Under Armour owned retail destinations and partner doors around the world. Jason LaRose, who runs our e commerce and Susie McCabe that run our retail division will be taking you through that just a little bit later today. So growth, all these things.
We talk about terrain. I mentioned that with the Admiral. Well, this is a company that specializes in terrain because when you were here just 2 years ago and you ask about a digital strategy, we're frankly a company that didn't have a digital strategy. We thought we did because our digital strategy at the time consisted effectively of a heart rate strap and 0 community. In that time since then, we've created this word called connected fitness, and beyond it, we've created, I think, a new industry and coordinating an industry.
And connected fitness is not a new growth driver for us and I want to be clear because we think it actually sits above all of our growth drivers. It helps empower and drive all of them. And as we look at that, you imagine from where we were, which was a few people working on e commerce and a strap to today more than 440 people in offices from Copenhagen, Austin and San Francisco to right here in Baltimore. We have more than 300 engineers and app developers in our company today, where at the time we had less than a dozen just 2 years ago. And in doing all these things and buying making the 3 acquisitions between Map My Fitness, which shouldn't happen until December of 2013 after you'd left, Endo Mondo based in Copenhagen and MyFitnessPal in San Francisco, with the community sizes and plus how they're growing.
The last time that we spoke to you, we told you we had 140,000,000 registered users on the apps. When we announced it all the way back, I believe, in March, we told you we had, I think, 120,000,000 registered users. Today, we're telling you we have over 130,000,000 registered users, downloading more than 100,000 of our one of our 4 apps every single day and growing. Scale, scale, scale. The opportunity here remains a bit undefined, but we believe this area will be additive across our 5 growth drivers and part of what differentiates us as a company.
I'm expand on this in a few minutes and Robin Thurston is going to go a little bit deeper with Connected Fitness a bit later. But today, I want to reiterate our growth drivers remain effectively the same. Men's apparel, women's apparel, footwear international and direct to consumer, with the additional bonus of Connected Fitness helping to power all 5 of them. So one other good Admiral, so I'm giving a lot of airtime today and he'll appreciate that. He actually won't.
He doesn't like being talked about. But one time in a meeting, we were asking, do you think we should go for it or not? He just sort of looked it up and he said, no one's ever won a horse race by yelling, woah. So we've never done that here at Under Armour either. And it's taken us and we're very proud of 19 years of growth, 19 years of growth that make a chart that looks like that.
That's how a growth chart is supposed to look. And we're very, very proud of what that means. It took us 5 years to get to our first 5,000,000 first $300,000,000 5 years beyond that to get to our first $1,000,000,000 So 15 years to our first $1,000,000,000 It took us 3 years to get to our second $1,000,000,000 1 more year to our 3rd. And this year, we're going to record $1,000,000,000 in revenue in just 1 quarter, firmly on track to make good on the last target we gave you at our last Investor Day of $4,000,000,000 by 2016, delivered almost a full year early. We've enjoyed 21 consecutive quarters of 20 plus percent revenue growth, more than 5 years of 20 plus percent revenue growth, quarter in and quarter out, delivering and finding a way and doing it not because we're pushing or pressing because it's the demand and the ask from our consumer.
We're one of only 2 companies, the S and P 500 that can make that claim and we're very proud of that and what that means. And frankly, we have no expectation of that stopping anytime soon. And to focus and to continue on this market trajectory, we're going to focus on something we're calling market expansion because we think about market expansion in every single category we enter because within each category, we see infinite space to grow. This is not an acquisition company who's buying other brands because we think we need help of relating a consumer. We will buy capability when it's appropriate, however.
And we are going to grow by entering new territories and introducing ourselves to new consumers through reinvention of product and through developing a bigger presence, frankly, where we already live. An example of how we're expanding markets is the recent Curry Road It was 5 cities in 5 days, which like 33 is easier than 43 doing like a step like that. And coming back from it like on day 2, I'm like, it's like getting a head cold and feeling the scratchy throat thing. And I'll get into a reason of how I think we can help that going forward. But launching a product internationally for the first time and taking that Curry 2 and doing it in Beijing and making this big story with our new launch and our new store and just seeing the power of this brand, opening this new 15,000 square foot brand house on Wahai Lou Road right in the central shopping district in downtown Shanghai.
Watching Steph and seeing the multiple clinics that engage fans and again I told you about Manila with more than 10,000 people filling arena and 1,000 more waiting outside. The reaction we had to this was really overwhelming. And it demonstrated, of course, Steph is a superstar. But man, it demonstrated the global demand for this brand right now, is that this is a connected world and people know the Under Armour brand and they're asking for it everywhere. With more than a 1000000 people tuning into the live stream of our final event in Shanghai watching Steph, generating more than 3,000,000,000 impressions on this 5 day tour through both traditional and social media.
We have again, let me underscore, Stefan is a global superstar and he's our athlete and he's our partner. We are committed to building basketball into a $1,000,000,000 business together
and
I think we have the tools, we have the product, we have the people and we have the assets to make that happen. This partnership is going to continue to drive our growth in footwear and frankly, our global reach. I mentioned to you some of the stats across the street. In a typical Under Armour wholesale account, we're about at 12% of our mix is footwear. In our own stores in the United States, it's about 20% to 22%, 23%.
In Asia, in general, it's 30% to 35%. And in the And in the Shanghai store, we launched, we saw footwear accounting for nearly more than 75% of our sales out of the Shanghai store in the early read. We believe that we are a footwear company for sure.
So I
can tell you about these great things, but what makes and fuels them all together is a very important word to us here at Under Armour. That word is culture. To give you some idea of what our culture looks like, let me tell you about just some of the demographic makeup of our team. The average age of our team is roughly 30 years old, 73% are Gen Yers, which is 18% to 33%, 25% Gen Xers, 34% to 54% and 2% are baby boomers. We currently have 11,143 teammates across 16 different countries.
That's up 35% from just 2 years ago your last visit, we had 8,256 teammates and up 1745 percent from 2,005 when we had just 604 teammates the day we went public. And it's important that when you get to see the size and scale that you have things written down as a company. At Under Armour, as you walk around here, you'll see that everywhere. My whiteboards are something which again, it's just it's the themes that drive our company. It's the essence.
It's the code. It's the culture. It's the attitude. It's all the things that go into it. Let me give you 4 themes that really define our culture here that we require of our teammates.
Number 1 is to act like a global citizen. Number 2 is to think like an entrepreneur. Number 3 is to create like an innovator. And number 4 and probably most importantly, perform like a teammate. And you can't emphasize that enough of what it means in growing because again, A type is higher, A type is higher, B type is higher, B type or C type and it moves down the line.
So finding the right people that fit our mix. So let's talk about the teammates and the quality as we look for them because we recently spent time in an off-site with our executive team. We really wanted to pin that down because we realized how important it is when we bring people on our team that they're successful. At the speed at which we're growing, it's critical that they're successful. At Under Armour, we're looking for the type of people who get things, as we say, done, done, done.
You may have heard me say before is that one of the things on the whiteboard, it says employees get things done, partners get things done, done, but owners, owners get things done, done, done. And that's like, hey, did you do it to get things done? Yes, yes, I got it done. Did you get it done, done?
Yes, I got
it done, done. No, no, did you get it done, done, done. Like at Under Armour, it's about every last detail all the way through, and we do get things done, done, done. So we thought about these characteristics for them. The first characteristic we came up with, number 1, as we're bringing people on the team, bringing experts in that are highly competent, functional experts in their field, bringing them pros, people that have done it, that have seen the movie before.
Secondly, it's about maintaining and having really important a global mindset, not being restricted to some local, regional, national, but a real true global mindset and thinking like an operator, a proven capability in hiring and developing others. This is required for a company that grew 32% last year that we have people that are thinking along those lines and can develop a team because you are an important slot. And the fact is, more importantly, there's going to need to be someone to replace your job and you to elevate. And that's the way we think about it every day. Someone who, as I said earlier about what the brand needs to have, our people need to have a strong point of view, and they must be able to anticipate.
The map differs from the terrain a lot in life and you must be ready to deal with that. An important characteristic to me is intellectual curiosity, wondering why, is there a better way? We like to say the only thing that will get you fired from Under Armour is someone who says that's the way we've always done it. And it's not simply questioning, always looking for the next thing, but always asking, do I have best practices or can we create what new best practices should look and should feel like? And finally, the ability to connect across the company, to be a good partner.
This is so important as you think about it. A great example of a new addition of the team who checks all these boxes for us is Tradema Ussuri, who just joined us recently, where team had been the President of the Dallas Mavericks. He'll be heading up our new sport category division. Henry will go to a little more detail there to tell you about what we're doing to really get to the heart and soul and really capture our consumer the right way. As we're moving well beyond startup phase also, what you'll see from us is that this is a company that can attract anyone contemplating any company anywhere in the world.
With more than 25 corporate offices that we have now to attract talent from every borough, again going where the fish are, places like Portland and New York for both footwear design talent, Austin and San Francisco Technology Hubs, Copenhagen, Munich, Shanghai, Sao Paulo and so many other destinations that demonstrate our international appeal and our willingness that we are truly a global company. And as we build these teams, one thing we know is that every great team, we need a great house. And a great house isn't just something that feels good, is that fluffy, that allows us to truly work better. So we intend to build a better house. Brad's going to expand on this a little more later in the day, but I want to tell you what it means to build a world class brand of attracting world class talent, and our campus must be an important reflection of that.
You may read from time to time about my own personal real estate investments and I want you to know that any dollar that I'm investing outside of Under Armour, my requirement for that investment is that it must have a tangential benefit directly back to Under Armour or to Baltimore. I've made the personal investment in a piece of land in Baltimore to help us build a better house. It's going to give us room to grow with the great we're accustomed to and to attract talent. What you see is a map of Baltimore right here. We'll show in a second where our current campus is, which is up on this side over here and then this piece of ground that we're growing over here.
Our current campus covers about 30 acres roughly, Collectively all in, we have about 24 total acres that make that up, but it's spread all over the place. We currently have 400 people that are located off-site here in Baltimore in addition to Triangle Lots and other things that don't make working here capable as well as we're in the midst of a neighborhood and something that we have to deal with. So the time has come for us to build a better house, not just a badass house, which you can count on, but one that's also going to maximize and optimize workflow. And I'm bringing the tank with me and we might build a freight train through the center of it also. But the new campus is going to cover over 50 acres of Waterfront property that will redefine our Baltimore's front porch as much as anything else.
And this is a long term project. I want everyone to understand what that means. Our first building though, we have 600 people moving into our first building on this campus beginning in January of 2016. It's going to be a long term product and to emphasize that, but it will also include things like innovation labs, sporting fields, fitness centers, manufacturing facilities to help us develop best practices and public parks and green spaces to engage local community and help beautify our city. The past 2 years, we've brought in over 380 people have moved to Baltimore because of Under Armour and their families have come with them.
Imagine the impact we're going to have as we continue to develop this working set 3 years from now, 5 years from now. It's not only good for Under Armour, but it's good for Baltimore. It's good for our community and we believe it's win, and this campus is a win on every front for us. Another big win for us is what we've done to accomplish since our inception. We've really spent a lot of time working and focusing on this idea of changing the way that athletes dress.
Well, now we're about to change that conversation, just like we did before from a sweat soaked cotton t shirt into a piece of equipment, performance apparel that actually enhances your performance, pioneering compression, innovating with design and textiles, focusing always on performance. Well, we're now at a point once again where the map and the terrain are beginning to separate a little bit and we demonstrate that not just changing the way athletes dress, but truly changing the way that athletes live. We aren't just selling products, we are solving problems. And there's 2 areas we believe are essential in changing the way that athletes live. The first is innovation because we know one thing that when we innovate as a company, we will win and we've done that.
Innovation, it is in our DNA And having this platform for open innovation, I'll describe in a second, is just as critical. It's not about how many people we have on staff and comparing how big is your R and D compared to so and so's R and D department because we're not thinking about it that way. Of course, we expect to develop and build the next great product from our own teams here, but we're also looking out and we're also seeing and thinking what we could do to leverage the broader community. There's 4 ways that we think about enhancing and developing innovation here. The first is something we call idea house.
Give us your tired, your poor, your hungry. This is if you have an idea, you send it to our website. Thousands of submissions come in every single day and these aren't things we just take and then send a nice reply. Every single submission is looked at. We have a team that we're building to be able to deal with this specifically is that I want people to know that if I have a great idea, if I am that 23 year old kid who has an idea for a tight fitting t shirt, I could go do it myself.
But what if I just send it to the experts at Under Armour who could help me? And at the very least, we should get a look at it and then it becomes incumbent on us to make the right decision when that happens. It's additional things you'll hear about like Future Show, which is our annual invitation that we take the top 20 ideas we hear from this, We then invite them in. We hold a trade show in our arena, which you'll see later this afternoon in the basketball arena. And we set up a trade show and let our own teammates vote on what do they think the best ideas.
The last 6 finalists we had, I think we're working with 5 of those different companies, again, bringing innovation through a different door. I also have another thing called Cupid's Cup, which is where it's a local competition that I started at the University of Maryland, my alma mater, to have in our backyard that encourages entrepreneurship. And again, to let people know about that flow of technology, innovation and understanding from Under Armour because what we want to do is we want to bet on the field. Like the final piece is like what does betting on the field means. Again, it means it's just picking and saying, we don't use outside ideas, not invented here is not good.
We want not invented here because frankly, we think that we do a better job of demonstrating the empathy for how an entrepreneur feels is that what they're looking for. They want to know that they're not going to get taken by some big company and they want to know that we understand that they can help validate their idea by us approving it. Whether we do it or we don't, they're at least going to get a fair shake. Kevin Haley, our Executive Vice President of Innovation and one of my longest standing partners here at Under Armour is going to take you through that in great detail, and I tell you it's incredibly gripping and exciting. The second area that's going to play a large role in changing the way that athletes live is what we call connected fitness, this term that Under Armour created.
A couple of years ago, I went to as I think about sporting goods as a whole, I went to the CES convention. And walking in there, I remember being overwhelmed by all these incredible consumer electronics companies. And I'm looking and here's Samsung and Sony and LG and all these incredible companies. And I couldn't help thinking to myself how much brainpower went into that convention, how many smart people worked at these companies. And the idea at CES this year, if you remember it, it was not only the flat panel television, but it was taking the flat panel television, which is probably maybe 9, 10 inches in-depth and reducing it to the super flat television, which was like 5 or 6 inches in-depth.
And the really innovative companies were focused on like the super, super flat television, which is like 2 to 3 inches in-depth. And I'm thinking to myself, every single company just had their own version of the same idea. And I'm thinking, I don't know, what does Sony have? 150,000 engineers, Samsung 200,000, 300,000, LG 50, 60,000. And you're looking company after company, I'm thinking, how much wasted brainpower is on this?
And going like what if we had these people because after the 10,000 engineers working on the idea for the superflat panel television, is it really helping drive and change that industry? And then I looked at my own industry, sporting goods. And I'm thinking how many engineers are we hiring every year? Because we're not. It didn't exist in our industry.
And I'm wondering what if we had smarter people working in our industry? What if I could borrow just 1,000 engineers, put them on buses, drive them to the closest 100,000 square foot DICK'S Sporting Goods, challenge them to get out and in teams of 5 to 15, everybody grab a product and start enhancing and innovating that product. Somebody grab a fishing rod. Somebody might grab a T shirt. Somebody grab a football helmet.
These issues that we haven't dealt with and saying, what can we do to bring smart people into our industry to develop engineers to help us ultimately enrich lives? We don't expect to be just another sporting goods company, where our logo is the thing that differentiates or makes us different or better. We expect for innovation to be infused into every single product that we build. That's what led to the acquisitions of Map My Fitness, My Fitness Pal and Endomondo. It wasn't that we didn't have the right answers at the time when we got into this in our digital strategy, it's that we weren't asking the right questions.
Bringing Robin on board in December of 2013 helped us articulate that question. As I said earlier before our last Investor Day, digital fitness again, a strap in a community meant virtually nothing. Today, standing with the largest digital health and fitness community in the history of mankind with more than 150,000,000 users and growing more than 100,000 every single day, we're incredibly confident about what that is going help do for us. We're the largest database of food ever recorded. All 195 countries listed in the world have someone contributing what they ate that day.
This year alone, we had more than 200 we've recorded 6,000,000,000 articles of food have been logged just year to date into our apps and more than 1,300,000,000 workouts, 208,000,000 of which were runs. So do you think we know anything about the running consumer? Do you think we need to hold a panel discussion to ask them how they feel? We know exactly how far they go, what they do and they're even telling us 600000 to 700000 of them and our gear tracker telling us what shoe they're wearing and when the shoe breaks down. What we can do with these insights are extraordinary.
So let me take you through a personal example and let me introduce you to Sofia and Darien. Sofia is a 28 year old finishing up her residency at Johns Hopkins. She lives here in Baltimore. She works 24 hour long shifts in a hospital and spends her free time studying or staying healthy and getting exercise is difficult for her. Darion is 34, owns his own IT consultancy, which makes him a road warrior.
So eating right on the road is a challenge and so he's getting any kind of routine for working out. As you're going to see in a short film on Under Armour Record, it's not just for teams or lead athletes, Under Armour Record will be the way to change people's lives and effectively help enrich them. Let's take a look. So let's talk about the Connected Life for a second. This is the idea and vision that we have to synchronize your life, which you'll hear Robin talk about in just a few minutes versus after Kevin, is this belief that we have that every product that we buy eventually is going to have a chip in it.
Obviously, 1,000,000,000 connected things in 2010, the estimates by 2020 2025, somewhere between 25,000,000,000 to 50,000,000,000 connected things. What are we doing with all this information? Well, we expect to be the destination. We expect to be the ones that synthesize that information. And where it's going to live, it will live on Under Armour Record.
So introducing UA Record 2.0, how many of you know, how many days last year you got sick? Like and if it's 0, I got you, right? And you know it was those 2 days. Do you remember when? Do you remember why?
Do you remember what happened? But imagine if, let me take you through a day in the life and let's just look at Sophie for a second. So she's a doctor, so she doesn't get a lot of sleep. She only slept 4.5 hours last night. And there's really there's 5 pieces of hard information that we expect to have plus one subjective, which is simply how do you feel.
If we know how much she slept, if we know whether she exercised or not and if so, what she did and how many calories were burned, if we know how active she was, meaning what steps that she took, if we know the calories that were consumed for her that day and can you imagine as we look to track this during the week and there's 2 other pieces of data. One where we look and say her weight, which is where if we can convince her just wear a wearable device and step on a scale in the morning and then tell us you could wear a heart rate strap when you exercise. The picture we could have for you and your doctor is so much farther than walking into a doctor's office where they take your blood pressure, they weigh you and the doctor pulls out a manila envelope and says, so how are you feeling? And you're looking and saying that's the best data picture that you can provide me, my most important asset in life. Imagine instead if I could walk in and I could give them these, how much have I been sleeping laying this month over last month?
How have I been feeling? Which is the idea if I want my weight and again if Sophie wants to show you on her phone, but she doesn't want to see it, if she touches on this, it will show her wait for and then when I remove my hand, it will go back. And you look and the last thing is a subjective, how do you feel? Imagine you have an ability where you can just look back and go, how did you feel 5 days ago? If you rated yourself every day 1 to 10 and on days where you were sick, you rated yourself like a 6 or 5 or less.
And imagine you could track and say how many days last month did I rate myself a 9 or 10. And if so, what are the things that I did to make myself feel that way? How much did I average sleeping? What was I eating? Was it active?
Did I work out? And how much was I weighing and how does it affect weight? But having data, having critical data about ourselves, imagine what you do about your own portfolios and you care of none of this about your most important asset. So let's start where we are. We believe this is a vision of where we can go someday.
And again, this isn't being broadcast out and so this is internal eyes only. But imagine what this can mean and where Under Armour Record can be important of where we take and we truly analyze these 6 pieces of data: sleep, exercise, activity, nutrition, weight and ultimately, how do you feel. So how will this work with the Notre Dame football team? Opening weekend, they started out and they had a 31 to 3 victory over the University of Texas. Well, when they play Southern Cal, wouldn't they want to look back and say, what did we do that week?
How active were our players? Do they exercise? How much sleep did they have? And how do we replicate that exact instance for the Notre Dame football team? We'll of course start there at the pinnacle with a top athlete.
But just as importantly, we see this playing a role in people's lives. If Sophie decides to go for a run to Chicago, imagine how then, of course, what this will do for us, where Connected Fitness prior our strategy prior to Connected Fitness was people that would just go and shop for us. One of the things that Amazon claims is 40% of their sales are actually directly connected to what they call their recommendation engine. And their recommendation engine is simply limited to people's purchasing habits. We not only know what people buy, but we also then understand how much they sleep, whether they exercise or not and what they do if they do, how active they are and what they eat and frankly, how they feel.
The reason we work on this because we believe that with better information, it will help us make better business decisions that will inform us about our athletes to build better products that are more on time with them and ultimately, most importantly, enriching people's lives. This type of engagement is something that, of course, will drive loyalty and sales, but we also have a very big belief in what this is going to mean for us as we continue to unite our systems. Later in the day, you'll hear from Paul Phipps, our CIO, who will talk about the security that we'll have around this program as well as what we're going to do to synthesize this information into what we're going to call a single view of our consumer. So as a brand, we do lots of great things, signing athletes, signing teams, developing apps and more. When we look at our whiteboards and going back to what my whiteboards are, these are lots of cool things.
There's one cool place and one sign that always rings true. My whiteboards are written all these different colors of ink. There's one thing written in red ink on my whiteboard and it simply says, don't forget to sell shirts and shoes. Widen the lens without losing focus and we will never forget our core and where we come from. Because while we may be evolving into a global technology company with its aspirations of being the greatest company in the world, which is what we're doing here, None of it would have been possible if it weren't for a single T shirt and we recognize that.
Is that everything is about one step in front of the other. So we can keep this other play out there, but we will never forget to sell shirts and shoes. When we think about that, think about some of our great athletes. Jordan Spieth, when asked post the Masters, why did he sign with Under Armour? The answer that was given back from him that he gave and said, all these companies, why did you go with Under Armour?
What made them work? And first of all, he said, number 1, I'm an athlete. And then he said, you know what? He said, they're a company that actually fit my game. And he used the words and he said, I'm aggressive, I'm young and I'm fearless.
And I think Under Armour shares that mentality with me. And you know what, he's absolutely right. Because what does being aggressive, young and fearless really mean? It's the mentality of our team and our stable of athletes. It's been a winning combination delivering immense brand heat, especially in the last year.
2015 is not over yet, but it's really clear that this is the year of the champions. You see some of the great champions that we've had this past year from Tom Brady winning the 4th Super Bowl to Carey Price and his NHL MVP Lauren Holiday, Kelli O'Hara with the Women's World Cup Misty Copeland, the trailblazer, the 1st African American female to be named a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theater and a cover of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People on the Planet. Stephen Curry, the NBA Champion and NBA's MVP and 3 point winning winner contest. Jordan Spieth winning 2 of the 4 major championships this year. Not to mention people like Clayton Kershaw and as I mentioned Memphis Depay over at the wall earlier, our new striker for Man Yu, who's had again scored once again yesterday.
And this list goes on and on. Being aggressive, young and fearless has helped us truly in becoming this growth company. So when I say being a growth company, what does that mean? Like let's get to it and I'm going to let my team talk in a minute. We are a growth company, but with growth comes the need to invest.
This is a transcendent moment for our brand is that people view us very big. We are a $3,000,000,000 company in 2014, approaching a $4,000,000,000 company in 2015. And I think people see us much, much larger than that. As we said earlier, when we innovate, we win and our track record of investment has proven that where we've invested in the past, we've also won. This momentum provides us with great opportunity, you will find from this company.
So now is the time for us to invest you will find from this company. So now is the time for us to invest in our future. And I know you've probably been waiting for a number. What does it mean? What's the next peg that we're going to put out there?
So I want to make it really simple for you as you have some context for the rest of the day. At Under Armour, we like to say that it's important that we define victory before we start anything. And our definition of victory as we look into 2018, our next investor goal that we'll give you is that we believe that we will be a $7,500,000,000 company by 2018. And I want to be clear of one thing, this is not our finish line. This is simply a moment in time for our brand, and we're going to earn it as we have the last 10 years, the last 20 years, frankly, and we expect to take it.
So let me put this day in context. I told you I'd tell you who we are. We are a growth company, led by 5 growth drivers that have remained effectively the same over the past 10 years. Where are we going? We're widening the lens.
We're changing from the way athletes dress to changing the way that athletes live, being a comprehensive brand for them. How do we expect to succeed? Through culture, leadership and investing in our brand. As I said earlier, we expect to hit the $4,000,000,000 target from our prior Investor Day nearly a year ahead of schedule and we will hit that new target of $7,500,000,000 by 2018. Throughout the day, you're going to hear from our leadership team of how success is changing, how our business looks and how more importantly, you're going to hear about the decisions around when, where and how much we invest, which has been and will continue to be critical for our long term success as a brand.
And as I said earlier, we are a growth company and this unique moment in time with our brand requires us to invest more to support our accelerated growth. The demand for our brand has never been stronger and in order to meet that demand, our need for investment has never been more evident as my team will lay out in detail throughout the course of the day. But what that means to us is that we're targeting our operating income dollars to nearly double from the high end range of our 2015 guidance of operating income to $800,000,000 by 2018. Our job is to deliver both near and long term value while simultaneously investing in our growth. So the continued investments that we will make the next few years give us the confidence in our ability to sustain our top line growth expectations through 2018 and beyond.
And we feel that this frankly, protecting and driving this growth is more important than focusing on minor short term operating margin improvements in the short term. The $7,500,000,000 revenue target by 2018 is the next milestone in our path to becoming a great global brand. We're thinking bigger, which will acquire investing in capabilities and capacities like merchandising, sport category management, technology and talent to ensure our runway for growth extends and widens for many years to come beyond even the $7,500,000,000 brand. That is not our end goal, it's one number. We are as a company truly just getting started.
And I want to thank all of you for coming and joining us here today in Baltimore. And one thing I want to assure you is that with certainty, the map and the terrain are inevitably not going to match over the next 10 years as we think about it. We'll probably find ourselves in positions like this. But as you listen to our management team, you see the strength in our vision, our culture, our team, our resolve and our commitment. I think what you'll find is that this is a team that is capable of finding the best route just as we've done over the past 10 years.
And with that, I'll turn my comments over and leave it to Kevin Haley to take you through our foundation, which is innovation. Thank you all very much.
Innovation. Here at Under Armour, it's just not a buzzword. It's more than that. It's our DNA. It's who we are.
It's both our heritage, it's what's got us here and it's our future. It's where we're going. It's the way that we're building the brand and the business globally. My job as a leader of innovation is to do one thing. It is to fulfill Kevin's request to make product as great as our brand and specifically to do that in a way that's just a little bit different.
By partnering with people on the outside, partnering with people like Dow who bought us Charge Foam, partnering with the inventors he talked about who bring us ideas to Idea House and Future Show, partnering with the federally funded research and development groups that surround us on the Baltimore Washington corridor and bringing them here to Under Armour and combining them with the world class talent that we're attracting in droves, so that those world class engineers can then commercialize the technologies that are brought to us by our outside partners and bring them to the consumer as quickly as humanly possible. It's an approach that brings us speed and scale that we couldn't otherwise have. And ultimately, we're successful with this approach because we're a brand. We're not just a brand, we're a challenger brand. Being a challenger brand, people want to be a part of us.
We're also a contrarian brand. We do things a little bit differently. We zig when people expect us to zag. And it's part of the secret of our success. If you look at what we've done for 19 years, we've defied convention.
We've defied the odds. We've defied the experts. And we've succeeded because of it. So a quick history, others built their brands on footwear. We built our brand on apparel.
And as you see that that's important. We think it provides leverage for the future and innovation. The world was loose fit. It was cargo pants and parachute pants and we came out with tight fitting compression apparel. It was a sea of $5 cotton basics and we brought to the floor at retail a $50 Colgear mock turtleneck that provided the funding to build the brand and the business over time.
The world was bricks and mortar. We had 1888 4 Armor, our 1800 number on the back of our shirt on the locker tag for the world to see. The rest of the world was running ads that were very sort of polished and light and airy. And Under Armour came out with ads that were dark and gritty and intense and it set us apart. The others, they featured the advantaged.
We featured the underdog, something people could relate to. And more importantly, they featured the advantage at the end of the road celebrating victory. We celebrated the road, the sacrifice, the blood, the sweat, the tears that takes to get you there. From protect this house all the way through to rule yourself today, it's always been about the journey for Under Armour. So the list goes on and includes products, dollars 60 sports bras while the world was at $15 high top speed cleats, the highlight boot when the world was going lower and lower.
We made shoes in a bra factory because it enabled us to do things that had never been done before, provide a level of fit and comfort that was unmatched and unobtainable in traditional footwear manufacturing facilities. And then finally, the world copied our dark, intense, gritty advertising with football players. So we partnered with a ballerina who inspired the world just the same and continued to grow the brand even as we elasticized the brand. So we've had success doing things a little bit differently. And now we've come to our latest ZAG.
You know it as Connected Fitness only because that's the name that Kevin chose for it. But it was wearables before. It was sensors, right? It was people sort of doing things a little differently. They were going after early stage seed investments in start up companies.
We're looking at gadgets. Under Armour went big and bold. And we scoured the world, and we found the 3 best, the 3 best companies who are doing it differently, not about the gadget, but about the experience and making an experience so relevant for the consumer that they built a community that's now grown to 150,000,000 people, which for me is huge, because my job ultimately is to take those 150,000,000 people and make them say, Wow. That's my job. Every time they put on Under Armour shoe and Under Armour shirt, just make them say, Wow.
And they're self selected to care about their bodies, their fitness, their health. So they're uniquely positioned to want to be a part of the brand. As we move on to what we're doing in innovation, I'm going to take you through 4 different platforms that we're launching in 2016. I just want you to keep in the back of your mind that the same way that we did things a little differently in building the brand, we zig and people expect us to zag. And do things a little bit differently in our approach to connected fitness.
We do things a little bit differently when it comes to innovation as well. And just think of it as embracing who we are. So we embrace our heritage as a company built on performance apparel. And as you see, I think you'll find in some of these technologies that I'm going to show you, it provides us real and an advantage. The other thing we embrace is this open platform that Kevin talked about, partnering with the Dow, the Lubrizol, the Fortune 500 Companies as well as the inventors and the federally funded dollars that are flowing to our area to bring in the technologies from the outside to give us speed, to give us scale.
And then finally, we embrace the science and not science for science sake, but avoiding the trap of just sort of marketing innovation by creating real innovation that you can feel and you can measure, which then gives the marketers incredible ammunition to tell their story. So without further ado, 2016, a glimpse into the future. 1st, on the footwear side, SpeedForm Slingshot, a perfect example of taking our roots in apparel and specifically knits and yarns and bringing them to the consumer with a product better than anything that's been done before. SpeedForm 4.0 is the way I want you to think about this product. So we did SpeedForm, 3 dimensionally molding shoes and a bra factory to give you precision fit.
Now we can do it in a knit process. It's the first time ever where a shoe comes off a knit machine with that three-dimensional molded seamless heel cup that we call SpeedForm that provides you this amazing fit and feel. Every yarn in the shoe is custom engineered. We've got the yarn experts to do it both inside and outside. Not going to take you through every yarn because Peter Ruppe is going to take you through this shoe in more detail.
But rest assured that from heel strike to toe off, the shoe is designed down to every to slingshot you forward and provide you with a performance advantage. I'm just going to touch on one yarn. It's the little white yarn you see here in the 4 foot. It's called Dyneema. It's unbelievable.
15 times stronger than steel of the same weight, yet so light that it floats. So you get this incredible abrasion resistance. It's so strong, you actually can't cut it with scissors or a knife. It has to be cut with a laser. So no worry about your toenail poking through the front of your shoe, but yet it's still soft and supple and comfortable, everything we want in a shoe.
And then finally as if that's not enough, it's highly conductive. So highly conductive that it actually provides a cooling benefit to your foot. So as your foot gets warm, it serves as a heat sink. Think of it as air conditioning for your foot. We marry that with a Charge Foam Bottom, again brought to us by Dow, unbelievable step in comfort, super soft, but then unmatched energy return as well, a non Newtonian response we call it.
Here's the thing. SpeedForm Slingshot does everything that we want in an innovation because it's a premium product with a premium price point and yet it doesn't just build the brand by being premium, it also builds the business. And the buyers have seen it and they love it. On the apparel side, again, capitalizing on our experience in yarns, knits, we developed something called micro thread. This is part of building that talent engine that Kevin talked about.
We hired a guy named Randy Harwood from Patagonia. He's done some of the most amazing textiles ever invented, including co gear, which we turned into a basis for our business, an engine for our business. But when he came to Under Armour, he got something that he never had before. He got scale. He got the ability to walk into the room of the world's most technical yarn supplier and say, here's the deal.
If you can make this yarn, I can commit to buying this much of it. And what he was able to do was effectively replace the rubber that's currently used to add stretch to most compression or performance apparel. People love stretch. But along with stretch comes the elastic that provides the stretch and the elastic in and of itself is heavy. It doesn't breathe.
It doesn't wick moisture and it doesn't really last. It's the first thing in a garment to wear out. So we've done a great job of engineering around that in products to date. But here, we can design from the ground up by component yarn, which is what you see in the left in cross section at the molecular level. Literally, it's drawn through one half of the yarn at a a crystalline stage and the other half of the yarn.
Why am I telling you that? Because it allows the yarn to turn into a coiled spring. Basically, it takes a yarn that has no stretch and gives it the mechanical stretch of a coiled spring. So what that means is no more rubber in your shirt. What that means is performance.
We'd love that 5% better performance. We're looking at 30% faster dry times, 30% less weight, but the ultimate benefit, the one that's truly astonishing is because we're taking all of that out of the garment, we're looking at 70% improvements in breathability. This is stuff you can really feel when you put the garment on. We can do it across synthetics, naturals, But
what I love personally is the anecdotal response. So
this is the I think the but what I love personally is the anecdotal response. So this is the guy who's wearing it in August and says, I just go for a run every morning and then everyone I get out of the shower and I'm still sweating. But when I wear this shirt, I get out of the shower, I'm not sweating anymore. Or it's August, it's hot, it's humid, Baltimore, Washington area. And so you just leave the air conditioning on in the car for the entire month.
And people are coming back to us saying, when I wear this shirt, I wear the golf shirt, I have to turn the air conditioning off in the morning. So it's something that you can feel. And the best part about it is because we're working with a partner who brings scale, we can bring it to all these different categories and end uses over time and not add $0.01 to the cost of the garment even as we add all of this performance. So Cool Switch, another apparel technology. We're approaching this one a little differently.
This is about adding performance to a garment through a print. We've done it before. It was called cold gear infrared. In cold gear infrared, we were inspired by the way ceramics were used to manage heat in space travel. And we coated the inside of a garment with a ceramic print, which did something amazing.
It just it basically caught heat that was being emitted off the body and held it to keep you warmer longer. But the best part about it was the success at retail, a huge commercial success, dollars 100,000,000 in year 1 at wholesale, but far from a one and done. We've built on the platform and it's now $200,000,000 platform in year 3 and it continues to grow. So now we approach hot weather and managing heat. And CoolSwitch does it by using 3 ingredients in a print that have never been used before and they provide cooling in different ways, which you can see in the graph.
So the first way, the first ingredient is highly conductive. So as soon as you put it on, it feels a little cooler. The whole time you're wearing it, it keeps you a little bit cooler. And that's the separation you see between the blue and the red lines here. To be clear, blue line, red line, 2 identical textiles, the exact same textiles on the exact same wear, 2 different identical workouts.
The only difference is that the blue line represents the skin surface temperature when the shirt has the print with the 3 components on it. So as the wearer warms up and this is about the 15 minute mark here, you can see the gap widen. And the gap widens because the second ingredient is temperature sensitive. So as the person heats up, they trigger that second ingredient. It's like someone threw a switch and the cooling kicks in to a greater degree.
And then finally, if you're late in the golf match, the sun is coming up, you're well into a run and you start to sweat, a third ingredient kicks in. It's a moisture activated ingredient that cools you further. And the best part about it is, it lowers the temperature of the garment enough to reset that temperature sensitive or temperature activated ingredient. So you get further cooling down the road. We look at this and we take the same approach that we took with CoGeer infrared.
We want to build a platform. We think it can exist across lots of different end uses. I was definitely looking for a VNAC version this morning and it's coming in 2016. The bottom line is we think we can make it huge and grow across categories. The final technology I want to tell you about is SpeedForm AMP.
And if you look at the animation, what you'll see on SpeedForm AMP is we've taken the SpeedForm construction to give you that precision fit. We've married it with charged cushioning, amazing step in comfort, unmatched energy return, but we're doing it in a different way. What you'll see here in red is what the SpeedForm technology allows us to do around your mid foot. And what you need to understand here is that most shoes are made with what's called a lasting board or a strobel board and they're flat and they're hard and they're stiff. They don't really add anything to the performance of a shoe.
They're just a vestige of the manufacturing process. So we hired a guy named Steve McDonald, who designed more 1,000,000 unit pairs of shoes than anyone in the industry.
And he looked at SpeedForm and he said,
wait a minute, you guys got rid of the lasting board, you got rid of the strobel board. I can pull the shoe up away from the midsole and give you a custom fit to the shape of your foot because the truth is when you have a lasting board or a strobe board to get away from that flat hard feel, you cover it with a sock liner. And a sock liner is just a best guess at the height, the length, the width of your arch. Amp is intended to amplify your performance by exactly matching the contours of your foot, the height, the width, the shape, the length of your arch, which the biomechanics tell us is incredibly important to providing the proprioceptive benefit that gives you the proper kinetic chain through the knees, the hips and the lower back. So it's starting in training because that's our heritage, that's where we started, covering the journey of the athlete, but ultimately has legs to move into other categories over time.
The final slide, Project Glory. With Project Glory, we've clearly saved the best for last. This feels like one of those opportunities that just it comes along once in a lifetime. And as usual, because we zig when people expect us to zag, Under Armour is uniquely positioned to take advantage of this opportunity. To understand it, you have to understand just a little bit about the context.
And the context is that if you walk into a modern manufacturing facility today, it doesn't feel very modern. It feels antiquated. 150 to 200 people touch every shoe as it moves down the production line. So it feels less modern and more like a Ford Model T production line combined with the Middle Ages Cobblers bench. But the opportunity exists right now today, not in the future to do it better And to do it using some of the enabling technologies that we've come up with like SpeedForm because 70% of that labor, 70% of those people touching that shoe, those 150 to 200 people are dealing with the upper.
70% of the labor is in the upper. SpeedForm is already quadrupling productivity in the upper manufacturing process with a ton more roadway in front of us to improve. Meanwhile, there's already technology out there, semi automated and automated for marrying the upper to the midsole of a shoe. It just hasn't been brought to the consumer yet. And so ultimately, our vision is local for local.
That's where this goes. It enables us to make great product, product as great as our brand and to do it globally, made in U. S. For the U. S.
Market, made in Brazil for the Brazilian market. And so that's where we're going over time, ultimately continuing to make those 150,000,000 people say, wow. So before turning the stage over to Robin Thurston, who's going to tell you more about those 150,000,000 people, I want to provide you with just a glimpse of what the future holds. And that glimpse is a video about something we call our lighthouse. The lighthouse is the physical manifestation of Project Glory.
It's that space, that place that we need that doesn't exist today to bring the technologies and the people together to partner with our factory partners and to make the local for local vision come to life here in Baltimore starting in 2016. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and enjoy your glimpse of the future at Lighthouse.
Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? Doing well.
How many people did the workout? Raise your hands. Fun, My name is Robin Thurston. I'm the Chief Digital Officer here at Under Armour. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about how we got here, Connected Fitness, where we are today and where we're going.
If there's one thing I learned from Kevin Plank over the last 2 years after the acquisition of Map My Fitness is that brands inspire, they innovate and they evolve. So the brand mission, make all athletes better. Connected fitness is a natural extension here. I mean how can you make all athletes better if you're not measuring what they're digital experiences for the consumer and have and create that daily relationship with them. And secondarily, drive growth not only for the core Connected Fitness business, but also for the broader Under Armour business, the shirts and shoes business.
How do we grow that? So how do we get here a little I'll give you a little history. So we made a big bet on community. You all know that. You know the investment that we made.
There were really 3 leaders here. So I'm the co founder of Map My Fitness, now Chief Digital Officer, Meta Laicchi at Endymondo, who we purchased in Copenhagen. She's now grown into a role of running and sort of thinking about the Map My Fitness audience and the Endo audience that had similar functionality coming together and leading our international strategy out of Copenhagen around digital. And then Mike Lee, the founder of MyFitnessPal in San Francisco, not only building out the capabilities there in that office, but thinking about our whole product portfolio, record, but today we have combined and we launched this product called Record. But today we have combined, bringing these together, over 150,000,000 registered unique users on the platform.
It's over 100,000 new people a day in 2015 and that growth we're seeing continue. Probably one of my biggest concerns originally coming into a bigger company was what's going to happen to the communities and we're seeing them thrive. And scale matters to build a community, bringing this together. Scale is a big part of it to win in this category. So if I just sort of take this out a little bit and you think about the growth that we're having now, if we continue at the growth rates we are having today over 30 percent, by 2018 that means there'll be 385,000,000 people on the platform, by 2020 almost 650,000,000.
Dollars Even if that slows down to 20%, we'll have over 300,000,000 by 2018 and 435,000,000 by 2020. We think there's a 1,000,000,000 people or more on the planet who potentially want to track and understand their health in this way as this market expands. We have created the world's largest health and fitness community. As Kevin said before, the challenge that Under Armour had prior to the Map My Fitness acquisition was it wasn't that UA didn't know the answers to the questions about digital, They simply didn't know the right questions to ask. So Kevin went out and looked for a group of people, happened to be Matt My Fitness, and tell a little bit more about that story, in that we helped formulate that question about was it community or was it hardware that we should go after.
And obviously we made a big bet on community, pulling these communities together and I'll talk about how the architectures come together. But what do we see behind me? These are all of the workouts so far in 2015. So there's 2 things you'll see here. It's at scale and it's global.
And in many cases, the first handshake we have with a customer now in some countries will be through digital years potentially before they buy a product from us, a physical 63%
of
everyone on the platform is 63% of everyone on the platform is female, 42% international, 71% under the age of 40. So clearly aligned with the areas that we want to grow into. But I think more importantly, it expands our definition of what an athlete is and gives us access to a totally new audience to have a conversation with. So consumers are increasing, obviously you all know this, on digital in a way that just is unprecedented. It gives brands the opportunity to have a connection that maybe they couldn't have before through apps and other components of the digital ecosystem.
Top line is important. So looking at the 150 is important. We're watching those numbers. But more importantly to us is retention. So there are some key metrics that we're using internally and building that best customer experience in digital is absolutely critical to retaining this group of customers and growing it over time.
If you think about the Super Bowl as an example, 115,000,000 people that watch the Super Bowl every year. There's 150,000,000 people we can have that conversation with. 60,000,000 of those, this is the average active user base over the course of 2015 month by month and we'll be reporting this number on a quarterly basis to you at earnings. 60,000,000 people every month are on the platform and engaging and we believe we can continue growing that number obviously as the top line number grows as well. But we look at a couple of other components.
So foods as an example, Kevin mentioned 6,000,000,000 foods logged in the system since the beginning of the year. It is the largest food database in the history of mankind and growing at exponential scale, especially as we add new functionality like restaurant, menus, things that are going to be on that platform to continue that engagement. The other thing that we know certainly is that there's a 100% correlation between how much people work out and how much gear they buy. So we're looking at workouts very closely as a metric for that engagement level. 1,300,000,000 workouts year to date and growing.
So how do we get here? I'm going to give you a brief history. Athletes have always been tracking. I was a professional cyclist when I was younger, started tracking everything in a journal when I was 8 years old. How far I rode, where I rode, what I ate, my weight, everything in a journal.
So it's not like athletes weren't doing these things. But the move to the cloud or to servers and pulling that data online really started to happen in 2,005. So you almost had a 15 year stretch where you almost went journals to spreadsheets then online. 2,005 you start to see a proliferation of this. Fitness tracking apps, when the iPhone first launched, I mean, we had 2 of the first 200 iPhone apps in the market with Map My Run and Map My Run.
It didn't take off immediately. Fitness tracking apps really were a couple of years after that. At that same time, Under Armour was working on the E39 shirt for the NFL Combine, essentially a heart rate monitor built into a shirt that then developed into a heart rate strap that had a proprietary metric on it called willpower that we still sell today. I want to tell you a little bit about this video here. It's a good story.
So Future Girl is playing up here and Kevin and I met for the first time in the summer of 2013 and we got together in New York, showed me this video and he says, hey, I made this video for you. And I was like, wow, that's cool. And it was soon after that that we decided to kind of bring the companies together because the vision was there. The vision was already in the video for where directionally the category was going. So the acquisition of Mount My Fitness happens, we realized that Under Armour has a lot of assets and the athletes, etcetera, as well as functionality that we were missing on the Map My Fitness platform in areas.
So we put together the strategy, not only to launch Under Armour Record, but as well as acquire Endemondo and MyFitnessPal to complete this picture. Next year, there'll be more devices coming on the platform, more partnerships that we'll be announcing. We see hardware and the proliferation of sensors happening not only potentially here, but in the ecosystem as a whole. And we've openly said that the future here in 5 to 10 years is that every product we make likely will be smart in one way or another. So you have to have a place for all of that to come to.
So what does our team look like? I will tell you I am super excited about the team. We have put together not only with the founders that I mentioned before and they are here to build this vision with me and Kevin and the team, but the rest of the group that we brought in and we're able to get to come work here at Under Armour with us is exceptional. Over 440 extremely smart tech savvy folks, over 300 of those are in engineering product and design to win consumer experience because that's so critical. App developers and engineers, they're not typical in this industry for sure.
And that's why I truly believe clearly we're an innovation company. You can see that with all of the stuff that Kevin Haley just talked about, but we're a tech company. There's a lot going on here. So what are we trying to build and why? This opportunity that brands have today to create these connections, You see it everywhere happening, trying to make it here and there, but we feel like in the health and fitness space, we have an opportunity to create this 20 fourseven, 3 65 day relationship through understanding sleep, eating habits, how you're working out, content that you might read and how you're shopping both in store and online happens and bringing that together into a cohesive experience to enrich your life.
So we have 4 primary goals and it's big deal for us to give back to the athlete. I feel like there's a massive opportunity not only through the product we create but the digital experiences that we can create. This holistic picture, we're focused on 4 things. So how much you sleep, your daily activity, fitness both on field, off field, in the gym, outdoors and all the experiences around that, and of course, nutrition. And bringing that picture together to allow us to provide these rich insights back to the customer.
So where are we right now? So we launched record at CES last year. This current version you can download in the store. I think it's the top 5 app today in the health and fitness store. But we were still missing some parts and wanted to talk to and understand what the consumer needed.
So we have a big upgrade to the interface that Kevin talked about, showed you this earlier today. The 4 components are critical, but the one thing we heard from customers is upfront they want to set up their goals to really pull this picture together. So as you register, you'll be essentially able to put in those specific goals around sleep, daily activity, fitness and nutrition, the weight component that Kevin talked about, and the subjective, how do you feel and how is that potentially affecting your performance? We also felt that there were 2 areas in the social and challenges that had to be part of the product. How many people participate in the steps challenge over the last couple of weeks?
So what is a challenge? A challenge is potentially, it's a step challenge versus your friends or your family or it's a workout challenge for the workout challenge for the month or how far you might want to ride your bike against other people in the community. Those challenges, we know the people that participate in them do 2.5x as much activity on the platform than someone that doesn't. So social is a key part of the engagement layer for us to win and create these areas. So what do we ultimately want to do?
We clearly want to equip the community. We want to get them shirts, shoes, accessories,
want to
build this experience through apps, wearables and sensors. We believe that ultimately you might not just have one device you're wearing, but you might have many, many sensors all over. We'll then obviously track that information, put it in a central database, user profile, location, activity, fitness, sleep, nutrition, but most importantly the cycle. So I started Map My Fitness in 2006 and I will tell you that the 1st 10 years of the cycle was largely about data collection. It was just about making it easy to get data in the system.
The next 10 years are going to be all about the insights. So being able to provide deep insights, recommendations, real time information, training plans, content. And then last, the big opportunity that we have with brand to inspire people to come back to the platform more often. Our athletes, our trainers, obviously your friends, your family, the community as a whole that's within these four applications. This will create brand loyalty.
So what is a platform? Building a platform, our view to sit to build these applications on top and our partners, it's 100% agnostic. It has to work with all partners. It gives users universal access to their data in one place. What does it mean from a company perspective?
What does it mean from a user perspective? So today, when you log on to MyFitnessPal or Record, you don't use the same sign on yet. Those pieces we're bringing together. A single sign on, not only between our existing applications, including e commerce. So bringing all of those together, a single data warehouse and an open architecture that 3rd parties can develop to, whether those are other applications, whether those are advertisers that are on platform, connected devices and in the long run our own shirts and shoes business.
So today we have over 200 partners and 6,000,000 users connected through our open platform that are driving data and creating connectivity. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you're a Humana Vitality member and you have points and rewards for your corporate wellness and maybe you shop at Walgreens and you want to get credit for the fitness activities that you do on our platform, our open technology allows Walgreens and Vitality to give the user, if they want to give access, data to go to those portals, but only if the user allows it. They have to authenticate it. They have to allow it, but it gives them access to take their data and get credit for those things.
So over 200 partners today and growing. Connected Fitness, the overall device platform. Data is a big deal here, making it seamless for the user to connect all these devices. So some of you might use a Garmin on the weekend for a run, you might use a Fitbit during the week, you might use another device for swimming, something like that, but you need a place where all that can go. Our platform connects all of those tools.
So 50 partners today, over 400 devices, 12,000,000 users on our platform have connected those devices in and it's helping fuel the growth of this ecosystem. This year, 1 out of 8 people that buy a fitness device will be synced on our platform. So they will have synced it back through the open platform to our environment. And advertisers, we have a lot of partners that still advertise on our open platform and it's important here. I'll give 2 examples.
There's hundreds of partners, but if you think about BMW just finished a major fitness challenge on our platform, driving thousands and thousands of users back into the platform from their ecosystem to promote the brand within the ecosystem leveraging fitness. Sports Authority, a big partner, they just launched a major campaign that you'll hear later today from Matt Merchant talk about and also driving their points and reward systems similar to say a Walgreens etcetera using that open platform. But in the long run, if you think about today that we make 280,000,000 essentially shirts, shoes, accessories in a year, And if we believe they're all going to be connected 5 or 10 years from now, it could be more than a 1000000000 units. They all have to connect somewhere. It's our platform that's going to allow us to do that.
It's the single platform we're building that comes from all the companies that we pull together that allows us to do that. Ultimately, what is this? It is a massive consumer insight engine. Netflix, Amazon certainly leading here, personalized shopping, personalized movies and film leading here. In later day, you're going to hear from Henry, Matt, Jason, Kipp about how we're leveraging the data into other areas of our business to essentially personalize the experience.
I've often been quoted internally as saying every sports record in history will be broken in the next 10 years for one simple reason, this hyper personalized experience around the but everything, yoga classes, everything will be changed because of this hyper personalized experience. And we're going to create content, communications, experiences, recommendations and product that we deliver to the customer. So what does this look like from a holistic perspective? Kevin talked about Sofia. Historically on Sofia, we didn't really know that much.
I mean, we knew what shoe size she had, what her shirt size was and maybe the closest store she shopped in, we didn't really know that much. Now we have the ability to truly have a deeper relationship and understand the needs better. So weight, BMI, heart rate, all of those things. But importantly, if you look at inactivity, exercise, nutrition and sleep, we start to pair those things together. So if you take an example of we know how much Sofia might sleep over time, we know how much she maybe carbs she might eat during the day and what activities she's doing, we can pair those things together and give personalized insights to when she might perform at her best.
So maybe there's a certain amount of sleep that she needs to really perform at her best. We'll be giving those insights through the application layer. So how we've been doing from a marketing and sales perspective, because I think that's the big question many of you have in the room since we made the acquisition. So here's some early insights. What we did was our consumer insights team, they basically surveyed right after the acquisitions, the database of connected fitness people.
And then we reran those surveys just at the end of August. There's a couple of questions we certainly were looking at. Brand awareness was a big one, purchase intent. And so what we've seen is in less than 6 months, we've increased brand awareness 3%, which is massive, but 8% internationally. So big, big changes on the brand awareness side.
And on the purchase intent side, so we asked the question at the very beginning, how many people have essentially purchased gear in the last 12 months and then we ask that question again later, that's already up 29% on the platform and growing. So that's really working. Secondarily, we've just looked at the hard numbers around the average order value for someone coming from the connected fitness audience versus an average customer going to ua.com and the average order value is 26% higher coming from the Connected Fitness database versus externally. And it makes sense, right? They're working out a lot.
And we said, you work out more, we know you're going to buy more gear. But this talks to the impact of the broader Under Armour business that we have. So what are the direct connected fitness drivers? So Under Armour acquired really 2 core businesses
through all
of the acquisitions. There was an advertising business, that business has continued and continued to grow. We were really selling advertising across all of the verticals. Premium services, so Map My Fitness and EndoMondo had premium membership subscriptions that you could buy in app as well as online. Those have continued and we've added new functionality to them.
We recently launched the MyFitnessPal premium service. It's the top grossing app in the health and fitness category and one of the top grossing apps overall in the iTunes store. So we've had good success with offering a premium service to MyFitnessPal. And next year we'll be launching more premium services across the base. So we definitely think there is a big opportunity in that in those categories.
We also think there is a big opportunity with the platform in licensing and working with hardware partners for us to drive the software experience rather than having a separate software experience directly driving them in and creating licensing revenue through those channels. What we've learned and what we believe is that by 2018, this will be a $200,000,000 business directly in Connected Fitness. Later Brad is going to talk about the overall impact to the Under Armour business, the halo effect of the shirts and shoes business in addition to these direct revenue drivers that the Connected Fitness business have. So where does this leave us? We all know that Facebook equals social, biggest on the planet, that LinkedIn equals business.
We will be the destination for health and fitness. We will connect the dots. We will connect the sensors all into one place. That is our vision. We're currently and clearly in the lead right now and I think we have the right team to pull this together.
But it's a virtuous cycle. We have to equip, get the best product, accessories, etcetera, into the consumer's mind, track, bring all that data together in a very meaningful way and coach. That coaching piece is so critical to the next layer in this experience, bringing those insights together and giving something back to the customer, absolutely critical. And then inspire, we have to inspire
people every day. We have to inspire people every day. We have to inspire people every day. We have to inspire people every day. We have to inspire people
every day. We have to critical. And then inspire. We have to inspire people every day. They need motivation.
They need help. It's not always that easy. Bring them back in through this love of the brand, work out more. There's no question that it's going to drive a halo effect for our overall business. So we're still learning and optimizing.
There's no question. The teams are working hard. We're working close. You're going to hear from Jason LaRose later today. We're working close with our e commerce partners and our retail partners about how this can drive the overall shirts and shoes business.
But I want you to maybe open the lens for a second and think about 2 So today we're in a $250,000,000,000 sports and apparel market and we're clearly going after that. But with these new assets, we now potentially can play in a $2,000,000,000,000 food and nutrition business and an $8,000,000,000,000 healthcare and fitness business. CF Connected Fitness provides this opportunity to leverage the premium brand into these new categories and going from $1,000,000,000 markets to $1,000,000,000,000 markets. We will not lose focus, but in the shirts and shoes business, as Kevin says on the whiteboard, we're not going to forget to sell shirts and shoes, but it's a massive new opportunity for the brand. So in summary, these are the 3 things we have to do.
We have to make a great digital experience for the customer in bringing these things together. We're building this consumer insight platform, bringing all of the pieces together, making it super simple for you to go back and forth between the experiences, including our e commerce platform and potentially retail and other areas, and amplify the trajectory of growth for the overall Under Armour business. Thank you. Tom is going to come up and we're going to show the connected fitness video one more time before you guys head off to lunch. Thank you very much.
Great. Thanks, Robin. So we've got
a real busy afternoon ahead of us. So we're going to take a quick break here to grab lunch and also open up our showrooms. So this will be your chance to see some of
the innovation that Kevin Haley talked to you
guys through this morning. Also give a preview of how we're thinking about sports categories. Also, as you guys probably saw when you walked in through the end of the tour, we have a brand house mock store that's opened that really serves as a template for how our stores should look consistently across the MyFitnessPal, this is your chance to log your food across the hall as we fill up for the rest of the afternoon. So we're going to try to keep people on time here. We're running a little tight.
So we're going to be back here at 12:25. So we guys so we said
2 years ago, this is a bit
of a working lunch. So we'll see you guys then. Thanks.
Me not working hard? Yeah, right. Picture that with a Kodak. Or better yet, go to Times Square and take a picture of me with a Kodak. Take my life from negative to positive.
I just want y'all to know that. It's nice. Let's enjoy life. It's full now you're a neo.
Please take your seats. Our program will begin in 5 minutes.
Good morning. Good afternoon. How are you guys doing?
All right.
You guys had lunch? You're ready to go. My name is Adrienne Lofton. I'm the Senior Vice President of Global Brand Marketing. And I'm really excited to be here today to talk to you guys about the brand.
Before we get into brand, I wanted to take a step back and talk a little bit about Under Armour. So Kevin kicked us off perfectly, and really just touched upon what's really important for our brand and what we think about every single day, And it's really the soul. The soul of our brand leads everything we do and has from the day we started. We think about the soul, we talk about what that means to us as a brand. It really is much more than a logo and a company name.
It's the people. It's the team. When you hear Kevin talk about done, done, done, the other thing we talk about always is the team, the team, the team. What does that mean to us? It means the people in this building every single day drive with passion, with meaning, with confidence and with a very, very strong point of view.
We are a building of athletes and we drive every day to make sure that everything we do is about making the athletes of the next generation better. So when we think about what does that really mean to us as a brand, it's about innovation. And we sort of happenstance upon innovation based on where we were born. So that's Kevin at Maplewood Athletic Association at 12. Kevin is wearing what we think is a flannel shirt under his uniform.
So when you think about this, this is where it began for our brand. In the winter, his cold gear was a flannel shirt under pads. In the summer, it was a hot heavy cotton tee. And what he knew back then is he needed to solve for this. He didn't know how yet.
He was 12. But today, when you look on the right, it's the highlight cleat. It's innovation that changes the game. This idea that started when he was 12 drives what we do every single day. That's the number one performing cleat in football.
That's what we deliver and it's because the soul of what we do is about science and innovation and making athletes better. The second thing that we talk about always as brand marketers is how do they do it. So back in 1996 and our founders are still here, which is incredible. We talked about this once in a generation kind of opportunity. Where did it start?
It started with a single compression was was easy because it was one style. It was easy because the people who made it and talked about it were football players and true zealots of the category. That shirt and this guy, Biggie, who still walks our halls and he's probably screaming somewhere right now, really defined football, a category that was cluttered and didn't need another player. No one expected us to show up this way and we literally changed the industry. So when we think about 2015 and beyond, does that mean as we get pulled into more and more categories?
Well, it means we better think about what we did in 1996 and we better apply it every single time. So if it's kids, if it's global football, if it's basketball, whatever we do, we have to make sure that we understand the consumer through and through. We're not on field anymore. Insights are more important than ever. And how we approach the categories will be critical to the success you see every day in the numbers.
The other thing that we always sort of think through and serve as our anchor of story is the tagline, I will. So Steve Batista is with us today. His team invented and thought through this idea of I will. And as we thought about what that means to the consumer and as we listen to the athlete, this is a unifier that we maybe didn't even expect to be as big as it is. And it's become the platform of every story we tell.
The awesome thing about this visual that we talk about is the elasticity of this tagline in this brand. You could speak to Ridge Reaper and Hunters, that guy is scary. You could speak to women's through Misty, all with the center of I will and it works every single time. So as we think about the growth and expansion of our brand, how we're going to continue to stretch beyond just I will, the DNA, the core of what we stand for is critically important. So we talk about this often internally and we want to make sure the athletes that we sign, the stories that we tell always come back to the DNA of our brand.
What does it mean? What do we think about? What makes us different? Fighting attitude. You heard Kevin talk about it in the beginning, we are about the fight.
We show up when we aren't even invited sometimes, we show up to win. So when we sign an athlete like a Stephen Curry that's not expected to be there or someone like Misty who never knew she'd be where she is today, it's about do you have the DNA of fight and are you there to win? Innovation. So for marketing, innovation is how we deliver the message, but for this brand, it's everything we do. Again, it goes back to Maplewood and 12 year old Kevin and Exista today.
Bold, loud, breakthrough voice. So historically, we would be nervous when thinking about things like women's, because that could be sort of construed as aggressive, edgy, dark. And that's actually not what it means at all. It means having an authoritative voice in the marketplace. It means being disruptive.
If you think about the I will what I want campaign, it was absolutely this. So we talk about again the elasticity of our brands, every single thing we do lives and breathes through this. Challenger, underdog, We talk about being blue collar and you guys we love it. That is our differentiator. That is what we are born to do.
We get up for the fight every single day. And again, when you go back to our athletes, we love to represent the athletes, whether you're an 18 year old varsity athlete or Misty Copeland, we want to represent the athletes that aren't expected to be and empower them and drive them forward. The real deal, that's authenticity. It's what we do. It's how we show up.
We are not shiny. We are not fake. We are real, and we tell the story that athletes are waiting to hear. Now this one is less about the DNA of our brand, but it's about where our brand is headed. So what we have found over time is athletes are bringing us into lifestyle.
You'll walk into our store, our brand houses, you'll see the chino. It's because athletes ask for it and we're going to deliver it. So as you hear and think about how athletes live, it's about 20 fourseven as a proposition and we're just scratching the surface there. Finally, youth. So again, going back to 12 year old Kevin and his flannel shirt, it started there.
And it ends here, the next generation, every generation, whether it's millennials or Gen Z, they are wearing our brand more than any other. And we realize as we capture market share here, we grow him and her and we keep him for life. So that's the longevity of this brand. That's the generational nature of this brand and what we believe in. So you saw this before, you're going to see it again.
This came from Jordan Spieth, but what's awesome about this statement is it embodies what we have always been, aggressive, young, fearless. It's everything we do. It's what we're proud of. It's the perseverance. It's the confidence and it's how we deliver our message and how we support our athletes.
So you understand the voice, you understand the soul, it's really easy to even feel when you're walking these halls. The other thing that you heard Kevin Haley talk about, and you'll hear Peter, Kipp and Henry talk about this later is the product. So we are about delivering innovation and story, cold gear, heat gear, charged cotton, everything we do is about changing the way athletes dress. So whether it's again story or product, what we've delivered and lived for and obsessed about every single day is making sure we're changing the way athletes dress. How do we do it?
Really through 2 pillars we talk about constantly in this building. It's physical armor, it's shirts and shoes, and it's emotional armor. It's Biggie screaming, we must protect this house. As we continue to drive forward, you heard Robin just before me talk about Connected Fitness. We know for us to be successful, it's 20 fourseven.
That's the proposition. And we must change the way athletes live. So no other brand today has the arsenal that we have from a connected fitness perspective. We're able to understand what consumers want, how they're sleeping, how they're eating, how they're performing. So this third pillar is our secret sauce to success every day.
So again, shirts and shoes all day long, emotional, tell a great story check, informational armor is the edge that we're going to bring to the marketplace go forward. You're on your You're on your mobile phones, you're paying attention to presentations, someone may be flipping through Instagram right now. You guys have 3,000 messages that you see in front of you every single day. The landscape has never been so cluttered and as a marketer, my job, my team's job is to break through this and be remembered. We think about this constantly.
We literally obsess about it, but we know the tools we have in our toolbox are like no other. One of the things we think about all the time is showing up for our consumers when our athletes are performing and winning. So, yes, there's 32nd spots, there's 60 second spots, there's traditional media, but this is the game changer. You heard Kevin talk about Stefan showing up in China for 5 days, 3,000,000,000 impressions. The media value is limitless on that and the authenticity we get from our basketball consumer, you just can't pay for something better.
So our social and digital approach is shifting the way we think and speak to our consumer. When Misty got named prima ballerina, we bought a flower for anyone who hashtagged Principal Misty. We delivered those flowers 3 hours later in an SUV to Misty. It was 50,000 roses and was incredible. So when you think about the media that comes from that, that's again what our brand does and what we're super excited about.
So we talked about the athletes. It's hard not to spend a little bit more time on them. I want to share a video of the successes they've had over last year and then talk a little bit more about how we'll capitalize on them. So take a look. I'm excited we made you guys laugh.
That's awesome. That means we're doing our job. Okay. So you see it, young, aggressive and fearless. You cannot ask for more.
When we think about what this means from a brand category perspective, we enter categories again like the zealots we must be. Going back to the start of this presentation, in 1996 in this building, in these halls, football players. In 2015, we're in multiple categories and every category better feel like there's nothing but that category of individuals working on your business. A team of hunt and fish guys working on your business, a team of women killing your business. That's how we think about it every day.
It's really about understanding and gaining the insight to really break through. So let's use women's as an example. You've heard Kevin and team and Brad talk about the financial opportunity that lives within the land of women. Women's is an area we confidently say will be as big as men's and we approach that business with that aggression every single day. Kelly Cortina is going to get up and talk and detail about the business and the opportunity, but what I want to share with you guys is the approach we took to finally get into our heart and mind.
We thought about this and about a year ago or really 18 months before we launched the campaign, it was about reinventing who we are to her. So after we did the repositioning work and a bunch of qual and quant work, what we figured out is we are right where we need to be with her, but it's about how we're expressing the story. We need to go through and we need to reevaluate our approach. Traditional brand marketing, sports marketing approach, fine athletes, team sport athletes, check, we did that, but we weren't resonating enough. So we realized people like Misty, supermodel to our hard ass trainers, I think I'm allowed to curse in here, are incredible for women.
So Giselle was a huge add to our brand that frankly we wouldn't have thought about before. So after we filled these holes that increased the aperture of conversation for women, what we're able to do is then reevaluate how to reach our female consumers through these women. So we brought our athletes to women. So in 2015, it's about 1 to 1 dialogue. Again, it's not always about a commercial.
She needs to meet us, she needs to touch us, feel us, hug us, love us. So Misty came out. Around the globe, Giselle went to the U. K. We showed up where she didn't expect us and in the end she loved us for it.
At the end of the day, when you think about the impressions that we got from a brand perspective, incredible, you couldn't ask for more. Over 5,000,000,000 impressions to date and everything around impressions and consideration for our brand shot up. The second piece that you're seeing in the marketplace you'll see in our mock store and our brand store is about the bra. So again, we've got to make sure that we're delivering the right product to her at the right time. And again, 1st phase was brand awareness, relevant love.
2nd phase, ring the register, sell her the product we know she needs, get her through fittings, tell her the story, show up with an A plus plus presentation everywhere we go and that's exactly what we've done. So at the end of the day, when we think about women's and the KPIs that we've seen around it, we've seen nothing but success. 300% intent to purchase, You can't pay for that. And when our brand shows up, that's what we deliver every single time. Global Football, this is an awesome story.
So again, this is another category that we were not thinking about entering, the consumer pulled us into the category. It happens every single time. Before we came up loud and turned on lights with voice, we needed to make sure our roster was complete. So we did things like sign some of the most elite soccer players, footballers in the world, including Memphis Depay. Memphis Depay is a Dutch national football player.
He recently joined Man U. He recently, sorry, scored 2 goals in the Champions League. So like he's a young, aggressive and fearless athlete that is going to represent our brand in this category, in the sport. We also onboarded clubs, clubs that think about the youth approach to football and the professionals. So the most elite clubs in the world, Tottenham, Sao Paulo, Cola Cola.
So around the globe, this is the global opportunity. We are setting ourselves up for success. The last piece was authenticating through story. So when we think about from a global football perspective, again, Memphis is our guy. So we're going to lead with that story.
But it's about what are we going to stand for in the category. So from a storytelling perspective, we talked to the footballer and we wanted to know, by the way, from 8 to the most elite aged athlete, what do you do? When does it matter most in the world of global football? And what he said is, it's about before the game of practice and it's about after. Okay, kind of no duh, that's for every sport.
But what really makes it unique in your world? What do you really think about it? What are the moments that are priceless? And they started talking about when they're lacing up their boots. When they're lacing up their boots, they're thinking about the game that's coming.
They're thinking about the practice that's coming and what they need to do to win. And then the key moment that they kept talking about is when they unlace, when they take off that lace and they think about like what did I accomplish or what didn't I accomplish and what am I setting my goals for next. Our brain is about next. It's about learning, but moving on to crush the next. So we kind of love that idea.
So the idea of Slay Your Next Giant is exactly that. What happens before the game? What happens after? And what is the goal you're going to set to kill it next? So let's look at a quick video that sets it up.
So the cool thing about this story is it feels authentically Under Armour. So we don't walk into a new category trying to be something we're not. We are Under Armour every single time, but we're about that keen insight to that sport to be right and relevant and be their brand for life. This is again how social media plays for us in our advantage. Memphis scored 2 goals in the Champions League, his first game.
And after the game, he's in the dressing room, he takes off his lace, he posts his picture. That's the relationships that we have with our athletes that drive a story that a commercial could never tell. So this, again, coupled with how we tell our story from a brand perspective, are what again is going to be the keys to our success in this category and every single category we enter. The other win and critical piece, whether it's American soccer or European football, is getting the kids. So our core target consumer, to be clear, is 8 to 16.
It's the kid. It's the young footballer. And what we don't always do is show that kid in the work except if we're talking youth. But what we know is youth is spread in every single category that we play and it's a critical part of our success. So whether it's NBA and the junior NBA or if it's global football, we're going to integrate kids into everything we do.
This is an awesome example of how we've done it. And what you're going to see are footballers that are the years of 8 years old to 10 years old, coupled with a Memphis to Pai to tell a story and show how the insight is relevant no matter how old you are, if your goal is the same. Take a look. So we think the power in that is incredible. We will deliver this message through social and digital and we will ensure that we are relevant in every country we enter.
So translating when necessary, but the message and the voice examples of when we're entering
a category, how we
play and how we stay in that category. This one is a little bit different. This is training. And stay in that category. This one is a little bit different.
This is training. So one of the things we talk about across every single category, whether that's one we have huge penetration or one we're just entering is that we do not follow trends, we start them. We change the conversation. We set the story and others follow. Training is an interesting area where you heard Kevin say from the beginning, compression was invented by us.
The category started because of this brand. The DNA, the soul, the voice of our brand is so strong, there are competitors that are starting to look and feel like our brand. So what do we do when that happens? We leap 50,000 feet forward and we reset the conversation. So in training, dollars 2,000,000,000 opportunity for our brand, a huge, huge area that we will continue to drive, it really is the soul of what we do from an Under Armour brand perspective, is an area that we knew we needed to change that conversation.
We know from men's to women's to kids training is the anchor, and we need to make sure that we're delivering a new and fresh insight to the consumer every single day when it's around training, whether it's through the lens of the record and connected fitness or what we're doing from a brand perspective or social and digital. Every athlete trains to be their best. And what's happening, what the insights showed us is social media, the 3,000 messages that we see every day, is taking over the perception of what it is to be an elite athlete in the world. And what you see is, you see Curry get MVP. You see Curry win the championship.
You see Misty as premium valerina. You see the Masters champion putting on his jacket. But you don't see the work they put in every single day. That's not glitzy, that's not shiny, that's not what consumers wouldn't necessarily see today. What our brand does is we tell the truth.
We deliver those stories and we remind our athletes how to be their best athletic self. So this idea of rule yourself is that you are the sum of all your training. And we are truly talking to varsity athletes and sort of consumers like us alike. Every single day, the work you put in is going to be what makes you your best self. And that's what we want express to consumers all over the world.
When you think about our visual, we used to be dark, gritty, aggressive. We're still aggressive. We are strong, but we have scale. We are big. The epic nature of this campaign was intentional, so that we can visually separate ourselves from the competitive landscape again.
So when we think about this idea of Army, we knew it was critical from a social perspective that we don't just tell the story through media, our athletes need to tweet it and push it out. Our athletes need to tell the story that's exactly what they've done. When you go to retail, we're telling that same story. So again, a holistic nature of how we approach our market, whether it's new market entry, soccer, women's or a place that we've owned for years, training. So we are super excited to share this campaign with you.
I'm sure you have already seen it, whether it's in Monday Night Football, or on NBC or any of the different networks we've showed up and social and digital. But this is the most powerful conversation our brand has had and our biggest category. And again, we're just getting started. So that's it for me. I'm going to hand it over to Henry, who is our Chief Merchandising Officer.
He's going to talk about category management and product. And I'm really excited to be able to talk to you guys today and have a great rest of the day. Thank you.
Awesome. All right. So let's talk about selling some shirts and shoes, right? So we talked about innovation, connected fitness. Now it's time to talk about shirts and shoes.
I want to thank you all for being here today to hear our story, our story of an incredible brand and simply our story of growth. Kevin Plank talked to you earlier about how we're going to reach $7,500,000,000 by 2018. The next part of the story is the how, how we are going to reach $7,500,000,000 by 2018. Here you have 5 key strategies that show you the how. We're going to talk about sport categories and our unique focus on sport categories and how we approach sport categories.
We're going to talk about innovative product and how innovation is always, always our strategy when it comes to product. We'll talk to you about our mission to make product, our product as great as this brand. We're going to talk to you about merchandising and what that means and building a merchandising capability that will give us a position of strength around the world. We're going to talk
to you about speed.
The expectations of our markets and our consumer are only getting faster And we will walk you through the capability we are building to be faster to market, top notch. And finally, we will talk to you about reaching more athletes and expanding our footprint around the world. This includes our business in North America, our international business and very importantly, we will discuss our omnichannel approach as it relates to our DTC businesses, our retail stores and our e commerce sites. So let's talk about sport categories and why that's so important. This is really about our unique focus on categories.
Our unique approach is really simple because it all starts with the athlete. It starts with researching athletes' needs, which leads to insights, which then drives the innovation. Kevin Haley talked about that earlier today. And that builds an emotional connection with consumers. The end result is athletes pull us into categories and that's very, very important.
When we innovate product and athletes pull us into categories, that is a winning formula for Under Armour. Athletes around the world are pulling us into 9 key categories. So what does pulling us in mean? It means the consumer expects us to be there. And to understand how we ended up at these 9 categories, you really have to look at our history.
It started with an insight. Our founder, Kevin Plank, as an athlete wanted a better solution under his shoulder pads. That passion and that passion for innovation and something to make the athlete better created our 1st compression t shirt. The next sport we were pulled into was the performance as were their younger brothers and younger sisters. Our history shows we have a track record of being pulled into categories.
And at the end of the day, our innovative product scales. What is happening right now is the same exact thing. Athletes are demanding So let's talk about our focus categories. So let's talk about our focus categories. We start with our heritage in team sports.
It's where it all started and we will never forget where we came from. Then we have our men's and women's training business as well as our very substantial outdoor business. But what the bottom row really represents is our opportunity. In Golf, we are the fastest growing golf brand around the world, running a huge opportunity for us. Earlier, the gang talked about Sofia and the insights that we will learn from runners like Sofia.
Our connected fitness platform has data on over 205,000,000 runs this year. And that research and the insights it reveals will enable us to be a leader in the running category. That's a whole new age of focus groups folks. Long are the days where you bring 8 runners in. We have data on over 2 0 5 runners and think about the potential for the running business that we will build.
Basketball, it's the 2nd biggest sport in the world and we are just getting started. In Global Football, with the likes of Memphis, we are the brand for the next generation in global football. What I want to impress upon you today is with this focus on these sport categories, there is significant revenue opportunity. Of the 8 categories you have up here, we have double digit market share in only 1, and that's men's training. Think about the other categories and the opportunity we have.
When we reach double digit market share in all of these, that will take us far beyond the 7 point 5 $1,000,000,000 that we are talking about in 2018. Now on this slide, we have 9 categories that we're going to focus on, but earlier I'm sorry, 8 categories, but earlier I mentioned 9. We have the opportunity to meet athletes' needs, of course, in the gym and on the field. But in addition, we will meet their needs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And today, we are Our approach will be through authenticity and dictating trend.
In the last year, we have had the opportunity to bring a unique talent to our team, Ben Proust, to launch our sportswear business. Ben, where are you? Stand up. Show everyone. He's a good looking, well dressed guy who's going to lead our sportswear business for us.
Ben comes with vast experience in the world of sport and lifestyle and has hit the ground running on this initiative for us. Let's talk about why sportswear and why now. I'm going to go back to it always starts with consumers, men and women, girls and boys is for us to bring an Under Armour approach to sportswear. Secondly, there is significant opportunity when you look at the business that our 2 largest competitors do and what they're doing in sportswear. You can see from this slide that our 2 largest competitors drive around 25% of their revenues globally in sportswear.
They have about $12,500,000,000 combined in revenues. We're at 0. That's going to change starting in 2016. In the middle of next year, you're going to start to see this hit the market. And we will have a very strategic plan in 2017 and beyond.
But this is really a strategy to reach significant scale in 2018 and really beyond 2018. It is the next great category by Under Armour. So let's switch gears and talk about product, shirts and shoes. We talked about our unique approach with athletes and how that approach led us to focus on key sport categories, which leads innovations that make athletes better. I will always say, always, our number one growth strategy at Under Armour is to innovate product, and we have done that time and time again and we will continue to do that.
That is how we grow and what our teams are always focused on. I now want to take a minute and show you a video that captures really the passion that our product, our design, our innovation teams have for developing and driving innovative product. Awesome. Future armor. That's what our teams are working around across the way on this campus throughout the world, innovate product.
When we do that, we win and we will continue to do that. Our relentless pursuit of innovation and product leads us to growth. And as you can see from this slide, our business continues to scale and grow. Through innovation, through that relentless drive, we see our businesses in both apparel and footwear set to accelerate, not just grow but accelerate growth over the course of the next 3 years. With apparel approaching $5,000,000,000 and footwear reaching $1,700,000,000 in 2018.
There is significant runway in both apparel and footwear in the years to come. In a moment, we would like to take a deeper dive into our Women's Apparel business as well as our footwear business. But before we do, I want to talk about the success we are seeing in our Men's business as well as our Youth business. Our men's business is stronger than ever. Our men's apparel business is about authenticity and innovation, and we have continued to grow our men's business through a relentless launch of innovations in the market.
I am here today to tell you that we will continue with this strategy in the years to come. Our pipeline of innovations is absolutely full. We will drive the market through innovation. When you combine these innovations that drive us and then add sport categories and the revenue opportunity in places like golf categories like golf, basketball, global football and outdoor, there is significant runway for growth. And then when you take the strength we have in our training business and you look at our footprint that we're going to expand internationally, tremendous run.
The demand for this product around the world is incredible and we will continue to focus here as a key strategy. What makes Under Armour different when it comes to youth? It's pretty simple. We focus on this customer. We focus on this athlete.
We focus on the athletes of the next generation and that makes us unique. We don't have a youth takedown model where we just do product or license it out. We care about this business. How do we do this? We build great innovative product and cool product for kids.
Why is this so important? This builds long term equity with kids. An Under Armour kid today will be us for decades. And our strength in apparel and footwear for kids will pay us significant dividends in the years to come. We are the brand of the next generation.
But for today, we want to give you insight into 2 massive, massive strategies for us, women's and footwear. I would like to now bring up Kelly Cortina to the stage to talk to you about our Women's business. Kelly is the Head of Product for Women's here at Under Armour and is leading our product and design teams and she will walk you through where we are going. Kelly, please come on up.
Thank you, Henry. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm really excited to be here and I cannot wait to tell you about what things we have ahead of us in women's. We have a very big vision around this business. Women's will be a major global growth driver for the Under Armour brand and we look forward to the day that we are as big or bigger than our men's business.
The Under Armour women's team is more energized than ever. We're on a mission to exceed our consumers' expectations and bring a unique point of view to the market around athletic, aesthetic and performance. Team is an important concept here at Under Armour. You've heard a lot about it today. It's our heartbeat.
And since we last saw you, the leadership team has been busy. We've been assembling a starting lineup of industry experts as well as brilliant young talent in product management, materials, innovation and design. We're inspired and we are committed. I will draft from the anthem that so well resonated with young girls, female athletes and athletic females around the world. And I will tell you that when it comes to expanding the Under Armour women's business, we will what she wants.
Currently, women's apparel is roughly 30% of our business, apparel. And we're just scratching the surface in women's accessories and women's footwear. Wow, there is a ton of opportunity to grow our women's business head to toe. As Adrienne pointed out, in the past year, we've seen our brand awareness among women heighten. Demand for our product is growing.
She's asking for more. This is incredible and a huge opportunity for all of us. Let's take a look at some of the growth indicators that we're tracking. Over the last 3 years, the activewear market has seen over 15% growth. We believe this is going to continue to accelerate.
As you all know well, many players are getting into this space. They see the opportunity to add incremental revenue to grow their brands and to reach more consumers. We have an advantage we will leverage in a crowded market. Our authenticity in sport and our in sport and our expertise in performance. Our business was founded on the Team Athlete.
It's our most established business and we are seeing over 40 percent growth over last year, 40%. We know that the team athlete trusts us and we will address her as she grows up and as her outfitting preferences evolve. But we also know that female participation in sport and fitness is at an all time high. This is very exciting stuff for our product and design teams. 42% of high school athletes are female.
U. S. High school soccer participation for females has more than tripled in the last 15 years. And there are over 10,000,000 women running in the U. S.
Alone, which you'll hear more about from our footwear team. One of the areas we're devoting a lot of attention to is our connected fitness platform, which is 2 thirds female. Digital and social platforms are a gateway to our consumer. We can learn every single day from over 100,000,000 women and growing. It's an incredible resource for our product and design teams and we are thrilled.
All this is really, really good news. Health and fitness are a top priority for her, and we are well positioned to grow with her. We get it. We understand her. We will stay current with her, importantly, we will change with her.
We're entrepreneurs and we see the white space in the market with this consumer. And my message to you today is about growth and it's about opportunity. We bring unique product to market that empowers and enables women to look, to feel and to perform their best, whether it's on the field, on the trail or in the gym. To design the best and most differentiated product for her, we're heightening our focus in 3 areas. It all starts with the consumer.
And Kevin said it earlier, we must anticipate what the consumer wants, and we understand them better than ever. Building product platforms and collections that are trend right and rooted in standout style and, of course, superior fit is a major focus for us in the women's business, and of course, game changing innovations in materials and trims. To show you an example of how all these things come together, how great product and great marketing leverage this brand and reach more consumers, Let's take a peek at our latest product launch, the ARMOUR Bra Series, where function, innovative Okay. So, when we talk about women's product, we cannot just talk about amazing technology and innovation. And as you just saw in the video, we know that her motivations are largely based on silhouette, fit and style as well.
Her interest renews with trends and you will hear Henry talk about our growing capabilities to be faster to market. This is a major opportunity with us with our female consumer and it's an absolute must. So, we're building out resources and strategies to be best at designing for her. One major step we have taken to be closer to market and the consumer is opening our New York City design house. The New York office serves as a magnet for talent and it's an epicenter for inspiration.
And our team there obsesses over beautifully designed functional product, aspects like fit and proportion, pocketing, trim details, color and texture are considered critical to meeting her performance needs. Considerations around the design of each style are part of a bigger idea, the outfit. And we are in the business of dressing athletes female athletes and athletic females from her bra to her running shoes. Combining our commitment to performance with an incredible aesthetic will be a key factor in cutting through a market saturated with athleisure wear. To give everyone a glimpse at what I'm talking about, here are just a few examples of our newest trend forward styles and tops and bottoms from our fall collection.
You've seen a lot of bras today and I'm sure you'll see more when you go to the brand house later. Here we have our Armor Low bra. This is becoming very quickly one of our customers' favorites. It has great support, a beautiful neckline. So, she gets femininity with support, strappy details that she can pop outside of her tank top.
She's also got her Studio Luxe tight on, which is the perfect fit, and one of our favorites from all of the women you just saw in the video. And we have the beautiful shot of Misty in our new ventilated muscle tank. You saw this earlier on Sofia in the Connected Fitness video. You see how workout must haves like the ARMOUR Mid Bra, the ARMOUR Shorty, these are core staples in our base layer category, get a great update through fun print that ties really well back to our Studio Luxe shoe. And going strong since launch is our back to school favorites fleece collection, which is super, super soft fleece, which gives her that post practice staple that she hangs around with hangs around in, goes to school in and warms up in.
Here you see our favorite Capri, one of our fastest trending styles right now with the flip over waistband. And a personal favorite is the Downtown Knit Jogger. So, these are silhouettes you haven't really seen from Under Armour before. And of course, as soon as this hit the market, it started selling through extremely quickly. It's built with a no fuss fit and one of our best fabrics from our studio collection.
She can work out in this, she can box in this, and she can walk around town in this. You'll see more from this more of this from us as we evolve. The opportunity for Under Armour Women's is enormous. We are committed to giving her outfit options for 7 days a week, at the gym, on the run, and to and from. We are investing heavily in talent and resources.
It is a head to toe investment and includes footwear, another piece of equipment she cannot work out without or score without. We are investing to win. And in order to talk more about the exciting opportunities we have in footwear, I'd like to introduce Kipp Folks. Kipp has worn many hats in his years at Under Armour and he is the President of Footwear and Innovation.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm Kipp Folks, the President of Footwear and Innovation. It's been a pleasure to work with Kelly for the last 10 years. Thank you, Kelly. It's an interesting time at Under Armour. It's fun to get up here and tell you a part of our story.
Our mission is to change the way athletes live in an ever changing world. And the catalyst for change is innovation and connectivity and they will accelerate our growth. The innovation is in our DNA. We're at the epicenter of a connected revolution. We have a new toolbox we've never used before and we're starting to use it for the first time.
With these new tools, we can craft experiences by maximizing our understanding of consumer behaviors. Focus groups are the old way. Today, we can observe athletes from afar, we can glean data to reveal critical information that will drive design and function. And when it's paired with actual observation, which is in our DNA, we have the opportunity to leap the competition. Let's take 2 simple questions.
The first, should men and women wear the same running shoes? With 205,000,000 runs recorded worldwide in less than a year, we know the average runner that goes out, many of you did this morning or yesterday, run 3.1 miles. The interesting fact out of these 205,000,000 runs is between 1 7 miles, women log more runs than men. They actually do it more on Tuesday and they don't care about weather. But men run twice as many marathons.
So looking at these insights, we find that men and women don't run the same way or the same distances. So why are shoes built the same way? Shoe construction has traditionally been the same for men and women. So now we can engineer shoes using information derived from our platform. The second question, why do runners change shoes?
A key insight we've learned is that as runners increase distance, they often change brands. As a matter of fact, as they increase over a long period of time, they change several brands as they become an accomplished runner. Sofia is one of over 700,000 people runners who use a feature called gear tracker in Map My Run where users record information about the products and brands they use on a daily basis. This creates an opportunity, the real opportunity to connect with her during the transition points in her life to become the brand of choice. It's amazing to think when you add innovation and connectivity together.
Well, now let's talk about another investment we've made that's paying dividends today. What I'm really up here to talk about, footwear. The brand is elevating through footwear. We are undoubtedly a footwear brand. This is our 10th anniversary of making footwear and we believe we're at a tipping point.
Why? Because we're experiencing this magnetic pull that many have talked about today. Consumer demand is at an all time high. The account support has been tremendous. We're attracting world class talent and partners are partnering with us like they have never done before.
But in order to win, we have to focus. We have to focus on our team. We have to organize our team around sports categories. Footwear has actually always been organized around sport category because we have to deliver insight and done before. We've even broken ground in a new office in Portland, which I think the image is coming up here.
Amazing space, glass and steel, innovation, a great place to not only retain and recruit new folks, but an innovative place to build some of the world's best product. We are really excited about our home in Portland. But it's about the people we're going to fill that building with. We need key leaders to elevate our brand. Since the last Investor Day, we added over 1 100 teammates to footwear.
14 of them in the last year have been VPs or Senior Directors. But it's not really about the numbers. It's really about quality and expertise And they're coming here because our brand is on fire. We've brought in an experienced leader in women's, a world renowned and a Head of Sourcing just to name a few. We're building capability know how.
We're starting to get confidence. We're achieving scale with our manufacturing partners and we have leverage because our brand is so hot. Our partners have actually extended over 150,000,000 units of capacity to us in anticipation of our growth. Finally, really what I want to show because everybody has all these gorgeous videos today is we're elevating our brand through our athletes. Bar none, our athletes are doing more for our brand of footwear than anybody.
The number one way we're elevating is through the field of play. The viral sensation of Stephen Curry breaking ankles of his opponents wearing the Curry 1, Warren Holiday scoring a goal in the Women's World Cup. These are just a few instances of not only competing, but winning at the highest level across gender, across sport, that is the number one way we're going to elevate the brand through footwear. So I'm going to step down, but I'm going to introduce one of those individuals that I talked about that we've recruited, our Senior VP of footwear, Peter Rupee, an Oregon native, tremendous amount of experience in the footwear space, a great partner of mine, father, friend and really passionate leader who's going to
Thank you, Kipp. And I really want to thank Under Armour. I really feel very grateful and honored to be here. Founders like Kip and Kevin and the energy of this place is really, really remarkable. And from the inside, you can really feel what a great culture it is.
But externally, this opportunity we have in footwear, we feel it all around us. Everybody's pulling. Our retail partners sitting with us and saying, be more premium, bring it, we want you, we're with you, we support you. They're with World class manufacturing partners. We didn't even have 2 to 3 years ago.
We've changed that landscape just in the last 6 months, let alone where we've been before that. They're helping us, capacity, capability, innovation. Our UA teammates, the thing that's most incredible to me here how much support you have wherever you reach into this organization. Everybody's pulling for us to be successful in footwear and we love the challenge of it and we embrace the support that we're getting. But the most important support we're getting is from those young athletes out there competing.
They know we're laser focused on what they're trying to do and they know that we're here to empower them. So we've got to bring in footwear. That's our mission. We've been building capability, spent a lot of time. I spent a lot of time even in the last 6 months recruiting, talking to talent, getting people on board, building capability and technology, design, development.
Today, we've got quality teams lined up against every performance category. We've got a women's team lined up across to focus on all the categories to be great at women's. We've got a powerhouse youth team and we're just now starting to look at how do we want to attack lifestyle. We're just starting to line up talent for that one too. All these teams are operating at a really high level.
They're bodying completely. They got the mission. They're on it. We're accelerating growth today and we're just getting started. So as we go forward, what I'd like to do is take a look at how we're going to go about developing our business.
So a little bit deeper into it. 3 buckets, kind of a familiar theme, we'll break it into threes. It starts with product leadership. And 2015 is really a benchmark for us to start to get where the world sees the things we're capable of. Leverage those into franchises so we can have sustainable growth and predictable growth going forward.
And it's always about storytelling. So I'm going to break it down into these 3. So let's start with the product piece of it. And obviously, for us, this is foundational time. And I'm going to talk about 3 products that we have in the market that we've just released this year and why they're important to us and what they're doing for us, right?
And then I'll go into the franchise part of it as well. But for us, gaining product leadership is job number 1. And we're building momentum there. And our goal is simple, make products as great as this brand. So let's start with our photograph of our player that you saw earlier with Henry.
This picks where we started from, right? Young player going through his drills and this is where we started American football. But we've learned a lot, right? This kid was the first one best in class to us in American football, started not at college level, not at high school level, but down in Pop Warner. They were the ones that said we're the best and we want you.
And they've been with us and waiting for us to bring things that are uniquely Under Armour that they can buy into so that they can continue to grow in the game. I'm going to come back to that in a little bit when I talk about franchises. And you've heard about the highlight before, but I'm going to come back to it in a little bit. But what's happening here in football and why we're almost a market leader there is also been happening in basketball. So under the surface of what
we see, there's been a
lot of great work that we've been doing with products that we're really, really proud of. Products like the Drive, like the can I go to the next slide, please? Thank you. Products like the Drive, the Rocket, the Jet, great performance basketball shoes. Kids love them.
They trust them.
If you
go out to gyms around the United States, you'll find kids playing in these shoes. They've been waiting for that next step. They've been waiting for us to step up and bring a signature product with an emotional story. So they're drawn hard to the Curry. They love that product, not only for its great performance features, but because this is the first time we've delivered a coveted sneaker, right?
And it enters us into the game that's at the higher level, where performance and lifestyle meet in the world of basketball. And we love that, we embrace it and we're really ready to charge forward with what we're doing with Steph. And with a partner like him, we've got the best and most marketable player in the game. With the quality of team we've assembled, we're poised for a great run. And like Steph, we're charged by the belief that we're going to be able to accomplish great things in the world of basketball.
And it just starts with the Curry 1. I'm going to talk about Curry 2 in a little bit. But let's switch gears a little bit here and let's talk about how we zig when the market zags. The fat tire, it's not for everybody, right, Sam, it's just not for everybody. But at the same time, Outdoor Retailer in January did give it best of show, not best footwear of show, a lot of products at Outdoor Retailer, best of show, because we took a departure.
We took a different point of view. We brought something unique to the market, right? Outsole, bottom unit inspired by fat tire, mountain bikes, the charged foam cushioning, real bouncy, but adjusts under load. And you also look at a very, very seamless upper, very, very clean with a unique closure system. So we're stepping forward, doing things unique, opens us up to possibilities in the performance segments of hiking, trail running, but there's also seeds of ideas here that you'll see coming in other areas of the business as well into the future.
Really, really proud of what we've accomplished here. Now let's talk about performance 15 marks the year that we really stepped into the performance running segment in a big way. It's really Gemini is the first step. Launched it in February, speed form construction, I'm going to talk about that when we talk about franchises, charge cushioning. Like I spent maybe 4 months at Harbor East right down where most of you were staying
and I
spent a lot of time in the brand house. I spent a lot of time just like asking people to try the Gemini on just to see what would happen. Almost every person that tried it on bought it at $130 I was doing a back to school trip down to Dallas, Texas, couple of high school football coaches both named Ryan, buying some new balances, dollars 75 gray blue shoes. I said, what they know who I was. I said, why are you buying those?
Well, we're on our feet all day, comfortable, clean. I walked over and grabbed a nice gray Fortis that we had, tried on. They each spent $40 more than they intended to. We really are getting somewhere, but it's taken step by step. As we develop the connected fitness platform that we've talked about, the Gemini is certainly the type of product, if not the product, that something like Sofia will be drawn to.
Let's talk about the band. We just released that in back to school time period, dollars 100 price point. Like the fat tire, a couple of awards here. The industry is starting to take notice. Best Buy in Runners World Magazine and also Competitor Magazine gave it best product 2015.
We're really proud of those awards. They signal to us that we're on the right path and our running team is just gaining momentum as we're getting the recognition and understanding that we're on it. We're going somewhere here. So as we look beyond this, when I stand here 2 years from now and talk about product leadership, there'll be a lot more. There'll be more basketball.
There'll be more football. There'll be a lot more running. There'll be more training product. We'll continue to talk about our youth business being on fire. We'll also talk about global football.
We'll also talk about lifestyle and we'll talk a whole lot more about our women's business and how much we're doing for her. So with this performance leadership, we're just getting warmed up. We just had a breakthrough year in 2015, but we're on the pivot point now where we're going to go from here. So let's shift over now and let's talk about building franchises. So if you've studied the industry for a while, you know that most really great concepts in footwear start small And it takes the brand's belief to stay with them, to nurture them, to develop them, to amplify them in the right ways and then they scale.
That's a discipline that we're developing and we look at it in 3 levels, right? Innovative platforms, Kevin Haley talked about innovative platforms. What are we starting from? What's this raw idea? What's the original intent?
Design them into iconic products. You've got a great design team to bring that forward. And then you've got an interim. You've got to stay with it. You've got to find new ways.
You've got to as Kevin said, you've got to be in the terrain. You've got to be like close to the ground on it, understand what the values are of that product and how to leverage them going forward. So this is how we develop innovative products and convert them into franchise over time. As we do that, it's critical for a growth company, right, because franchises will give us stable growth. We'll have more predictable business going forward.
We can take that into manufacturing and do better job on getting good pricing and raising our practice. So now let's take it and give you a couple of examples, okay? The first one I'm going to come back to football where I started with product leadership in the highlight cleat. 2012 is when we started. Cam Newton was
the 1st player out there.
The innovative platform, hey, let's take an old school upper like a boxing shoe or boxing boot. We see a lot of players spat. Let's take that type of design, modern materials put together in a cleat with a great plate on it. People went, that's interesting. We like what you're doing.
But inside the locker room, it was even more compelling than that. 2013, we come back, we say, wait a minute, let's take Cam up. Cam is a signature guy. Let's do $160 Cam shoe. Let's bring the highlight up.
Let's be bold with this. It's $130 Upgrade the materials. But hey, let's not end there. Let's give everybody a chance. Let's do entry level product, rubber molded for youth.
Let's let everybody in on this party, right? We do that in 2013, market share doubles. Go through 2014, as you can see the game continued. We continue to elevate, continue to sell through. And now as we're standing in 2015, highlight 4th year out there in the marketplace, 3 years as the number one selling football cleat in the United States, number one sport in America, number one cleat in the business, bigger than anything by Nike, anything bigger than what Adi has.
There's certainly some lessons to be learned from the story so far. Obviously, we created a different pie. There was no high top cleats in the market, but we led with high top cleat. So we extended the market. We raised the average retail price.
So with a number of our major retailers today, our average retail price is $20 higher than our number one competitor. Of course, we've raised margins. We've been able to lift because we've got a more consistent business, we've been able to pull the margins up. And most importantly, what you heard Kevin talk about earlier, nice shift in market share, 17% in 13%, 42% in 2015%.
We're just getting close
to taking a leadership position and we can't wait to announce it. As you look forward into 2016, we're going to have a lot of fun with Highlight again. We've reinvented the platform, new materials, new patterns. But what we're celebrating in 2016 that we probably haven't done as much of in the past is how passionate these football kids are. They start playing in January for kickoff in September.
That's when they start that next season. Maybe they take a little Christmas break, watch a few bowl games and all that and then they're back at work. They've got spring ball, they've got passing leagues, they've got training and then they're back in the course. So we're back on the field. So what we're trying to do is make sure we've got fun stories, compelling things to engage them all year round, not just with highlight, but the entire line.
And this product is awesome because it really takes color and is really powerful in that regard. So that's the franchise story. You'll see things coming from us with highlight in places like lacrosse, global football or soccer, basketball and even running. We're doing something around this concept for running. So we zig when they zag.
We deliver the unexpected. Last time we were in front of you, I wasn't here, but we talked up SpeedForm quite
a bit.
We're really excited about the platform. As Kevin said, we'll draw a factory making shoes. But the real idea is the foot has tremendous movement to it. It's really incredible in terms of what we ask it to do every day. And we've been working from a flat surface and trying to figure out how to power that into curvature.
Why not start the other way and actually build it with shape? Precision fit and feel is what we're after. We can contour all types of foams in there, we want them for comfort, for support. I mean, it's an incredible platform for us, fully molded uppers, fewer, far more automated. We're just starting to unlock the potential of what SpeedForm is all about.
But we do know this already, it's a much better way to make footwear. So we've been extending it. If you look into what we've been doing with running, we've got it leading each of our major segments in the business, run long, run fast, run strong right now. So we're covering there on the premium level than we have product that offers underneath that. Going into next year, we'll take it out into Trail.
We'll continue to evolve from here and continue to build. If I was to show you this for 2017, number
of products there, we're
going to be really aggressive going out into the next year in terms of becoming a true running company, new positioning and a much bigger point of view about what we have to offer. So you see what we have going in SpeedForm. You can see we believe in it. We're going to nurture it along. And we also added a twist to it, right?
Kevin Haley talked about the slingshot. There are samples of it around here. Just grab one. They're over here. If you get a chance, just put your hand inside there and feel what this feels like.
I mean, it's incredible. There's 3 different zones of compression with this knitted upper. So I mean, it's all built on a machine. It's more flexible in the ball area, more stiff along the lateral side and high compression in the arch area. It just makes a ton of sense and is really, really comfortable.
We're really, really proud of this and we know again that it's going to be something we can build upon. So that's what we're doing in the running area. But with SpeedForm, we're carrying it over into other sports. So in the football area, for American football, our next big frontier is to win the Speed guys, right? Those are the flyers on the outside, the corners, the wide receivers.
Those guys want light, tight, fast product. The spotlight is on them, all eyes on speed. We want to make sure that we're delivering for them and we're going to use speed for them to get there. In American football, but we're also going to do it in global football. Here you see the product that we have for Memphis Depay coming in for next season with the spotlight.
The thing about Memphis and SpeedForm is he's wearing these straight out of the box. So a lot of guys in global football got to get stuff customized and stretched and everything's got to be just tuned, not SpeedForm. It's for them. It's working for them just straight out of the box and we're really, really happy to have that resolved. And for both these areas, winning the game and speed is going to be one of our next big franchise areas of focus for both American football and global football.
Now Kevin Haley touched on another one. I've only got a couple more speed form examples, but you get the point, we're committed, right? And that's the AMP, great training product here. He talked to you about it, but I want to note again that it's part of the SpeedForm package. We've been bringing that into training for quite some time.
Very revolutionary way to treat the underfoot for strengthening the foot while enhancing mobility. And then the last one that I'll talk about is basketball. So yes, Curry 2 just getting launched. It is a SpeedForm So we've really spent time to engineer SpeedForm to make it right for basketball, light, tight, agile, just like Steph, allows him to stay on the toes really, really well and move as quick as he can, gets a lot of the bulk out of the shoe. So we're excited about the ability to launch this particular one as well.
And with Steph, obviously, there's franchise opportunities there, right? So chapter by chapter, I
love the photo from the
tour here, just shows that we're just getting started here. Generation 1, Generation 2 in the works right now. The team is actually in Asia trying to finalize query 3. We've got other things we're working with for him both on and off the court. He's great to work with.
He's humble. He's hungry. He's intelligent. He always wants to get better. So he's been a great partner for us.
And he's also a great person to tell stories with, right? So he's been one of the first ones for us to master how to tell stories through footwear. And the launch of Curry 2 just started, right? Started out in Manila and in Tokyo and Beijing and Shanghai. You heard a lot about that with KP this morning.
You You can see some of the slides here. You heard some of the results of the Shanghai store. So if we average low double digits, 11%, 12% in normal wholesale, in Shanghai in that launch, it was over 70%. People are really excited to have that product, really, really excited about the fact that he was there. We're getting great response to the product going forward.
Love the details that go into the product as well. But we're really excited about what's going to happen come to late October when we launch it here in the United States and how it's going to play out and excited for the season that Steph
is preparing for right now.
But before we get there, we've got global football and we've got Memphis. And if you look at Steph Hsu, the Curry 2, you'll find a little etching in the tooling. This is I can do all things. So we think about the physical armor that we present with our product. But we want to make that emotional connection not only to the public, but also personally with the player.
And if you look at if you can see the image here, Dream Chaser, his affirmation about who he is as a person, his philosophy as a person is tattooed on his chest. So we just wanted to take that and talk about it as Dream Chaser, celebrate it, honor it. And also as we look at the campaign work, Slay Your Next Giant, this idea of the mindset, that thing that we call in connected fitness, the subjective, the way we think, the beliefs we have, we're helping him by bringing these affirmations onto laces of his shoe and connect the story all the way through. Like so here, score my first Champions League goal. I think you did that already, right?
It's done a couple of times maybe? Yes, yes. Kind of past that one now, so we got to keep going. But you get the idea. Let's connect all the way through and that's what great storytelling is all about, not just the big amplification, but all the detail.
And we know our kids, they pay attention to the detail. So we want to be able to drive it all home. Steph, Memphis are great athletes for us to tell footwear story. With them, we are making the connection in the 2 largest sports from footwear up. And in the process, we're building long term equity with today's young athlete.
Okay. Now start to close it up for you and move on to the next section. So it's about our young generation of athletes. They're the ones that are pulling us the most. They want us in every athletic and lifestyle occasion.
We're part of their peak performance experiences and they want us in their lives. We do this by creating great product, developing sustainable growth and predictable product that they can count on season in and season out. And most importantly, we do it through telling stories and really making that emotional connection happen. As we do that, we'll continue to scale the business and have great success. So as we look at our footwear business, we predict itself out into the next year.
What we see is $17,000,000 or $1,700,000,000 I wish $17,000,000,000 in revenue, which is a 40% CAGR. So a nice healthy growth number for us. And when we really look at that, it's just on the way to doing something even greater. Because as I look at where we're at, we're a lot more like this little guy from Vanilla over here, right? He just stepped on the court.
He's got the T shirt on saying, I got next. And if you know anything about playground basketball, that's bold assertion. It's my game now. And for us in footwear, it's our game now. We got next.
And if you know anything about playground basketball, you keep winning. You keep winning, you keep winning,
you hold the court.
That's what we're building to do. We intend to do it really, really well. And we're really excited about the opportunity that we have. So in a minute, Henry Stafford is going to come back up. He's going to wrap the product session.
He's also going to share the great work that he and Kevin Eskridge are doing in leading our global merchandising effort. As we transition, let's get a little look at our young fellow from Manila and see a little of the game he's got.
Thank you.
All right. Awesome, Peter. Okay. So a couple of other things. You've just heard us talk about innovative product, footwear, women's.
We talked about men's and youth. You've heard us talk about our focus on sport categories. The next strategy, the third of what I had up there earlier to discuss on our path to $7,500,000,000 is to build a very strong merchandising capability. The best brands don't predict trend, they dictate it. The best brands look amazing wherever they're found, whether it's in an international location or domestically, whether it's in a store or on a mobile device.
The best brands get the right product at the right place at the right time with amazing storytelling. And that is exactly what we are doing in building this merchandising capability. If you looked at our business 2 years ago, we basically had an assortment that covered the world. That is how we serviced our business. Our catalog was a catalog for the globe.
That has changed and you're going to see that significant change in market in the spring of 2016 and beyond. In the past, our assortments you would find in sporting goods in the United States were very, very similar to what you would find in Europe. In the near future, our merchandising capability will enable our DTC business to be differentiated from our wholesale business. It will enable us to have the right product in South America, which is going to be completely different than our product in China. It will enable sporting goods in the United States to be differentiated from a huge growth vehicle for us in the mall.
We have invested in talent and leadership over the course of the past year in merchandising. Our leader in merchandising is Kevin Eskridge, who is leading this function globally. In the past year alone, we have added 40 merchants around the world to get the right product at the right place at the right time. And I want to talk stop and take a minute and kind of veer off of merchandising to talk about developing leaders and how we are developing our talent and leadership. If you could switch the slide here please.
We are focused on developing and attracting leaders with great general management capabilities. Now what do we mean by general management capabilities? As Kevin Plank touched on earlier, our leaders not only have to be highly competent, but they also need to have a global mindset. They need to be invested in hiring and developing others. Our leaders need to be intellectually curious and have a very strong vision.
Kevin Eskridge, our Senior Vice President of Global Merchandising is a great example of this and he's not alone. We have a whole crew here at Under Armour that we are developing and building to be incredible leaders. Kevin grew up with sports, was a high school athlete, was a college athlete and then moved on and developed his skills at great brands at Gap Inc. Under Mickey Drexler with Armani Exchange. And he came from Armani to Under Armour and logically took over our hunt fish business, right?
But what Kevin learned there was adaptability and how you look at a brand and how you look at a market. What we are doing what we then did with Kevin is we moved them to China. He built our office and launched our brand in China, gaining incredible and valuable global experience. And earlier this year, Kevin became our Head of Merchandising. These experiences Kevin has had here at Under Armour will be a big part of his success in the future.
So my point is not just about Kevin. I probably need to take him down a few notches after this meeting. But we are developing our leaders like this. We are attracting leaders like this from around the world. Our strategy is to continue this cross pollination of our leaders around different categories, different functions and regions to build the next generation of leadership at Under Armour.
So now let's talk about speed. Speed is the 4th strategy on the how we are going to get to $7,500,000,000 by 2018. What this means basically is developing our product faster and being closer to market. Within this past year, we have launched a very, very important initiative at Under Armour. We now develop product 4 times a year as opposed to our past it was 2 times a year and this is a huge deal.
And we have done this in all product categories. This has enabled us to essentially reduce our product lifecycle by 10 weeks. We are 10 weeks faster to market in 2016 than we were previously. We will get faster as well. We have and will continue to invest in our processes around fabric and materials procurement.
This will further enable us to react to trends in fit, trends in color and trends in style. Speed to market is very important to our athletes and very important to the market landscape. Here, our size is our competitive advantage. We will build it organically. We are building a capability that will enable us to be more efficient in the near future in how we develop product.
When you take our initiative to enhance speed as well as our passion to change of footwear and apparel in the world. That's our goal and we are driving very hard to get there. So let's talk about reaching more athletes. We've talked about sport categories, innovative product and speed. The next strategy is reaching more athletes around the world with our global footprint.
And to do that, we're going to start with North America. I'd now like to bring up Matt Merchant, who's our President of North America. Matt has been with Under Armour for over a decade and he's been the President of North America for the past 10 months and he's hit the ground running and taking our business in North America to the next level. Matt, please. Good afternoon, everybody.
Welcome to Under Armour. I have the pleasure today of taking you through our North American business. As Henry said, my name is Matt Merchant. I've been here for about 10 years or so and 10 months in this current role. The 1st 2 months I spent on the road meeting with accounts, walking retail, spending a lot of time listening quite frankly and learning.
And after meeting with our customers, I heard one very clear, very consistent and very loud message and that is our customers want more from Under Armour. And the reason our customers want more from Under Armour is because the consumer wants more from Under Armour and that speaks directly to the power of the brand and that demand has fueled and will sustain our 20% plus growth quarter after quarter. We're proud of the brand that we built here. We view ourselves as the underdog and quite frankly, we like being the underdog. While we've grown and taken market share, we are just tapping into the tremendous opportunity that's out there for us in North America.
Before I get into the business today and take you through the numbers, I'd like to take a few minutes to talk to you about how we view and approach the growth opportunities for us in North America. As we look forward, it all ties back to the 4 pillars. Kevin did this earlier today. It's the founding principles of Under Armour, make great product, tell a great story, service the business and build a great team. And it all starts with great product.
We have great innovative product that our consumers love and have come to expect from Under Armour. We started building that connection with the consumer through our apparel and through making great footwear, we're starting to build that connection with them with footwear as well. So I'd like to start with footwear. The appetite for UA footwear from the consumer and the customer across all age, gender and sport is incredible. Our highlight, you heard about this earlier today from a couple of different speakers, but Kevin Haley talked about zigging when everybody else adds.
The marketplace was coming down in price. Everybody was trying to go low and minimalistic. We came out with $130 shoe, high top shoe and we also took a big risk on the marketing side. This was Cam Newton's rookie year. We decided to put this shoe on 1 athlete, 1 player as a rookie and he comes out in his first two games and throws for over 400 yards and breaks the rookie record and goes on to win Rookie of the Year that year, creating tremendous exposure, buzz and demand for that product.
So big bets with big partners and that's built and let us establish that franchise in the highlight cleat, the number one football cleat in the market. This works across sports, it's not just football. Another great example is through basketball leading with the right athlete with Stephen Curry, great product with the Curry 1 and the on court exposure that Curry's generated for us, leading vote getter in the All Star Game, winning the NBA championship and also winning the NBA MVP. And that has resulted in our basketball business being on fire. It's not just the Curry Signature shoe that's sold out.
Our basketball shoes across the board are selling well and he's also had a halo effect on all of our basketball apparel. Visible athletes, no matter what it is, Cam Newton in football or Stephen Curry in business across all categories. Key items. We have tremendous confidence in our product pipeline and you're going to see more of a focus for us on key items that drive volume. In apparel, we're going to drive more volume on fewer styles, while delivering a stronger point of view to the consumer.
Behind me, you can see some examples from this past season, whether it be our sixty-forty graphic program, jogger pants, the play up short in women's, the armor pants, leggings, joggers, all those have been really successful. We're going to get behind and drive those key items. All great apparel driving business with more to come. The second pillar is story. In addition to creating great product, you heard from Adrian about compelling storytelling and Henry about getting the right product at the right place at the right time.
As we build out strong capabilities through our sport end use categories and our growing merchandising abilities, we know we can further elevate and enhance our in store experiences. UA changed the game at retail over a decade ago by building a simple idea of creating a mannequin that we felt properly represented our brand on the pad. We took Biggie, Erica Boggler, former teammate at KP's at the University of Maryland and at the time an NFL player took a 6 foot 4, 2 75 pound frame and built the mannequin that we felt represented our brand. At the time in the marketplace, there were little skinny mannequins. When you put compression product on them, it just didn't look right.
I guarantee you that our mannequin could beat the hell out of any of the mannequins in the marketplace. And that idea sparked a development of better fixtures, more compelling imagery and an overall better shopping reinvent our space. Here's a recent example from Shield. This store opened about 3 months ago in Overland Park, Kansas. For those of you not familiar with Shield, they have about 25 doors.
They're based out of North Dakota Fargo, probably don't many people go there. But here you can see 4 different elements of their shops. I'll start just give you two highlights on the bottom right here. You can see the golf section that they built, taking advantage of Jordan Spieth, the best golfer in the world, the hottest golfer in the world and our newly created Golfmatic and given that authenticity in the right form, Golf Shop is exploding. Shoes, we are in the footwear business, make no mistake about it.
From the Cam Newton Signature shoe to the Hi Lite cleat, basketball, running, trading, we are in the business. We are taking this approach across channels. We're testing a concept right now at Champs called the Army. They're a division of Foot Locker. I'm going to speak more about this a little later on today.
Service, you heard Henry talk about service. Brad is going to come up here in a little while and talk about service. The key point here is that we're constantly challenging ourselves to get better. Our supply chain has done a great job of scaling with our growth. We're putting plans in place to increase service levels with a big focus on the following: auto replenishment styles, easy money for us, high margin, easy money for the accounts, high maintain margins.
With key items, we'll be able to put more products on replenishment and better service the business. Direct ship container programs, overall transportation initiatives to cut costs, improve speed to market and better service our customers. And the 4th pillar, team, last but certainly not least. We continue to grow, we continue to change, we continue to evolve as an organization. We recently realigned our North America wholesale sales department to be more channel focused with expertise going on in each channel.
So we now have VPs of Sporting Goods, a VP of Mall Specialty, a VP of Department Store and a VP of Outdoor, enabling sales to align with the new category GMs all the way through to product, marketing and merchandising. With the alignment of channels and categories, we're in a stronger position to service the customer and the consumer. I heard a lot of people talk about team today. We continue to build out our team in North America. Over the last 3 months and more importantly, the last 2 weeks, we've added 3 key executives to the North American team.
We hired a Senior Vice President of U. S. Wholesale Sales. We hired a VP of North American Merchandising and we hired a VP of North American E Commerce, all bringing decades of industry experience to an already talented group at Under Armour, who made us better on day 1. So what has our team accomplished?
We love calling it the scoreboard. Let's take a look at the UA scoreboard. Our North American business has grown at 26% CAGR from 11% through 14%, pretty impressive. But more important than reporting the past is talking about the future. We will more than double our business by 2018 from 2014 through 2018 at a 21% Our biggest business is going to more than double from 2014 through 2018.
Let me take a step back, let
me slow down and repeat that. Our biggest business will more than double from 2014 to 2018. Where is the growth going to come, come?
Let me give you
a few examples. It's going to come 1 from our current distribution across all channels, whether it be more specialty, department stores, outdoor sporting goods. Part of the growth is going to come from our wholesale partners and our DTC businesses opening up new doors, easy for that business. Part of the growth is going to come from selling all doors within existing channels and people partners that we do business with. Additional growth will come from expanding programs in existing doors by earning more space and being more productive within existing doors, which leads us to category expansion.
Henry talked about that a little bit earlier. We're going to grow all of our current businesses. In apparel and accessories, we'll grow our men's business, we will grow our women's business and we'll grow our youth business. In footwear, we're going to grow all categories, men's, women's and youth through 2018. You heard Henry talk about taking market share.
We'll take market share across the board led by golf, women's, run, basketball, team sports. These are categories that we do big business in. Train, of course, is our biggest business that drives the lion's share. We will grow all these businesses plus training in North America. This is a little new for us.
It's league deals. We've had sponsorship deals with the leagues for the past several years and I won't go into the sponsorship rights. But I'm going to talk a little bit about some license rights that we recently acquired across the 3 major sports leagues, baseball, football and basketball. I'll start with Major League Baseball. Actually in market today, we're selling Under Armour apparel with team logos.
We're selling it in our brand house. We're selling it at underarmoredotcom. We're also selling it in the concession stands in the arena and we're selling it to the team stores. Limited distribution, baseball is testing us, getting us in the game, but the performance to date has been incredible. So you can now buy an Under Armour T shirt or sweatshirt with a Yankees or a Mets or an Orioles logo, I guess you can figure out where I'm from, but you can buy with the team box and we can put our brands together.
We have high expectations of that business expanding. In football, we had the NFL Combine deal where we were the exclusive and official supplier to the NFL Combine for the apparel rights. That deal just recently got extended. And with that extension, we can now take Under Armour apparel, we could put the NFL scouting combine logo on that product in addition to putting Ravens or Giants or Jets Teammarks or logos on that product and sell it across all of our current distribution. And last, we just signed a new NBA deal.
We're actually going to be the outfitter in 20 17 2018. The NFL deal starts in 2016 by the way. The NBA deal starts in 2017 2018 season and we're going to be the official combine supplier for apparel and accessories for the NBA. So all the players going to the NBA combine will be wearing Under Armour apparel and accessories and similar to the NFL deal, we'll be able to take that product and put the NBA Combine logo on it in addition to Knicks or Nets or Lakers or Celtics on our apparel and sell it across most distribution that we have today. These rights help us get into the pro leagues and the team license business and complement the growing collegiate license business that we have today.
And last, through the acquisitions of Map My Fitness and Amando and MyFitnessPal, we now have about 87,000,000 people on our platform in North America, which provides us the ability to engage directly with our consumer. We're just getting started with activating this community and we're excited about the additional opportunity provides us to deepen our relationship with the consumer and provide the best possible brand experience for them. Our accounts are investing in this opportunity. They're utilizing UA Record to reach more of their consumers. As you can see behind me, Sports Authority just ran a recent promotion with Not My Fitness where they generated in 3 weeks 20,000,000 views, 57,000 click throughs and they recognized 100% increase on their tsa.com sales and attributed that directly to dealing with this MyFitness consumer.
We're also working closely with our wholesale accounts who are taking a more active position in their e commerce business. For the accounts that need technical help, our digital team is working directly with them, helping them with their sites and we're also using assets, content and imagery through a new digital asset management system that's recently been installed to enable our accounts to use the same imagery and content that is on underarmour.com. So here are screenshots from Cabela's, Dick's Sporting Goods and Macy's. So department stores, sporting goods and outdoor that are using imagery that's similar or the same that's on underarmored.com and we want to look great everywhere we interact with the customer. You all know the North American marketplace and the channels really well.
There are a couple of key takeaways today that I'd like you to see across the channels. We are seizing the opportunities by creating compelling and differentiated positioning within critical segments of the market by broadening our access to the brand. Let's start with our largest and most developed business, sporting goods. In almost every account we're in, we're either the number 1 or the number 2 apparel brand when you combine men's, women's and youth. And there's still enormous opportunity for us to grow the business there.
We are not going to stop and we're not going to be satisfied until we're number 1 in every category. Footwear, we talked about it a lot today. Footwear provides the biggest opportunity for growth in all channels, sporting goods included. Our accounts are all in. What we did for them in apparel by extending to another brand, better margins, better competition, they feel we're the only brand that could do that for them in footwear.
They are responding as we continue to grow our product line, add additional price points, they're responding positively and giving us the space that we need. And last on sporting goods that I want to talk about individually is our team dealer business. We don't talk about this much. Our team uniform business is going to be up about 50% this year in a marketplace that is basically flat to declining slightly. We're outfitting athletes from grade school through middle school, high school, college and beyond and developing a really loyal consumer.
But you really can't talk about sporting goods without talking about the biggest player in the market and a great partner of ours, Dick's Sporting Goods. Our relationship and our partnership with Dick's has never been stronger and our business continues to grow. We have taken leadership positions as the number one brand in many categories. And like I said earlier, we're not going to be satisfied and we're not going to stop to a number one everywhere. We talk about elevated products, storytelling and overall retail presentation.
DICK'S is an amazing partner for us. We have dedicated shops in all their doors. The size of the shops vary based on the size of the volume of their store. And over the next year, we're working with them to have 400 running and basketball footwear destinations, a huge investment, a huge initiative for Under Armour and Dick's Sporting Goods that we think will pay off for both brands. Mall.
There's a ton of white space in the mall for us, which is a relatively new channel for Under Armour. As you know, footwear makes up about 85% of the volume done in the mall, which is primarily driven by 2 categories, basketball and run. As you can see behind me, these are basically the Foot Inc. Banners plus the finish line. They make up majority of the business in the mall, although there are other people that will be selling in the mall or we do sell in the mall.
These guys make up majority of the business. When you consider that we're still fairly new in this channel, you can understand why we're so excited about the opportunity to grow our business in the This is one of the key places that our newly aligned sales organization combined with our category management and enhanced merchandising will help us establish and drive growth. The largest player in the business, the largest player in them all is Foot Locker Inc. We have formed a great partnership with their team. If you total up all the doors behind me, we're in less than half of these total doors, enormous opportunity for growing and expand our brand and business.
We had incredible success of the Curry 1 launch. Behind me, you can see Stephen during All Star Weekend, which happened to be in New York this past year. Stephen made an appearance at the 34th Street store. There was a line out the door for him in the 400 door Foot Locker doors that we sold Curry 1 to. We took over the windows for a couple of weeks and inside all this happens to be 34th Street, but in all the doors we had windows and then we also had big displays in store.
The Curry launch was amongst the fastest liquidating signature shoe Foot Locker had this past year. As we expand to Curry 2 this coming October, we'll go to more doors and put more pairs per door in. We work closely with Champs to build out a new concept called the armory. It's been up for about 3 months right now and it's still early to say success, but the results have far exceeded expectation to date. So this gives you a pretty good view of the store.
On the right, you can see the window. We have the armory signage there and it highlights headwear, apparel and footwear. If you go to the back of the store, Under Armour has pretty much taken over the entire back of the store. It's about 1,000 square feet. See the big logo drawing people back and then we have footwear utilizing our key assets like Stephen Curry, Cam Newton.
We have a lottery pick in the NBA draft this year in Emmanuel Moutier tying imagery. We've taken key elements from the Brand House, the throw ins, the chairs that we have in Brand House, using those elements in the mall, things that we've learned from BrandHouse taking to our partners at wholesale. The Armoury is just another example of how we're elevating our brand and enhancing the experience that the consumer has with Under Armour. Outdoor, this business is kind of like the silent assassin for us. Like every category, authenticity and performance are keys to our success.
Driven by Kib Faulks, who's an avid outdoorsman, I very rarely ever give Kip credit, but he's an out of the box thinker. We created through Kip a UATV show called the Ridge Reaper and a camo pattern called Ridge Reaper and under the same name to continue to help drive authenticity in this space. Both have been very well received and both are driving business. Cabela's is the leader in this industry. The physical and virtual presentation of our brand at Cabela's is strong as you can see behind me.
We are their premium brand and we're positioned accordingly in their doors. Department stores is another relatively new channel for Under Armour and gives us access to a consumer that may not shop in sporting goods or the mall buy their activewear. Behind me you can see Macy's Herald Square in New York. It's one of the most iconic retail stores in the world. We have a shop in men's.
We have a shop in women's. And based on the results from our youth business to date, we'll have a shop in spring of 2016 in Herald Square. Our men's shop is among the most productive shops in the active department. These are just a few examples to show you how we're focused on elevating our consumers' experience wherever they interact with the brand and we're building mutual profitable businesses with our partners. DTC, while we're enjoying incredible growth at wholesale, our DTC business is going to a faster rate and at better margins than our wholesale business.
DTC sets the standard for our brand in the marketplace and has been a powerful way to us to learn and share best practices with our wholesale partners. Susie and Jason are coming up here in a little while to talk about the global DTC business that will also hit North America, but I wanted to just share some quick highlights with you as it relates to the North American business this past year. So the Stephen Curry Signature shoes sold out 90 percent on the 1st day in Brand House. Our Chicago Brand House, which you see here, is getting about 3 times the traffic as our average Brand house. And we've walked Chicago and had customers walk Chicago, the brand house.
And based on the experience they see on how we merchandise and elevate the brand in a 30,000 square foot environment, they're actually taking some of the products and some of the merchandising and bringing it into their doors. Factory House. We now have 50,000,000 people in North America walk through our factory houses this year. Our youth business is over indexing, makes up about 20% of the sales in factory house. We ended 2014 with 130 retail stores in North America.
By the end of 2018, we're going to have over 200 retail stores in North America. E Commerce. The Curry shoes sold out online in minutes. We had 500,000 page downloads for the Curry MVP drop. We tried to test golf shoes.
We did it in a pretty good timing right after Augusta and Jordan 1 sold out in 2 days. Kelly and Adrian talked about the importance of our bra business to the female consumer, We're up 50% year to date on e commerce and our mobile traffic is up triple digits this year. Our DTC business provides revenue opportunities for Under Armour, but it also is a way for us to drive brand presence and enhance storytelling to the consumer. So in closing, I'd love you to take away 5 things from the North American business today. First, our customers and our consumers want more from Under Armour.
It's an incredible position to be in as a brand. Our business will more than double in North America. The biggest business will more than double from 2014 through 2018. The growth is going to come from existing distribution. All of our categories are going to grow.
Apparel and accessories across men's, women's and youth and footwear will lead the growth across men's, women's, youth all categories and digital is key in both our direct to consumer businesses and working with our wholesale partners. So now I have the pleasure to introduce our next speaker. Charlie joined us about 3 years ago after spending roughly 20 years in this industry and he's coming and he's grown the business and built an amazing team. My only request to Brad today was I didn't want to have to follow Charlie because doubling the business is going to sound a lot less impressive. You have to listen to what he's doing in international.
So it's my pleasure to bring up Charlie Maron, our President of International.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thanks, Matt. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to present an update of Under Armour's international expansion strategy this afternoon. 2 years ago, I was standing here and presented to this audience under ARMOUR's international expansion strategy until 20 16. This slide you see behind was my final slide of that presentation. In 2013, we organized by putting our international strategy plan in place.
By 2014, we optimized by establishing consistent processes, organization structures and systems to ensure scalable growth and by starting new subsidiaries in Australia, in Brazil, in Mexico and in Chile. In 2015, we accelerate by focusing on key regions, key markets and key customers. And by 20 16, we attack. We will get bigger, better and faster. I also presented the International Strategic Business Plan and its 5 building blocks of success as well as how we transform a successful North American company into a truly global player.
I spoke about the brand. What means the brand? The brand is how to ensure that Under Armour brand always stands for performance and innovation wherever we show up. About people, where we have regional teams that are engaged, enthusiastic, empowered and passionate about Under Armour and their work. I spoke about the operating model, which provides clarity about the governance of the company and where roles and responsibilities are clearly defined at global, regional and market level and about infrastructure, which is about setting up offices, distribution houses and IT systems and the international expansion strategy with a clear plan of where, when and how we show up.
The good news is Under Armour International is almost 1 year ahead of the original plan. By 2015, we will achieve our 2016 international business ambitions. Or in other words, we are 50% ahead of our 2015 plan. Obviously, our strategy is working, and we are gaining traction around the world. We are managing fast growth while limiting risks.
Around the world, we are winning the hearts and minds of athletes. How do we do this? We are investing in the activation of our global and local assets, such as Chordensby's, Memphis Depay, the Welsh Rugby Union or Jared Hayne from Australia. Most of you may not have heard about him. Jerry is a 2 times Australian Rugby League Most Valuable Player, who last year gave up his fame and fortune to chase a lifelong dream to play in the NFL.
He had never played in the NFL before. Let's have a look at him. Good one. He's an Australian, by the way. He had never played American football, but after a year of training and 4 weeks of NFL preseason, the long shot novelty became a reality.
We also utilized DTC and controlled retail space as well as store opening as a media. Here you can just see a couple of examples in Manila, Shanghai, opening with Steph Curry 2 weeks ago and the SIAM Center in Bangkok. And we drive engagement to digital and connected fitness. And we do things differently be disruptive in key markets. This event is called the Armor Camp that was held during the ISPO in Munich just at the beginning of this year.
Actually, this was called Last Man Standing, what you see here in a minute. We got a lot of coverage. This was during the International Sporting Goods Fair in Munich and a lot of press coverage was done during negative temperatures in February. Interestingly, Ron, this is last man standing and even better, it was won by a woman. The construction place in front of the ISPO Fair.
Okay. Because of all this, our brand awareness has been increasing rapidly. In any market where our brand awareness exceeds 30%, we see a strong acceleration of our revenue growth. A great example is Chile, where our brand awareness has reached 43% in less than 2 years, driven by the signing and activation of colo colo, I think I spoke about this, one of the biggest clubs in the country as well as the opening of 4 Under Armour stores in Santiago. This is just an example how fast you can grow a brand awareness in a country where the brand is hardly known.
We continue to position Under Armour as a premium performance brand that makes all athletes better. How do we do this? We prioritize our key categories and innovations when we enter markets. We focus on premium distribution and we are strategic about our geographic expansion. Our consumer love our brand because we deliver authentic products that are designed with cutting edge technology.
As simple as it sounds, we are successful in any market with our core categories when we align them with Under Armour's 4 pillars of greatness: make a great product, tell a great story, provide great service and build a great team. And when we enter markets, we focus on the following core categories: running, football, training and basketball. Our channel strategy is tailored to ensure we have the correct balance of wholesale, retail and e commerce in each of the markets. Our objective is to be premium in each of these channels and look the best wherever we show up. So what do we do?
Let's talk about wholesale. We focus our expansion at premium, pinnacle locations such as Selfridges and Harrods in London, Sportschuster and Sport Chek in Munich, and we built strong strategic partnerships with top regional accounts that allow us to represent the brand in an elevated way. And by 2018, Under Armour will have more than 2,000 shop in shops outside of North America, meaning we will increase our shop in shop presence and footprint by over 2 50%. Let's talk about retail. Our retail strategy incorporates both own retail and partnership stores.
With the opening of partnership stores, we leverage our own retail capabilities. We will increase our store presence through a tiered approach, focusing on flagship, brand house and factory house to drive sales. By 2018, we will have more, more than 800 stores outside of North America, growing our existing store base by more than 500%. Susie McCabe, our Senior Vice President of Global Retail, will go into more details later on. Let's talk about e commerce.
We are rapidly increasing our accessibility to our consumer by expanding in new geographies. We are piloting omni channel in order to offer athletes an innovative, seamless consumer experience. The Millennium consumer demands an integrated omnichannel approach, so they can shop on the Internet, within brick and mortar and on social media and switch back and forth with ease. We are building loyalty through mobile with our connected fitness and e commerce platforms. And by 2018, we will have 30 localized e commerce experiences covering approximately 80% of the key markets around the world.
Jason Larose will represent or will present more on e commerce later. Last time, we talked about focus on key regions, key markets and key cities. To continue to be very we continue to be very disciplined with our geographic expansion and cadence of new market entries with own subsidiaries, distributors and partners. So I just want to give you here an example. By 2025, 2,000,000,000 people will live in 600 cities in the world.
These are 25 percent of the population, but they will represent 60 percent of the GDP. In 2025, 75% of those 600 cities will be in emerging markets and emerging market cities will have more and higher middle income households than the developed world for the first time in history. Today, Under Armour is only the opportunity that we have ahead. So let me start with our biggest region, EMEA First. We focused, as I have told you, our efforts in the 3 biggest markets, U.
K, Germany and France, which represent 70% of the business in this region. 16, we will take back control of our brand in France, following the U. K. And Germany. In addition, we have signed new distribution agreements with partners in Turkey, in selected parts of North Africa and in South Africa, each starting in 2016.
And we continue to evaluate market entries into the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Sub Mediterranean Europe and Russia in the years to come. We are happy to have an experienced industry leader with Chris Bate, who drives the development of our brand and growth in EMEA. Our brand is about energy. It's about an obsession with being better, stronger and more powerful. As you might have heard in Germany, goes close to my heart by the way, we have Seinsankpauly, a football club that resonates with our core consumer and our brand.
Recently, they were nominated the 4th most popular club in Germany, even so they are in the 2nd division. Just to give you an idea, what you see over here, this is the way they welcome their opponents at evening games. And for those of you who do not understand what it means, Wilkomenindahoehler, it means welcome to hell. So another good news. To further strengthen the brand in key markets, we anticipate announcing 2 additional EPL clubs to our global asset roster in 2016.
We, Under Armour, will continue to invest in activation around our new sport marketing assets to drive brand awareness and sell through in key markets. Let's talk about Asia. In Asia, we will continue to focus on premium positioning through own stores and regional partners. We are very satisfied with our longest serving distributor and licensee, Dome, that drives Under Armour's business in Japan and South Korea. In China, we continue to experience massive growth as we expand our footprint with our regional retail partners.
Our GM of Greater China, Eric Haskell, has a long proven track record in sporting goods industry in Asia, and we are pleased that he is leading our efforts. In Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Brunei and Vietnam are the next markets that we will enter in 2016. And we are also evaluating a market entry into India, most likely in 2018. In Latin America, we have created platforms for the brand to reach our consumer with our football clubs, stores and shop in shop rollouts. In all three markets, we are still in our investment phase as we have built up 3 new subsidiaries in Mexico, in Brazil and Chile as well as expansion into the remaining markets of the South Cone.
We continue to develop key account relationships, retail rollout and establishing UAecom sites in our market at Tech. So let me summarize. We have a strong and motivated team in place. We are quickly becoming a truly global player. In 2012, Under Armour International was 6% of sales.
In 2014, we were 9% of sales. And in 2018, we will be 18% of our global sales. And we are just getting started. We will continue our strong growth path, delivering a cumulative annual growth rate of 50% in the coming years. Please let me hand over to Susie McCabe, our Senior Vice President of Retail, who will not only guide you through our global retail strategy, but who is instrumental to our success internationally.
Thank you very
much.
Thank you, Charlie. Hi, I'm Susie McCabe and it's a pleasure to be here today to talk to you about the global retail game plan at Under Armour. Before I dive in, I want to provide a little insight into what drew me to Under Armour almost 2 years ago. I've had the privilege of working at some great retailers and great brands over the course of my career, from Bloomingdale's to J. Crew to over 15 years at Ralph Lauren.
Without question, what we are building at Under Armour is the most exciting thing that I've been involved in. This is a once in a generation opportunity to bring a brand that is changing the industry to more markets and more athletes around the globe. We have a proven track record for success and an even greater runway in front of us. So let's jump right in. The last time we met, we had just opened our Brand House store in Harbor East and we're about to open our store in Tysons Corner.
6 months ago, we opened the Chicago Brand House on the Magnificent Mile, a true flagship location and a UA Beacon in the Midwest. Last week, we opened our Shanghai BrandHouse store on outside the United States at approximately 15,000 square feet. The opening was on the final day of our 5 day, 5 city tour through Asia with NBA MVP and UA athlete, Stephen Curry. What an end and a beginning. We are really proud of these openings, but as we like to say, we are just getting started.
And you all know our CEO well enough to know that as soon as we opened these stores, he was saying to us, what's next? So let's level set with where we are today. We ended 2014 with 2 26 locations globally. That includes both our owned and operated stores as well as our partnered stores. We're in 11 countries with 1,100,000 square feet of retail space.
A little over 60% of our locations today are in North America. That means that our opportunity outside North America is large. Remember, 70% of the $250,000,000,000 Sporting Goods business is done outside the U. S. So we're a little inverted here.
There is definitely room to grow. As we think about the vast opportunity that lies ahead, we firmly believe that how we grow is as important as how fast we grow. Our single largest asset is the brand. Our goal is to maintain our premium positioning and share the brand with athletes globally. We will expand our reach and broaden our access, but we will be vigilant.
We will focus on always being brand right and business right. If you leave here today and remember only 5 things, I need you to progress the slide. Remember these with UA Retail. We will build the brand. We are elevating our brand through great consumer experiences.
With every store that we open, we build brand equity with our consumers throughout the globe, From Baltimore to Shanghai to Manila to Chicago, our stores are creating Retail gives us direct access to the athlete to tell our Retail gives us direct access to the athlete to tell our stories, from the brand history to our athletes' personal journeys, to product and technology launches, we are able to tell pinnacle, head to toe stories and be the best expression of our brand. We drive the business. Retail drives revenue and profit for the company within our four walls and outside of our 4 walls. We have seen our BrandHouse stores drive growth in our wholesale businesses in the surrounding markets. We reach more athletes.
With every door that we open and every market that we enter, we access more athletes. Our door count growth combined with the growth of our connected fitness community will be 2 of the largest drivers of broadening our access, but we will always strive to grow the right way. So we will protect the brand. While we are focused on driving the business, we will not chase easy profits. We are disciplined and will pursue growth that is brand accretive, brand right and business right.
To achieve the goals just outlined, we're pursuing a tiered market approach. We're focused on balanced distribution, not only within brick and mortar, but across DTC and wholesale. So we're pursuing a 3 tiered approach. Every tier in the pyramid serves a different role within the portfolio. Collectively, they help us achieve our goal of broadening access to our brand and expanding our reach.
So if we talk about each one, they serve different purposes. Tier 1 builds the brand. It's premium distribution that makes a brand statement. It's an anchor for the brand and an anchor for the region. These will be our largest stores, over 20,000 square feet in the United States and over 12,000 outside the U.
S. Tier 2 drives the business and builds awareness. They are operationally efficient and financially self sufficient. These will be smaller in size than Tier 1, but they will still make a very big impact. And lastly, Tier 3.
Tier 3 protects the brand. It is controlled off price objectives. So as we dive into each one of the tiers, we'll start with Tier 1. Tier 1 is the pinnacle point of distribution. Of distribution.
These stores make big brand statements on some of the world's largest stages. They showcase the full world of UA products and experiences. These are important to drive the business and build the brand, especially internationally. We will be selective about where we open these. Our focus will be major global gateway cities like Chicago, Shanghai, New York, London, Tokyo.
They will be beacons in the marketplace. We have had great success making amazing connections in markets that we have opened a Tier one location. We are on track to have over 1,000,000 visitors in our Chicago store annually. We have people flocking to Chicago to have their picture taken with the big bus form or to track their vertical leap at the optajump. We've hosted countless events with our marquee athletes like Misty Copeland, Stephen Curry and Jordan Spieth as well as some of our major team assets like Notre Dame and Colo Colo.
We just pre launched the Curry II at our new store opening in Shanghai. Crowds lined the streets to see Stephen Curry and to buy the shoe. We are selling Pinnacle products and delivering authentic category experience is in run, hunt, fish, studio, golf, basketball and train. These stores will not make up a significant portion of our door count, but they will be a significant contributor to brand heat and they will drive performance for the other tiers and the whole sell channels. Tier 2 is all about driving the business, broadening our reach and generating more access to the brand.
These stores are brand statements and workhorses. They are self sufficient and allow us to engage local athletes on an ongoing basis. While Tier 2 is smaller in size than Tier 1, they will continue to give our athletes the opportunity to shop head to toe looks by end use and they will showcase technology launches and our most elevated product. Tier 3 assets play a multi Secondly, they protect the brand. They allow us to make bets on product and liquidate what we don't sell.
They are a vital part of a healthy brand. They drive the business as well. Worldwide, the factory business is one that is for brand loyalists and novices alike. They provide access to the brand for a more value driven customer or a new customer and they offer another access point for those that are already fully engaged in the brand. As Charlie mentioned, as we expand outside the U.
S, controlled retail will represent a big portion of our growth. The lion's share of that door count growth will come through BrandHouse stores. Our factory house door count will come to represent a smaller percentage of our overall stores. Our target here is 25% of our doors. We will open fewer larger doors.
So Factory House will be 16% of our new store door count and 22% of our square footage growth. In North America, we could have opened more stores, but we're focused on being in only the best centers. We're targeting having stores in no more than 70% of the outlet centers in the marketplace. This is about quality over quantity. So overall across every tier, all of our doors will be consumer right, market right and brand enhancing.
As we follow this tiered approach, where do we expect to be by 2018? A minute ago or a few minutes ago, I told you 62% of our retail doors were located here in North America. By 2018, about 80% of our doors will be located outside of North America. We'll still look to grow North America by over 20 percent CAGR, but international will be growing at close to 10 times that rate. Our store count growth will be 12 percent in North America and 75% internationally.
The international growth potential is large and retail will play a huge role in that. But as we expand outside of North America, our store mix will also change. By 2018, we expect that 70% of our store count will be partner operated. By working with partners, we enable our growth, increase our speed and manage our investment and our risk. As we scale, our global teams will ensure that we are globally consistent, but locally significant.
It is critical that regardless of whether or not we own the store or we partner with the store, the athletes get the same amazing brand experience. They will see the same global fixture series, the same visual merchandising standards, the same emphasis on high energy teammates and the same globally powerful and locally relevant assortments. We issue global standards and have robust in market training. So where do we end up in 2018? By 2018, we are projecting that 80% of our stores will be outside of North America.
We will have over 1,000 stores worldwide. We will have stores in close to 40 countries and over 3,000,000 square feet of retail space. We are tripling our footprint. 75% of that growth is coming from international locations and 60% from partner operated retail. We will have over 150,000,000 athletes visiting our stores each year.
We are truly just getting started. So just a reminder of the 5 major ways that retail supports Under Armour's global growth strategies. We build the brand, we tell a great story, we drive the business, we reach more athletes and we protect the brand. Our e commerce business will do all of this as well. And in a world where the athlete sees us as one brand and one community, it is critical that we are aligned in our strategies and positioning.
The world is changing, yes, and this is why we think of ourselves as DTC, not just retail and not just e commerce. We work together to draft off each other's strengths to provide an omnichannel shopping experience for the consumer. We will continue to see the convergence and acceleration of digital with retail, digital within the store itself. But before someone enters into one of our stores and after they leave, whether they've made a purchase or not, they will be interacting with our brand in the digital space. As you can tell, this is not an or conversation.
This is an and conversation. It's not digital or physical, it's digital and physical. With that, I'd like to hand it over to Jason LaRose, who will take you through the strategy for the fastest growing part of the retail business here at Under Armour, e commerce.
Thanks, Susie.
Super excited to be up here for you guys. I apologize upfront that I'm last before Brad. I don't have any videos. I don't know how to say welcome to hell in any other languages. So we're just going to talk about the fact that we run the fastest growing business and the most profitable business, hopefully with this crowd, that's a pretty good way to start.
So when we talk about e commerce, there are still two goals. They're not very different from the other things you heard today. Be amazing to our brand, accelerate our growth. That's really what we're here to do. The objectives are not they're not in question I guess.
But the strategies are really what we're here to talk about hopefully pretty quickly here today. So let's talk about the four things that most of our activities really bucket into. Launching global platforms, delivering personalized experiences, dominating in mobile and establishing a premium presence everywhere. Starting with global experiences, Charlie gave you a little bit of this flavor already. The last time we were together in 2013, we had 5 sites around the globe.
Today, we have 23 sites. Tomorrow, we have 20 4. With 23 sites, we're still very much in a nascent stage from an e commerce standpoint. Even with that growth, only 3% of our e commerce revenue is happening outside North America. The idea behind launching those sites so quickly wasn't to see how fast we could make that number grow.
It was to reach more athletes. We're trying to tell our story. And from a digital standpoint, we have much better opportunity to very quickly get our story out there as we establish the right distribution partners, whether it be DTC or through other partners, market by market. Those localized experiences mean a lot to us. If you think about a place like Brazil, Kevin mentioned that tomorrow we launch our site in Brazil.
That's partially true. Tomorrow we launch our commerce site in Brazil. Tomorrow is not the day we launch our site in Brazil. Our site's been up in Brazil for over a year. And our site's been up in Brazil for over a year because we needed a place to talk about our brand.
We weren't ready to handle it from a commerce standpoint, but we needed to talk about Under Armour. We needed a place to talk about our partnership with Sao Paulo Football Club. Some of those things that give us a great chance to drive our brand into market before we even have all the distribution to be able to satisfy the demand. So that's a great example. Denmark, we talked a little bit about EndoMondo.
We launched our Danish site 2 weeks ago. That Danish site was launched in a country where 45% of the adults have the EndoMondo app downloaded onto their phones. So when we talk about Robin mentioned earlier today the idea that certain people are having their first handshake with our brand in digital space. That's absolutely what we're talking about. We're seeing that in Denmark.
That's not a pipe dream for us. That's reality in a country where we have limited distribution, but half of the population now knows a lot about Under Armour and that's where we're satisfying with those types of sites. As we talk about 2018, we're going to have 30 countries, probably a little more, but we'll talk about 30 plus, where we'll have localized experiences. That will take us from 70% of the GDP we cover today to over 80% of the GDP by the time we get there. And this lines up perfectly the way we think about distribution and brick and mortar and how Charlie talked about market expansion.
We do it from one single approach, so we're reaching athletes in a very combined and holistic way. Switching gears toward engaging content experiences. We've talked a lot about Stephen Curry, the trip to China, those types of things. Certainly a great opportunity for us, but not one that you can perfectly predict. I mean Stefan had a great year.
We know he's a great player. He's a great partner to us. We don't know he's going to be the MVP. We don't know he's going to be a world champion. We don't know he's going to win the 3 point contest.
So digital is a really important place for us to be able to tell that story at a moment's notice as it happens. So behind me what you see is the commercial. And we played this commercial and it did great in both broadcast and online, tens of 100 of millions of views. It was wonderful. It's a great place to learn a little bit more about Under Armour, but it's really quick.
What happens for that kid who has a lot of passion for the brand, who wants to learn more, who wants to spend more time with us, that's really where we have an opportunity to use our sites to tell the depth of our stories. So as you look at what's behind me, you see a lot more of the content that we can allow you to drill into really only in this channel. Everything from videos about what inspired Stefan to help us design a particular shoe or what goes into charge cushioning or why we designed a shoe a particular way, shoe release calendars, things happening in social, how he's interacting with other athletes in our roster, all of those things are things that mean a lot to that kid who cares a lot about basketball, who cares about Steph and who cares about Under Armour. And so our ability to let him go to the bottom of the ocean on that content is really what's made a difference. I mean not only is that kid coming to search for it and Curry is the number one search term on our site year to date, so pretty important for us.
But that kid's buying. Our basketball business is up 300% and he's hanging out. For kids who come and search for Curry on the site, they spend twice as much time on the site as people who don't. So they're diving into that content in a year when Stefan's having an amazing time and we have a chance to tell that story and engage that kid in our brand. And as Matt mentioned before, a lot of people talk about sell throughs and say, hey, we sold through this shoe in weeks or maybe even days.
We used to talk about them in hours. Now we talk about them in minutes. Our last 2 Curry shoes sold out online in minutes, less than 10. So when you talk about people pulling us into categories the way Henry did earlier today, this is just another example of what's happening when we can just give that kid a little bit more access to our brand, how that passion can be fueled. At the same time, not everybody wants to come search for that content.
Sometimes we have to come find you. And so we'll go back to the story of Sofia. We talked about her earlier today. She's here in Baltimore. This isn't a minority report example.
This is what we can do today. You think about a woman who lives in Baltimore who we know is a runner, we see her out on our app and we see her searching for a run route. But she's searching for a run route in Chicago. What she doesn't realize is that it's fall in Chicago even though it's still summer in Baltimore. And that 23 degree difference means that run along the harbor here is pretty comfortable and that run along the lake is pretty uncomfortable in Chicago.
So we have the ability very quickly to say we know the difference, we know how far you run and because we know how far you run, we can push to you a notification that says here's what you're probably going to need. We know your sizes, you have payment type on file. We know a lot about you. These recommendations can be amazing. Kevin talked earlier today about the fact that Amazon has 40% of their revenues attributed to their recommendation engine.
That recommendation engine is still only powered by transactional info. They don't know more about you than what you have bought. We know about what you did yesterday. We know what you put in your body, how well you slept, how far you ran, how far you usually run. And all those pieces of information just give us a better chance to make really smart recommendations.
And when we do, then we can have Sofia in Chicago very quickly having an awesome run-in new gear that's just right for her. And maybe we sent it to her hotel room in a box, maybe we had her pick it up at the nearest Dick's store, maybe we had it shipped to her hotel from the nearest Dick's It doesn't matter. The point is we were able to solve a problem for her. We were allowing her to focus on her run and that's really what we want to be able to do. Now if we switch gears and talk about mobile, this trend is not new.
You guys cover this space. Everybody says mobile is growing a lot, mobile is growing a lot. For us it's even more. If you went back 4 years less than 5% of our traffic came from mobile device and we were together 2 years ago that number was 28. Today that number is 57% year to date which is higher than most people.
But when you think about our connected fitness community, when you think about our youth and their tech savvy, that's not a crazy number for us. But that acceleration is really incredible. What's different for us is we've been able to take that information and we've been able to put it into action. We've made sure that all of our sites around the globe are responsive. So we're device agnostic.
No matter what size screen you want to be on, we can optimize that experience for you in any of those 23 countries we talked about before. And while other people are saying, hey, we're seeing our mobile go up and that means we're seeing our conversion go down. We're seeing our mobile go up, but we're seeing our mobile business get stronger too. So while mobile is accelerating as a percentage of traffic, our mobile business is up over 120% this year. So we're seeing that turn into revenue.
It's not just flipping traffic on the bus. These are kids who are putting things in carts and leaving with products. So excited to see that when we're making those investments, it's not just in making a better experience, but our job is to sell shirts and shoes and we're doing good job of that even on devices where some folks are struggling more. On the shopping app side, many of you have asked questions about, you don't have a shopping app, when are you going to have a shopping app? We are going to have a shopping app very soon.
That doesn't sound like new news and it's really not, right? I mean every brand out there has 1 or most brands have 1. But what's different is what you can do with it. Most people build a brand and then they build an app. And when they build the app, it's for the people who love the brand.
So if you love a brand, then you download it, you put it on your phone. Couple of 1000000 people download it, they love the brand, it's really cool. That's fine. For us, what we have the ability to do is not just launch an app, but to integrate that app into the daily lives of 150,000,000 people. It's not building an app that's hard, it's building an installed base that's hard.
So you launch brandx.com and you put an app up there, who's going to download it? Getting the downloads is hard. But integrating into 150,000,000 people who have already downloaded you is a very different situation. So while these are a couple of stills, if you look to the far left, what you see, that's not an image of our app. That's an image of record.
And that image of record is showing you how a moment of inspiration around a yoga pose can very quickly turn into how do I buy that tank, one click. So those are the types of things we can do because we know that customer is already with us looking for inspiration, in this case about yoga and very quickly we're transitioning that into product. Shouldn't have to go to Google and search around and say what was that pink tank and who's in that and what size is that and how are the straps? We can do that. And we can do that very quickly because we have 150,000,000 people.
And so while the technology is available to everyone, the installed base isn't. And that's really what makes this so powerful for us. Now omni channel, you heard a little bit. People have thrown that word out. You guys get this word a lot, right?
Everybody says it. It makes them sound like they're smart. It's cool. Nobody really knows what it is, but they say it anyway. It's been going on for like 8 or 10 years, right?
And when people say it, I think they mean a whole bunch of different things, but I think there's a convergence around the definition. I think it's important to just say why we think it's different. What most people say, what I think they're saying when they say omnichannel is they're saying supply chain. They're saying we know how to share inventory between our core stores and our e comm business. So if you buy online and we have it in the store, we'll get it for you.
If you're in a store and we don't have it, we'll get it for you from online. Cool. Not that cool, but you should do it. From our perspective, that's really not what we think about when we talk about omnichannel. We should do those things and we're doing those things and that's fine.
But those are tickets to the game in 2015. What we're really trying to do is expand so that Factory House that doesn't have all the same assortment we have or our wholesale partners and distributors who we don't have all the point of sale information from are still being part of that conversation, how we think about our relationship with that customer and ultimately how we integrate the communities. So when we say omnichannel, we don't think about one view of inventory. That's what most people I think say. When we think about omnichannel, what we think is 1 customer equals 1 relationship.
Not a relationship with that store, but well, it's different when I go to Dick's. That's not our deal. Our deal is to have one relationship with you, to know everything in your locker, every time you run, everything you put in your body, all the stuff you need, all the content you need, all your likes, all your dislikes and to build that into one relationship where we can really solve problems for you. So when we talk about making omnichannel investments, don't mistake us that what we mean is we're making sure we have a single view of inventory. We are, but that's not the point.
The point is we're building 1 single relationship with our customer and it's our customer's passion for us that allows us to have that two way exchange. So when we talk about those partners, we do have partners out there and Matt alluded to the fact that we have to do a great job by them. Henry said many times that the best brands look great everywhere and that's our intent. Whether we're talking about macys.com or we're talking about T Mall, we expect to look great. And so we invest a lot of our time now in sharing assets and content and those things and sharing inventory and drop shipping and all of that stuff because it's really important that our customers shop where they want to shop and when they shop for Under Armour that they have an amazing experience.
So we work very close to their partners to make that happen. I'll just give you one anecdote. Cabela's you guys cover the space. They have a great e commerce business. They're based in catalog history.
They do a very good business. They have have a very large amount of traffic. The number one brand search on their site is Under Armour. It's amazing In that space, I think Matt talked about outdoor being our silent assassin. I think that's a good sign of it.
The cool thing though is while we have 100 of millions of visits to our stores and our own properties, our partners have 1,000,000,000 more. And so what we're committed to doing is doing a great job for our 100 of 1,000,000 and still capturing everything we can in those 1,000,000,000. We're not competing with our partners in digital space. We're really just trying to look great. And when we look great, we believe we're going to win because we believe we make the best stuff.
So let me leave you in summary with just a few things if you're going to take there we go if we're going to take a few things away. When we get to 2018, we're going to have at least 30 localized experiences. Those experiences are going to be personalized, not by transactional data, but powered by Connected fitness. That we're going to drive 4 times as much digital traffic through mobile as we do today, 4 times even when we're being at when we're at 57% today. So we're making investments in omnichannel, but those investments are in our definition of omnichannel, not everybody else's definition of omnichannel.
And what it all is going to lead to is 5 times the business. We're going to approach 5 times our current size in e commerce when we get to 2018. Even though today we're a good chunk and we're growing really fast and we're really profitable, 5 times is very doable for us given what's happening in Connected Fitness and how we're driving traffic. So I hope that was a good quick summary on the guy between you and a break. So I'm going to tell you we're going to take about 5 minutes then Brad's going to come up so nobody wants to miss Brad, I know that.
So it'll take about 5 minutes, quickly stretch your legs, use the restroom, whatever. That's plenty of time to buy something on underarmour.com by the way, plenty of time. You really need like 90 seconds. So if you want to do those things, you've got 5 minutes and then Brad will come up talk a little bit about financials and operations. Thank you.
Awesome. Welcome back every single day, managing your expectations every single day. All right. So we got 6 chairs up for Q and A. We got 38 minutes to get to Q and A.
So I'm going to wrap it all up here, talk about the financials and I'll get a little bit of help from Paul Phipps on the technology side too. So you've heard a lot from our leadership today, everything from where we are to where we're going and probably most importantly from my perspective where we're investing. So from innovation to product to channels of distribution and more, you've heard 2 common themes across the day. First, how success is changing how our business looks and second, how decisions around where, when and how much we invest have been and will continue to be critical to the long term success of our brand. As much as we speak about the consistency of our 5 growth drivers, success of these growth drivers changes our landscape drastically.
2 years ago footwear and international were spoken of mostly in the future tense. Now they come with added degree of confidence based on our results from the last 2 years. Our ability to continue to be focused on investing in key areas of growth balanced with the discipline of delivering shorter term results has been our recipe not only for our past and near term financial success, but more importantly our ability to accelerate our top line CAGR the next few years to 25% and lengthen our runway of growth beyond 2018. Let's start with the most visible benefits from our investments, by 2016. Our current 2015 revenue guidance of $3,840,000,000 gets us nearly there an entire year earlier.
Again, these top line results were fueled by our investment decisions we've been making along the way. Regarding revenues, let's take a look at the past, present and future as a starting point. 1st, let's look at our 22% revenue CAGR we signed up for last Investor Day and see what revenues would have looked like if we simply extend that growth rate through 2018. You'd get a number just under $6,000,000,000 Fast forward to earlier this year when we provided details in our connected fitness strategy in New York. We added results from 2013 2014 where we over delivered in part due to the execution of our footwear international strategies.
At that time, we were guiding 2015 revenues of $3,760,000,000 and still holding true to the growth rate of 22% signed up for back in 2013. That guidance did not even consider any benefit from the acquisitions as it was too early to really tell where those areas would be. Therefore, if we apply that same logic as before and hold that 22% rate constant, further understand the opportunity around connected fitness and it is this additional clarity around this new opportunity coupled with sustained execution in our core business and continued evolution of our brand that gives us confidence to accelerate our revenue CAGR. The new line behind me represents our accelerated 25% CAGR from our 2014 results and is inclusive of our current 2015 guidance. What it shows is that we are adding an incremental one $500,000,000 in revenues versus the trajectory at our last Investor Day, led in part by the confidence we have in our footwear, international and connected fitness businesses.
That incremental $1,500,000,000 is almost the size of our entire business just 3 years ago. This shows that the confidence we have in our investments leads to results, which in turn leads to increased confidence in our ability to lengthen our runway of growth. Staying with revenues for a moment, let's take a look at a few different revenue slices to give you a little bit more detail on how things roll up to $7,500,000,000 in 2018. 1st, product category view. Earlier our product team spoke about our initiatives around apparel and footwear specifically.
The big mix change here is in footwear. We're at a 40% CAGR in revenues. We'll go from 14% of our revenues to 22% of our total revenues. Apparel, our largest category continues to grow over 20% approaching a $5,000,000,000 business doubling the size of the business since 2014. Connected Fitness revenues of $200,000,000 are those revenues directly attributable to advertising, subscription services and licensing from the platform.
It does not include the anticipated largest benefit from the platform which is the broader lift across our shirts and shoes business. Switching to our segment view. Earlier, Charlie spoke to you about the strategies around our business outside of North America. We anticipate our international business will deliver a 50% CAGR going from 9% to 18% of total revenues. Within North America, as Matt stated before, we continue to expect a 20% plus CAGR and more than double our revenue from just under $2,800,000,000 in 2014 to almost $6,000,000,000 in 2018.
Our final revenue slice is channels. As expected, global direct to consumer is the largest growth percentage story here, growing at a 30% CAGR and reaching 35% of our total business by 2018 from a 30% mix in 2014. Breaking down DTC a little further, e commerce will have the highest growth percentage mainly attributable to expected benefits we expect from our connected fitness platform that Robin and Jason discussed earlier today. Susie walked you through our global retail business earlier. In North America retail, we'll focus on planned optimization of our factory house business as we open fewer doors.
International retail is still in the early stages. We will open doors at an accelerated rate over North America as we look to drive brand awareness around the globe. Complementing our DTC growth will be our wholesale business around the globe, which will double in size from 2014 to 2018 with a CAGR above 20%. So wrapping up all the different revenue slices, there are some big stories going on through 2018. First, we expect all of our businesses to remain above a 20% growth rate.
2nd, our largest business areas, apparel, North America, global wholesale will all double in size. And in case you haven't done the math already, global direct to consumer at a 30% CAGR will grow nearly 3 times the size of its business from $900,000,000 in 2014 to $2,650,000,000 in 2018. Footwear at a 40% CAGR will grow nearly 4 times the size from $430,000,000 in 2014 to $1,700,000,000 in 2018. And international at a 50% CAGR will grow 5 times the size of its business from $270,000,000 in 2014 to $1,350,000,000 in 2018. Impressive numbers historically and even more impressive is the expectation of these businesses going forward, all driven by the success of the investments we have been and are currently making.
Some of the key growth stories for scaling and driving our revenues will also play a key role in our gross margin trajectory over next few years. So let's talk about gross margin for a second. At our prior Investor Day, we provided a 49% gross margin target for 20 16, which we were able to achieve 2 years early in 2014. The 2 areas we believe would provide the largest benefit direct to consumer and product margin improvements were the primary drivers of our ability to achieve this target early. Going forward, we still expect these two items to play a beneficial role in our gross margin story.
At our prior Investor Day, we also state our belief that we should be a 50% gross margin business and this has not changed. In the near term, however, as I mentioned earlier, a lot has changed in our business since we gave those targets back in 2013. From a margin improvement perspective, the addition of the high gross margin Connected Fitness business along with the 2 benefits I previously mentioned DTC mix and product margin improvements are expected to provide additional margin improvement over the next 3 years. However, in areas such as footwear and international, we're kind of a victim of our own success so to speak. As I previously spoke of, these areas are expanding at much higher growth rates in our overall business and both of these areas come with lower gross margins.
The footwear business in general is inherently lower margin than our apparel business. For international, new and expanded distributor relationships build our brand presence quickly in key markets, but come at lower gross margins, especially in the near term. Longer term beyond 2018 as we continue to build our DTC and owned businesses overseas, we would expect gross margins to be more in line with our North America business. Another factor impacting gross margins is foreign exchange rates, which has already contributed a negative impact to our 2015 first half results. Assuming the current environment persists, this will impact this impact will carry forward on our comparison with our 2014 rates.
Based on all these factors, specifically the strength in our footwear and international businesses, over the next 3 years, we expect relatively consistent gross margin compared to our 2014 results of 49%. Again, longer term 50%, but in the near term, especially because of international footwear, we expect these to remain relatively consistent. As I stated before the decisions we make on where, when and how much we invest are a key driver of our success to date and going forward. Thus, there's probably no more important part of my presentation today than SG and A and the investments in our brand that we are making. We specifically speak about SG and A in 2 buckets, marketing and other SG and A.
As you've seen today around this campus and you've heard from our leadership, 2015 has been a remarkable year for our brand. In a period we have seen unprecedented success from our athletes on a global stage, we believe we have a unique opportunity to position ourselves more aggressively in key long term growth categories such as women's, basketball and golf, which we believe can create brand halos across the entire Under Armour portfolio. And as we stated on our prior earnings call, we will be opportunistic with our investment levels if and when the right situations present themselves. Looking at marketing, we are competing in a rapidly changing world and we must be willing to move swiftly to maximize our ability to drive consumer engagement, not just for a given quarter or season, but for years to come. We will remain focused on capturing the right opportunities that help accelerate or extend the long term success of our brand.
What this means is that the next few years, our marketing spend will need to remain flexible and opportunistic as we shift to capture the right opportunities to drive long term brand equity. Activating to those opportunities may result in years of marketing that because of timing may be above or below the historic 11% rate we're used to. Also as you heard in prior earnings call, we have already started to think about marketing in this way as we made the strategic decision to invest more back into the brand in the back half of twenty fifteen to drive the long term benefit of the business. Outside of marketing, let's talk about where we are investing above or below the company growth rate. In speaking about other SG and A, let's break out business areas separate from support areas.
1st on the business side, two areas are consistent with our story for quite some time now and 2 others are relatively new in the discussion. The 2 areas we've been speaking about over the last few years are footwear and international.
And first
on footwear. Since our IPO 10 years ago, you've heard us talk about becoming the footwear brand. As you heard from Kipp and Peter earlier, we are extremely proud of the progress have made, especially over the last few years and believe we are in a great position to accelerate this growth over the next 3 years. Today's success in footwear was built through focus and investment. As you probably recall over the last 5 years, we've doubled down our investment in this category by bringing in the right talent across design, innovation, manufacturing and sourcing among other areas to help us build the foundation of our business.
As Kipp and Peter said, we think this investment is paying off in multiple ways. Now let's turn another key At our last Investor Day, we outlined a strategy to tighten our focus on key markets in both new and existing regions, which included building a local presence in these markets to help us fully identify the opportunity, get closer to the local consumer and ultimately grow fast. As Charlie mentioned, we opened new international offices including 4 alone in 2015. We retained key leadership with the insights of how to build our brand in each region or country and added many local relevant sports marketing assets to serve as a lens through which we build our brand awareness and tell the consistent UA performance story. With revenue growth well above the overall company growth rate, footwear and international are prime examples of where investment decisions have paid off for us.
These areas were investment areas 5 years ago, let alone 2 years ago at last Investor Day. With the success we've seen and the fact both of these businesses are still in early stages, we expect to invest in these areas above the company revenue growth rate over the next few years. Just as these two examples provide insight into how we've invested in the past, there are new areas of our business today that look a lot like footwear international did just few years ago. Perfect example of this is our connected fitness business. We've already discussed some of the financial impacts of that connected Fitness business that will have on us in 2015 back at our event in New York earlier in the year.
We expect to continue to fund this investment investment the next few years in order for us to manage its growth in the right ways for the brand. With Connected Fitness, we see enormous untapped opportunities to not only accelerate and extend our runway, but to also widen it. While the most direct opportunities exist through continuing to improve consumer engagement and drive brand awareness, we are thinking much bigger about Connected Fitness and the potential it has for our brand. Robin mentioned some of the key areas where we're thinking about this, how we'll continue to focus and spend on this business. Beyond revenues such as advertising and subscription services, we emphasize again the greatest benefit is the broader halo across the Under Armour brand, especially in areas like e commerce.
Also as I said earlier, we believe that our connected fitness business is a key factor in our ability to accelerate our top line CAGR to 25% and we are extremely excited about the opportunity it can provide to us well beyond 2018. Like Connected Fitness, another relatively new area of investment for us is global DTC. Within retail, as Susie mentioned, investment in our Tier 1 BrandHouse stores both in North America and around the world are critical for driving premium brand awareness and serving the 20 fourseven athlete wherever they are. On the e commerce side, we're focused on building global access to our brand and finding ways to seamlessly provide access to all consumers no matter where they are or how they choose to interact with our brand. Now looking at our support areas.
First in the areas we anticipate investing above our company growth rate, innovation and technology. Innovation is in our DNA as a company. We will always look to invest in this area as a critical part of the product creation funnel. Technology is a differentiator. It will be increasingly important not only to support our growth, but as in the case of connected fitness, get closer to our consumer.
We're going to talk a lot more detail about technology in a little bit. All areas of support are critical to our success and with our growth all areas will continue to get more dollars. There are areas though with more dollars that we'll still leverage compared to our revenue growth. Apparel product creation and supply chain are obviously critical areas of success for us. These areas will again grow significantly in dollars.
However, their sheer size will enable us to leverage while adding to these dollars. Additional areas like administration, finance, legal should also obviously be leverage points for us as we go forward. Balancing it all out in SG and A, while we see particular areas of deleverage for us over the next few years, key business and support areas will continue to need investment at rates above our company revenue growth. Because of this, we expect SG and A to modestly deleverage in total over the next few years. So when you wrap that all together in the P and L, our job obviously is to deliver both near and long term value while simultaneously investing in our growth.
Whether that's continued investment in areas like international and footwear or new investments in technology or connected fitness. We will continue to invest in the opportunities that allow us to accelerate, expand and widen our runway for growth through 2018 and beyond. So the revenue, gross margin investments I've spoken about resulting in a targeted operating income of $800,000,000 by 2018, representing a 23% CAGR in operating income and more than doubling our $354,000,000 level in 2014. Back at our event in New York, we showed you a path to a 22% CAGR. Our increased confidence about the business from 7 months ago gives us the confidence to raise it another percentage point higher.
We believe the top line growth rates we are speaking of in the near term require the level of investment I'm speaking of today. These investments give us confidence in sustaining our impressive top line growth expectations for longer periods of time. And this is far more important than focusing on shorter term margin operating margin improvements. In fact, as it relates to profitability, the reality for us is the biggest driver of our increased operating income is in fact our revenue growth. Therefore, our focus is specifically on growing operating income dollars and not on operating margin.
Sustaining this top line growth will not be risked by focusing on short term operating margin. We can use our prior earnings call as an example of this, where we raised our top line for 2015 by $60,000,000 while standing firm on the high end of our operating income dollar range at $408,000,000 Hopefully, you're all listening to that line. As we said on our prior earnings call, the unprecedented success of our sports marketing assets this year has provided us with the unique opportunity to invest more today to help drive our brand over the long term. We must be willing to continue to make these types of investments to drive long term success. Over the next 3 years, we could have more of these situations that present themselves and when they do, we will manage our business to ensure that what we do is best for the long term part of the brand.
We are a growth company and investment critical to ensure that our growth is healthy and sustainable far beyond 2018. To be clear, today our guidance is on an operating income dollar and growth rate. No operating margin target should be implied with that. Pause. So what's going on below the operating income?
There are some things going on below there too. As you heard from our leaders today, we'll continue to make strategic investments that will impact us below the operating income line in different ways. These investments require funding and in the near term we've turned our capital focus to debt. We'll look to both increase debt levels to support this business growth and shift to more of a long term fixed rate. With that, expect our interest expense to get a little bit higher over the next few years.
Also investments will also extend to our employees obviously. We'll remain focused on attracting world class talent that will help us deliver well beyond our $7,500,000,000 2018 ambitions. We'll continue to utilize stock based compensation to attract the best and brightest to our brand on a global scale. This is expected to result in continued annual share count increases. Final elements are consolidated effective tax rate.
Over the past year and a half, you've heard me talk about our tax strategy specifically tied to performance and growth of our international business. With international expected to grow at a 50% revenue rate and increase from 9% of our business in 2014 to 18% in 2018 and more importantly the expectation certain key markets become profitable, we expect our consolidated tax rate over the next 3 years to improve into the mid-thirty percent range from the nearly 40% range it is in today. When you put all of that together below the operating income line, what it tells us is that all the benefit we expect to see from our consolidated tax rate improvement through 2018 will offset the higher interest expense and growth in share count and result in EPS growth rate in line with our operating income dollar growth rate at 23%. So all this talk of top line operating income investments obviously means something to our future cash flow and balance sheet. Our cash needs going forward will mainly will be coming from the need to support working capital growth to support a 25% revenue growth company.
We need a lot of working capital to support that growth. And secondly, CapEx needs that we'll discuss in a little bit. In addition to our growth in operating income dollars, the other two areas we'll look to assist in funding our cash needs is working capital improvements and debt. On the debt front, as I stated before, we'll look to increase debt levels to fund our business and shift to more of a long term fixed rate. On the working capital front, the majority of our focus is going to be on inventory management and the efficiency of inventory management.
Our ability to improve inventory is tied to our value chain initiatives, which I'll break down to near term and longer term. 1st on the near term, over the course of the rest of this year and through 2016, we are focused on delivering our products to our consumers more timely, specifically on key seasonal floor set dates. This focus specifically in comparison to some prior year's challenges will result in elevated inventory growth rates over this timeframe as we flow product earlier. Longer term beyond 2016, many initiatives are underway, which should bring added efficiencies to how we manage our inventory. These initiatives are focused on how we plan and deliver our seasonal products.
From a planning perspective, we are focusing on connectivity across the value chain from the demand side of merchandising and sales channel planning to the supply side of materials, manufacturing and logistics planning. This focused connectivity across all plants will help reduce variations and align teams earlier on matching supply with demand. Henry touched on some of these things in his presentation earlier today. From a delivery perspective, better planning will lead to more efficient material strategies, which in turn will enable us to continue to pre position more fabrics and inventory, thus shortening our lead times. This has the added benefit of enabling our suppliers to be more consistent in meeting their manufacturing commitments.
Finally from a delivery view, we're looking to expand our direct from source to customer shipping thus reducing lead times and skipping our distribution facilities altogether. These are multi year initiatives and driven by investments in people, processes and systems. Specifically on the systems side, we have spoken about our recent initiative with SAP. So before I go on to CapEx a little bit, it makes sense to expand a little bit more on our ongoing systems initiatives, specifically over the next few years, which directly ties to support some of the value chain benefits I just discussed. The best person to do that is Paul Phipps, our Chief Information Officer.
Paul has a storied career as a CIO and has been with us for nearly 2 years now, first as SVP of Operations and most recently as our CIO. Paul?
All right. Thanks, Brad. Good afternoon.
So we need slides to advance here. There we go. Okay. So you've heard a lot today about technology. You heard from Kevin and Robin how we are using insights from our connected fitness platform to drive products, services and new experiences.
You heard from Kipp how we are changing the way we work and how our category focus along with our new innovation platforms will elevate our brand. Henry talked about the development of our new capabilities in go to market and the importance of having the right product at the right place at the right time. Matt, Charlie, Susie, Jason, the entire leadership team had technology woven throughout their presentations. I will tell you that is by design. You see today, technology is embedded in our company's business strategy and is tied to our CEO's vision.
Now like most companies, that has not always been the case. Let me take you back in time. Nearly a decade ago, we implemented our 1st enterprise resource planning system, SAP's apparel footwear industry solution. At that time, we were a domestic wholesale performance apparel company, generating $250,000,000 in annual revenues with aspirations of becoming a multibillion dollar brand. We do not have a large retail footprint and we were not operating globally.
And by any measure, that significant technology investment but it was an investment to solve a particular problem at a particular point in time. Subsequent investments required to support our company growing at 20 plus percent per year were designed and implemented much the same way. While not optimal, these technology investments over those years provided the foundation upon which we've built a very different company. Today, we are a large multichannel global brand with a wide portfolio of products in different sport categories and a growth trajectory that requires us to enter emerging markets more quickly and with more agility. These differences in our larger global organization naturally result in added complexity, all of which sits on that platform we built 9 years ago.
With our sights settling $7,500,000,000 in annual revenue and more importantly beyond that, now is the time to rethink how we run and how we grow our business. So today, I'm going to share with you how we are investing in global scalable capabilities using some of the most advanced technology in the world to drive speed, transparency in our value chain, agility and simplicity. These investments present an exceptional opportunity for Under Armour at a critical time in our growth. To help us capitalize on that opportunity, we have chosen to work with SAP, the leading enterprise application software company in the world to build an extraordinary foundation that will sustain our growth. Our partnership with SAP is very strong and their commitment to our brand and to our company at the highest level is significant.
This gives us great confidence in the benefit of this partnership to our shareholders. There are 2 strategic initiatives that will be driven by this investment. The first is what we call architecting the future. Architecting the future is all about creating a business platform that will scale our organization and sustain our global growth. The second is developing the consumer insight engine that you've heard referenced throughout the day.
Over the next 3 years, we are investing in the implementation of one global instance of SAP across all lines of our business, taking advantage of their fully integrated, proven core enterprise resource planning software. This is the primary focus of architecting the future. Make no mistake, this is a business led initiative. And while our CEO is sponsoring the work, all the leaders you've heard from today are committed to simplifying and automating our processes to enable a far more transparent value chain, allowing us to accelerate in critical areas of our business, a key underpinning to getting the right product in the right place at the right time. Now is the time to invest and build the additional capabilities that we need to efficiently operate a value chain at scale.
We've seen other companies who have invested too late. And once a business has grown globally and actually matured, it becomes much more difficult to simplify processes and drive productivity. We will be ahead of that challenge. And from this initiative, we expect to see revenue growth, inventory optimization, service level improvements and effective margin management. Let me give you a simple example of one of the main benefits we'll see, inventory visibility.
Today, we have inventory data in multiple retail, planning, transportation and distribution systems. In the future, the ability to optimize our inventory, combined with the visibility of demand from any channel across the globe in a single planning system is extremely powerful. In fact, very few organizations have been able to achieve this goal. We are truly innovating in business processes, and it's a great example of what Kevin Haley talked about earlier today. This platform will not only provide better transparency to our inventory but will enable with speed, agility and sophistication, and it will be at the heart of the way that we engage that omnichannel consumer.
1st phase of this program will go live in Q1 of 2017. The second strategic initiative and the other half of our investment is directly targeted at building the consumer insight engine that Robin talked about earlier today. Building this powerful insight engine allows us to combine multichannel commercial data with connected fitness lifestyle and behavioral information. This will add holistically to our relationship with our athletes and more importantly make them better. Using data, we will empower our team to create value for our consumers through new personalized products, services and experiences.
Given the advances in cloud computing and memory technology and access to more than 150,000,000 and growing connected athletes, we now have a platform that differentiates us in the marketplace and is a distinct competitive advantage. What used to take hours, days, even weeks for some companies to process will now take seconds. And with this speed and analytical insight, we will accelerate our innovation. Just think back to some of the key statistics about our consumers that you heard throughout today. All of that's been generated by the earliest versions of this incredible capability.
Now before I go any further, let me take a pause and talk about something very important to us here at Under Armour. Information security
and
and through our own investments, we are highly focused on these vastly important areas to ensure our community is protected. If I leave you with one thought today, having the technology so tightly integrated into our business strategy drives the right investments for Under Armour. And when combined with the efforts you have heard about from our top leaders today, we will be the most digitally connected real time enterprise on the planet.
Back to
you, Brad.
All right. Let's wrap up our balance sheet conversation with an important our important investments around CapEx. So historically our CapEx as a percentage of revenues has trended between 3% to 5% from 2010 to 2014. With the inclusion of a new distribution center, technology and the expansion of our existing headquarters in Baltimore, this rate is increasing to nearly 9% in 20 15. Given our current visibility for our capital projects, we expect this rate to remain elevated at roughly 8% to 10% through 2018, all in support of growing our top line at 25%.
With this elevated spend, we thought going forward we'd add more visibility in how we talk about our capital expenditures specifically in 3 buckets: ongoing support, new revenue drivers and capacity investments. Ongoing support is the basic capital needed to continue to support our current operations. In other words, keeping the lights on, keeping the business running. This spend is expected to remain consistent with our historical average at around 3% to 3.5% of revenues. New revenue drivers are areas of spend that enable us to provide new revenue opportunities for the brand.
Example of this will be the continued expansion of our global retail strategy that Susie mentioned earlier. As we open more of those Tier 1 stores globally, they provide new opportunities to generate and drive revenue for the brand that did not exist before. We expect this to run at 1% to 1.5% of revenues over the next few years as we continue to expand our global DTC channel. Finally, capacity investments are things that are necessary for our growth and ability to continue to scale. The amount of spend in this category in the next 3 years is expected to range from 4% to 5% of revenues.
Let's dive a little deeper into some of those which you've heard about before. Campus, it will be the largest contributor to our CapEx spend over the next 3 years as we build out the vision you saw from Kevin earlier around building global offices and world class headquarters with a specific purpose of attracting the best talent from a multitude of industries needed to be a great global brand. Granddad vision is over a longer period of time than the 3 years we're talking about, but obviously during the next 3 years there'll be investment in this too. Technology, you just heard from Paul. Our investment in technology to build the foundation for our future growth and the analytics engine that will incorporate our connected fitness information will be instrumental for our ability to scale going forward.
Distribution center expansion. We are opening our 3rd DC in North America this year and believe going forward we will need to continue to look to invest in new continue as we invest in capabilities, campus, capacity that are needed to continue to build our brand. So as I wrap up the presentation portion for the day, let's recap what you've seen and heard from our team today. Today you've heard about growth, connectivity, innovation and investment in capabilities and capacity. The strength of our brand today has been built in our mission of making all athletes better.
From changing the way athletes dress to how we plan to change the way athletes live, our brand is positioned to deliver the accelerated revenue growth target of $7,500,000,000 by 2018. Our growing confidence in key areas like footwear, international connected fitness combined with our continued focus to elevate and broaden the reach of our brand across physical and virtual experiences will be instrumental in our long term success. The unique position we find ourselves in today with the performance of our athletes combined with strong consumer demand provides us with enormous opportunities to manage our business to drive long term growth. Over the next few years, we're making the right investments to accelerate and expand our runway of growth through 2018 and beyond, Whether that's systems, people, facilities or capabilities, we are focused more than ever on what it will take to continue making Under Armour the next great global brand. And yes, we truly are just getting started.
So with that, we're going to bring the chairs up and we're going to go into our Q and A session. Thank you very much for your patience today.
Great. Well, thank you everybody. And just as a moment in time, I think the last time that you were here, we've done a good job with our Investor Days every couple of years now or 10th year. So I guess this is our 5th one. And I think I'm most proud of this one for many reasons.
And obviously, we've got a great growth. We've got a great story to tell. And probably most or just importantly, where am I on the end? The team that we have, so I think all the presenters today did an amazing job articulating our vision. So this coming together, we already have day jobs, so preparing for something like this always is a lot of work.
But I think it was incredibly well done by the team. So hopefully anything that we didn't cover today we can answer for you now and we open the floor to questions. So we'll have 2 mics working, one active and then the second one finding the next person, so don't waste any time. So where are we first, Cary? Let's go ahead
and get the mics laid out
and then
Tom you find another question if you want. We'll go from there. Omar?
Thanks. It's Omar Saad from Evercore ISI. Really appreciate the aspect of your presentation. We talked about accelerating investment as a way to lengthen the duration of the growth curve given all the opportunities for the company and elevated and A in the near term, medium term. But can you talk about the gross margin side a little bit more?
I think you implied flattish gross margins. I think the missing the part that was missing for me was how do you think about price gross margin from the price mix side of it. The category is so healthy. The brand is obviously so healthy. Your products are becoming more innovative, more premiumized.
I'm having a hard time understanding why gross margin shouldn't be lifting for this brand given the strength in the innovation pipeline etcetera.
So I
can address those. We'll take that in 2 pieces maybe Omar. I'll take the first piece and maybe let Henry take the second piece on price. But even on the costing side, the thing you didn't hear us talk about was kind of the commodity environment today and the input prices today. And there's a lot of puts and takes in that environment right now.
Labor rates are challenging, but the commodity prices are probably a little more of maybe a beneficial impact going forward. We're kind of sitting in between seasons right now from a pricing perspective or a costing perspective. So it's a little hard to gauge how much benefit we could have relative to that. So we haven't really built in too much into our forecast or our guidance here on margin improvements relative to that because we just don't have enough information yet. So I wanted to answer the costing side first.
I'll pass the pricing side over to Henry.
Sure. In terms of pricing power, it's definitely something are doing and looking at. And what I would tell you is if you look at like businesses, men's apparel, men's apparel, we are increasing our ASPs. We are going after more premium product. It's really about the mix of footwear when you look at that and the accelerated growth in footwear relative to our apparel business.
And that's offsetting some of the gains we're having in pricing. So I think whether it's cost of goods sold, whether it's pricing, I think you'll see that evolve from us over the course of the next year. But the big thing is the footwear offset of our ASP increases in apparel.
And just one follow-up.
As we think about
the 25% revenue number, is it reasonable to think 5% of it comes ASPs, 8% I don't know if you thought about it from that standpoint?
Yes, that would be a little bit high. So obviously forecasting ASP rates are a little more challenging than looking backwards, but that would feel
a little high to us, I think.
Next question. Tom?
Yes. Hi.
It's Dave Weiner from Deutsche Bank. So I had two questions actually. Number 1, I was interested in the local for local initiative you guys talked about that seems like there could be a big opportunity to localize the manufacturing closer to the revenues. If you could just dig a little deeper on that and whether any of that is included in your 2018 assumptions? And then also on the upper manufacturing, I thought that was an interesting part of the presentation.
Can you talk about your ability to increase the gross margin because of that within your footwear business?
I'm going to throw the answer over to the audience between Kevin Haley and Kipp Faulks. But I'll just I'll start with the fact that local for local, it's a great for us to sit here in America and say made in the USA and how important that is. But whether it's freight, whether it's being close to market, whether it's fast fashion retail and the other abilities for us to react can be really fast, that makes a lot of sense for to do that. I'm incredibly passionate about the fact, Henry touched on this, where what if we were the greatest manufacturers of apparel footwear in the world? Like we're good right now.
As a customer, we're an okay customer. I don't know if we're a great customer. We're certainly not the very best customer, but we should be better. And one of the ways we can be better is better in our current supply chain, but it also looks and say how many industries can you imagine when I talk about smart people entering sporting goods, smart people entering manufacturing, the way that a shoe is made today, the way that a piece of apparel is made today is the exact same way it was made 100 years ago. And it's still you go and watch walk into a footwear factory and there's someone with basically a cookie cutter working on the press and with 2 thumbs working on pneumatic press that comes down and cuts the patterns out in saying, no one has innovated this.
20 years ago in computers, for instance, a computer that can be the size of a fingernail took up the size of this room. And you look at that and say that innovation must be coming from somewhere. And so we intend to put really smart people against this. And I think we want to be best in class in every way, shape or form. And I think we can help reinvent the game.
So,
Jeff? Sure.
So I
think the opportunity here is both immediate and long term, right? So the immediate opportunity is to allow us to make better product by having this space here in Baltimore to get our designers, our developers closer to the manufacturing processes that are now available to them through these new technologies. As I said during the presentation, the local for local vision is the longer term vision. We can get there. We've got the technology now to do that.
And when we do, we think we're going to see significant savings in the amount of labor going into these shoes. I mentioned we've quadrupled the productivity in the manufacturing of an upper with the SpeedForm technology, but we are literally just scratching the surface there. People have been using the existing supply chain for decades to get it to where it is right now. We've been making things in the SpeedForm technology for just a couple of years. So with time, it's going to be a major driver for us and we do think there's an immediate impact to just make us better at what we do every day and then take those technologies and use them in our manufacturing facilities that our partners have overseas once they get the processes down that we perfect in the lighthouse.
Cool. Great.
Thank you.
Hi. Lindsay Druckerman from Goldman Sachs.
Hi, Lindsay. How are you?
I had, two questions.
The first was for Susie, but, maybe someone else can answer on the North American store count. I just wanted to clarify, I think your target was for 200 stores with limited growth from factory. So I was hoping maybe you could give a little bit of detail on how you're thinking about the balance of stores? And then my second question was related to North America. You talked about reducing SKU count.
Sorry about that. Tom said I should turn that off, but I forgot.
Reducing SKU count and being more key item focused
at the same time while you try to increase your floor space within your account. So maybe squaring those two initiatives. Sure.
Let's let's where's Susie? Go ahead, Susie.
Okay. So as we talk about the 200 stores in North America, we're really looking to optimize the factory house space. So we'll get to about 150 to 160 locations. We will manage that from a center perspective and we will look to have between 40 50 locations from a brand house perspective in North America. So Brad spoke about the planned optimization of factory house.
We know we want to be in the best centers that we may have closures in that, but we will manage the overall number of doors and then look to open the 40 to 50 brand house doors.
You got it. And then in terms of SKUs, how I would look at that is, if you look at our business a year ago, we were over assorted. We weren't as focused as we needed to be. And if you look at the bottom 20% to 30% of either our offerings or even to an extent our inventory, it just wasn't productive. It wasn't dictating trend.
It wasn't dictating the tempo. So we've taken an approach to really look at segmentation through merchandising and be really effective, invest in key items and also invest in fashion and seasonal product. All that being said, we can grow our business over the course of the next year by 25% and up through very limited SKU growth. And that's the model. We're going to be very consistent and focused in the coming years.
Where's the next question?
Hey, guys. It's Camilo Lyon from Canforginiti. You guys spoke a lot about improving the supply chain, spoke about adding a couple of seasonal drops to the calendar now for UART 2. Brad, you've talked about in the past about meeting those initial delivery dates and the improvement that that would have on the gross margin longer term. Maybe you could articulate how you where you are right now, how that process should unfold over the next couple of years and what kind of product margin improvement we should expect to see from that initiative alone?
Yes. So we've been very focused in the near term here in this year and going into next year on those key floor set dates and making sure that product flows efficiently, effectively. We've called out airfreight in the last few quarters is kind of a little bit of a headwind on the margin side for us as part of our ability to do that. Obviously, going forward, we want to have this product flow a little more naturally than having to air freight it. And I think some of the initiatives we talked about, especially lining up the value chain and the planning side of things should help us do that.
So from a perspective of gross margin benefits definitely I think what you'd see is as we started to more naturally flow this product without having to airfreight it, you'd have the benefit of not having to airfreight. It's definitely impactful, but not a huge amount, not a huge headwind for us right now. So the flip side benefit won't be a tremendous benefit on the airfreight side, but it will be a benefit. I go back to the bigger stories going on in margin for us right now is this very robust growth rate in footwear and international and those businesses really do kind of bring our gross margin rates down. That's the big story in gross margin.
So there's a lot of benefits kind of built into our guidance that are kind of being offset by success of those 2 businesses per se.
And then just a follow-up, if you put out the 25% CAGR targets on the top line, Let's stream the dream a little bit and assume that because of the visibility gap now, you're being conservative on that. What do you plan to do with the excess top line growth? Is that something that would flow through or do you have more investments that you would invest?
Wow, man. I just we just talked about 50% rigors and 40% rigors and 30% rigors. Yes.
I think that's one thing we really wanted to underscore today as well is that, look, we want to commit to the fact that we can nearly grow our top and bottom line by 95% 99%, respectively, and what's north of that. But there's considerable investment. It's not that we're waiting for the money coming to make the investment. I think we're pretty deliberate. We have a pretty strong point of view about what we need to do in order to achieve our long term objectives, which again go well beyond the $7,500,000,000 by 2018.
So we want to be opportunistic with that. I think we want to sure that we're putting the money to good work and being thoughtful about it. But it's the hardest thing about a presentation like today is editing. There's so many good things to talk about. And I still feel you've got to hear maybe about 50% to 60% of it.
So there's a lot of things happening. And I understand focus and believe me, I know how important that is in any organization. But I also believe that we're at a point that this is a moment in time. It's a real moment in time for our brand in the next couple of years. And we're making things happen with campaigns that frankly a fraction of the size.
And so we're I think the quality is as high as it can go, I think you're seeing other campaigns that maybe have 5, 6 times the budgets behind them too. So and this isn't just marketing, this is foundational, this is systems, this is facilities, distribution centers and all the things that we need to build what we think going to be the next great global brand.
Yes. Hi, it's Eric Trusi with Green Capital, right here. Brad?
Hello. You would not agree. Right in the middle, right?
All right. First question actually for Henry. Wanted to see if you can expand on the global merchandising that you talked about, how it ties into the sports specific category, but maybe importantly, the timing with which we can start to see the channel, geography, segmentation that I think the brand has been been seeking for a while. So I would
say in terms of timing, I'll work backwards, really focus on spring of 2016. And the first aspect of that is really segmentation. And I have Charlie right here. We have done Kevin talked about travel this morning. We have combed the market in the past 18 months to 24 months and how important it is for different regions, different markets and within our markets different channels of distribution to really be specialized is very important today.
So I think you'll see that in the first half of twenty sixteen. We have basically a team of 40 plus merchants who are end use focused in market. And so that's someone down in Chile who's focused on global football. That is someone who's down there focused on building that business and working with our global product teams to get the right product there at that time. If that's someone we have folks in China who are focused on basketball and they're focused on that basketball category and also getting some lifestyle apparel into China, they're focused on that.
And then when you look at our business here with say Dick's Sporting Goods, really being a great training brand as well as a great team sport brand on the men's side and really being a great team sport athlete on the women's side as well as our approach to studio as well. So all of that being said, just teams of experts in end use to reach out, know the market, know the athletes in that market really well. And you'll see the true, true benefit of that in the early part of 2016.
Okay. And then I guess just
a little bit just following up on Connected Fitness for Robin maybe Brad too. Again, just to clarify the $200,000,000 through $18,000,000 specifically direct, how will you all sort of measure the halo effect it has across the brand? And will you all be communicating those measurements to us over that time period?
Well, some
of the metrics I put in there were certainly using things like average order value of somebody coming from Connected Fitness. I mean, one of the big things that's going to happen early next year is because of the platform that we're moving towards, we'll have things like single sign on and the ability really again to sort of understand that customer all the way through the value chain. So those things will start to give us real clarity. I think I'll leave it to Brad on what specific metrics we might think about in the future. But we think we're going to have a pretty good understanding about how it's moving through the course of the life, so to speak, with that customer.
The reality there, Eric, we're still learning a lot about the business, obviously. So just breaking it out into the direct revenues and direct costs obviously is very easy to do. So that's where we started just kind of breaking out visibility to the things that were easy to break out. Going forward, I think we still have to kind of figure out how we talk about this and the halo effect to the rest of our brand. The easiest probably and probably most impactful place is going to be e commerce.
So, but we kind of have to work through thinking about how we're going to talk about that going forward as we kind of get more clarity around where those benefits
are going to be.
Hi, Sam Poser with Stern AG CRT.
A couple of things, Brad.
The SAP, is the SAP system you're putting in, is that a customized system? Or is that something that is
So So if I have to answer a technology question, we'll be in more trouble. So I know enough to be dangerous, so Paul can answer that question for us.
Good. Okay. So, our strategy with We're going
to call
you the lights.
I can't see you. Yes.
All right. So our strategy with SAP is really, we're kind of this is a new implementation for us. So this is not your kind of the old upgrade process that you've seen other companies go through. And so our strategy there and you heard me talk about all the leaders and their commitment to simplifying our processes and actually going through and saying how do we do things better. So that's the long answer of saying we're going to use as much standardized SAP as possible and then only make changes where it differentiates us in the market.
That's our game plan.
And that's starting in the
middle of next year I assume?
We will. We have a very large program as you can imagine. We've got some of our best teammates coming in that are dedicated to the actual project working alongside SAP for the implementation.
Thank you. I have one more question. The flagship stores, such as Shanghai and Chicago, where else are you looking to open new flagships
and when? Susie, you want to take that one?
I'll take that one. Sam, I knew I'd get a question from you. So does everyone know Sam was my first boss in retail?
I know, big news, right?
As I said, we're looking at major gateway cities for the ship. So we are looking in Europe, we'll be looking in London as I mentioned, as we look outside in Latin America. We are going to have to really be thoughtful. It's obviously not a big street location marketplace. So we will evaluate that and may discuss if there is a flagship opportunity in a mall in one of the major cities there.
As we think about Asia, we obviously have Shanghai. We will look at Tokyo. We will look at Beijing. And again, these are not going to be an enormous amount of doors for us, but they are going to be incredibly significant from a brand halo perspective. They will be larger in square footage and they will be real beacons in major gateway cities.
Let me add on that too. The first 25 or 30 flagship stores that we put up, there's not going to be a lot of difficult decisions with that. But the opportunity we have that Henry, that Susie, that our entire teams are working on and Jason as well, like what does omnichannel really mean and what is it going to look like in the future? For instance, we've got less than 100 stores in China today. You look at our 2 main competitors in the same market, they have 8,000 to 9,000 stores of distribution.
And it's something that brings up the question, I don't know if we need 9,000 stores of distribution. Frankly, when we look at it, we think it's closer to around 1,000 ish to 1500 and we're just guessing at this point. But I think what the role that digital is going to play is really going to be evolving. But without question, you need a physical manifestation of the brand. And any of you have a chance, I encourage you to please go see our store in Chicago.
If you've been to SoHo, that's good. I think what Chicago does at 30,000 feet versus Soho's 15,000 is a very, very different story. So, you really feel the brand that really helps us activate in a big way.
Great. Thanks. It's Erinn Murphy at Piper Jaffray. I guess I had a 2 point question on international. First on the retail side of the business, it's a very aggressive growth rate you're looking at internationally.
I guess how comfortable do you feel with the current product assortment from a SKU perspective to really fuel that growth, particularly as you get into new markets where there's very individual taste? And then I guess the second question would just be on the international profitability as a whole. How do we think about the trajectory and what's embedded through your 2018 guidance?
Sure. I'll take the assortment perspective. I think the assortment we have today or what you've recognized internationally today does not cover our aspirations. But what we've built with this merchandising capability and really looked at segmentation by market in 2016 and beyond, we're very comfortable. Just to hit you on a couple of quick things.
That goes to different fits, developing an Asian fit versus our fit that we have here today, different capabilities in women's, different textiles, different hand feels, the way we offer the product, the way we package the product, translation on packaging, so on and so forth. These are all capabilities that we've been working on over the course of the past year to set us up for success in 2016. So we're very comfortable in 2016
and beyond. And to add to what Henrik just said, overall the size of our brand houses outside of North America, they are smaller. That means also the assortment doesn't need to be as big as in North America. To your second question in terms of profitability in the regions, actually it's good news. We have a little bit of a different situation region by region.
If you go to Asia, where we have a long term partner with Dome and China, we have been moving really into profitability in Asia. Also Europe, who we have been, I think, for many, many years made losses is profitable. So the 2 biggest regions are profitable. Latin America, the situation is a little bit different. We basically have opened subsidiaries in the last 12, 18 months.
And it just takes 2, 3, 4 years to get really into profitability, but we are extremely positive. And again, adding to what Henley said, when we talk about partnership stores or own brand houses, all the stores we have opened in the last 12, 18 months outside of North America have reached their plan, which makes me really proud.
Hi. John Kernan from Cowen. Can you talk a little bit about the major hardware players in Connected Fitness and how your strategy fits with them, maybe Fitbit and Apple obviously now. Do you view them as partners or competitors as they build out their own ecosystems and communities?
Yes. So I think the biggest differentiator people ask a lot about where does Google and Apple sit kind of the 2 biggest players, Google Fits and Apple Health Kids. We really see them as partners from an integration perspective. It makes it easier for the customer potentially to get data in, so our syncing with those environments. But I think the biggest major difference is they're not really building communities.
They're not really building the layers on top of the pipes like I would call Apple HealthKit and Google Fit really the pipes, right, from those devices in areas. And we're very strong partners with them. I mean, Google, Android just did a big feature for record that drove huge amounts of downloads. We have done really well on Watch since it released with all four applications. We have we're excited about the changes that Apple is making to disconnect the watch and make it a little bit more in the use case that we have for things like outdoor and in the gym.
So you don't have to necessarily have your phone while you're working out. So they're definitely major partners. Fitbit is also a major partner, biggest integrator just from a data perspective on MyFitnessPal and Map MyFitness, clearly someone that we're friendly with and work with. As things progress into true wearables, what we have on our body, maybe they might feel different at that point, but we don't. We want the environment to be open and the ecosystem to be open.
So and from a user perspective, data should be shared both ways. So if somebody wants to take data back, we're not holding them back from doing that in the open platform.
And then let me take
a minute just sort of shape the broader conversation as well for the company and hopefully it came across today is where you're feeling Under Armour is this technology innovation company because as Robin says we believe all of our products will have a chip in it eventually. And so the day we're preparing for is not Under Armour versus Brand A, B or C that's currently participating in sporting goods. But what we go to work with, we challenge our team with every day while we have these great technology partners. But what are we going to do the day that Apple decides they're going to start making a shoe? That's the challenge that we're giving our product team.
What about when what happens when Samsung comes out with a T shirt? And if so, why are we waiting for them to come out with it versus we understand fit and fabric and function and form better than anyone else. And frankly, that should be us leading there. So that's how we're really pressing the team and what has led the entire Connected Fitness initiative as well because I think anyone else is going to be sitting there and saying, wait a second, we're a trusted brand, why don't you buy our stuff because our logo is cool. I think those are the ones that are going to be left out in the cold.
So we, A, want to have a great cool logo and that's Adrian, that's our marketing team's job to ensure that that's happening. But at the same time, we expect to give consumers a really firm reason as to why we make the best product that advantages them better than anyone else in whatever they're trying to do with it.
Just a quick follow-up to that.
When does smart garments start contributing from a revenue perspective?
Henry? I
would say there's no material number within 2018 and that's our frame of reference today. It's an initiative that we are working on. It's beyond 2018 where it will truly contribute and reach scale. That doesn't lead to there's not passion for it. It's just realistic beyond 2018.
But when it does happen, we'll do it first.
Yes.
Hi, thank you. Jay Sole from Morgan Stanley. First, just thank you for putting together such a great day and such a comprehensive overview of the business.
Thank you. Someone said to us earlier, they said, DeGeeter, this is one of the top 10 investor days I've ever to and then over 500. And they looked at me and he said, Isn't that great? And I said, Well, who's number 1 there? We'll get better next time.
Kevin, I want to ask you
a question about your whiteboard. I saw a story with you once where I think you had in your whiteboard said 27, 24 never again, which is kind of a play on a football story from a while ago, but also was about you don't want to see SG and A grow faster than sales and there was a fiscal year plan that came to you and it was SG and A was going to grow 27% and sales was growing 24%, which led to the whiteboard comment. And it seems like the thought process is changing a little bit where you're willing to invest a little bit more relative to sales than before. And just want to kind of make sure I understand what the message is. Is the message that now in 2015 just the cost of business is increasing and that's why we're seeing more investments to help the company reach its goals?
Or is it more that you see so many opportunities out there that it would just be kind of penny wise and pumped the wish to not invest that money today and not go after becoming the brand, the global brand that you want to be.
Yes. One of those often asked questions I get from people is, when it's an entrepreneur or someone else, they say, give me a piece of advice, like tell me what do you think, what do you know? I always struggle with the answer. And then Henry actually said something one day that actually really rang true with me. And he said, it's important that like what are we famous for?
Really framing the thing like what is Under Armour famous for? And now that's my answer like when I say to people like what advice can I give you about your business and saying focus your business on becoming famous for one very important thing? At Under Armour, I feel like we've done that. And one of the keys and the other things in order to running a good business, I believe, is focus. And what we say here is that we want to do everything.
Like we expect to do everything. We expect to play in all categories. And from launching shoes of the 5 categories in shoes that we launched into from 2,006 to 2010, and then we said, you know what, we're not launching in new categories of business anymore. I think what we laid out today was a pretty good architecture for the business that we think that we have. But as we look at that, we're not opening new businesses.
We're not thinking about, frankly, additional acquisitions. Like we like how we're set up right now. We feel the infrastructure that we've laid in by adding the bolt on of Connected Fitness that works across our core 5 key growth drivers. We think it's really important. We think it's going to be incredibly additive.
But frankly, we still think it's a bit of a work in progress. And so when you're asking for the $200,000,000 by 2018, like, yes, we have line of sight to what that means in terms of an advertising model and some licensing and some other things that we can do there. But there's also this massive upside that we believe the lottery ticket, the return is worth the investment. And so you're right, that 27 versus 24, we walked into a year and said we were deleveraging walking into a year and you're going, how does that happen? And these are part of the lessons that you learn in 20 years doing it, 10 years as a public company.
And I don't know if we have all the answers, but when I use the words moment in time, we don't say that to you lightly. We don't say that we're looking to go spend shareholder money and say, now times are changing and profits will happen some other day. What you have to remember about this business is you can think of how visionary it is to look at connected fitness and what that might be someday. Underneath of it, we have a real world shirts and shoes business, where we're promising today operating in the high 10 ish percent -ish range on the operating income side. And you look and say, could we do more, should we do more?
And I believe that the value of this company is not built in a few bps of operating margin improvement in the short term. I do believe it's something that needs to play out over the long term. And so what I want you to understand is that when I use the whole analogy about the map differing from the train is that our eyes are wide open on what we're looking at. I think that we understand and we've got a pretty good record of and resume of investing in things that create and bring return to the company. But I do believe there are certain things that we are in order for us to be in, we need to go a little bit deeper and we need to demonstrate our level of commitment at the level of the brand and the company that we are today.
And so we are in the deep end of the pool. We recognize that more than anyone else. But I want you to understand is that beneath of it all, we have the underpinnings of this efficient shirts and shoes business, which is highly profitable. And one of the things in the slides that Brad laid out at our digital day that we hosted right after we made the announcements of the additional 2 connected fitness companies was talking about how our other businesses, our mature businesses are actually leveraging right now. And so without doing any of these other things like we'd be fine, we'd be making more money in men's apparel, we'd be in women's apparel, we'd have these other things.
But the additional investment to truly speak to the woman, the additional investment to truly get into connected fitness that we think is the future versus waking up one day. And frankly, there's a list of brands in our industry that just have sat there and saying it's going to be okay and our logo is what's going to carry us through the day. And I just don't believe that that is the case. And so, I want you to know it's not an we appreciate, we respect what that means. And I think that it's up to us to be this management team to be prudent about the way that we're spending those dollars and putting them appropriately.
But 1st and foremost, we believe right now as people sort of do the compare and contrast of us versus others in our industry, even at approaching $4,000,000,000 we're very small in industry. So we believe that for us to create and to get the scale, that achieving size is very important for us right now to give us the additional revenue dollars, to give us the additional investment dollars that will come with that additional size and scale.
Thank you.
Awesome. I think
that's it.
Done good.
Any more? Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. So what's going to happen from here? Let me get these guys. You guys just hold for one second and let me dismiss my team right now and have you guys exit the stage because I've actually got a more interesting interview than even that was as gripping as that was.
It's pretty good. You guys want to grab these and take them off? So it's been a fun day hopefully for you. Just let these guys grab them. They're grown ups, they can do it.
And we wanted to we always have one final surprise for the day and we wanted to do that today would be absolutely no different. And for all of you, I don't know how many sports fans are in the audience. Sam Poser, I see you there. And I did not know the Susie McCabe fact though either. That's interesting to hear.
But we wanted to bring out a very, very, very special guest. And that one today is someone who happens to actually be let's see, let me make sure I don't mess this up. Well, he won the 2014fifteen Most Valuable Player trophy for the NBA. He won the 2014, 2015 championship, out of a little place called San Francisco over the Golden State Warriors and won the 3 point contest 2014 NBA All Star Game. Ladies and gentlemen, help me welcome to the stage Mr.
Stephen Curry.
I think I'm check, check. There we go. Your mics okay? Yes, sir. How's everybody doing?
I think they're okay. They had a good day. You spend 50 hours on a plane with another man for 5 days. You learn a lot about them. So like we could have used a couple more weeks where we saw each other again, right?
Yes, sir.
But you know what, it's always good seeing you.
Great to see you. Glad to be on campus and obviously in front of you, important people. And, yes, we're coming off the heels of a great trip and taking the brand overseas to Asia. So it was a lot of fun. I'm glad to get a little bit of rest on the back end.
Did you fall asleep when
you got home? Right away. No, no. We got a little vacation with my family right after, so I got to spend that good time and then obviously back here to the East Coast. Yes, we're good.
We're good.
I appreciate you coming down too Steph. So when you were over in when we were over in Asia, I mean first stop we did was in the Tokyo and it was an amazing event. But I think probably and I think you were impressed and you loved it and you handed over to the audience. But walking into Manila, like so let me just set it up for everyone. We head into the Mall of Asia, we were hosting this event and it's a 10,000 seat arena and literally there was thousands of people outside as well holding Curry signs, chanting your name, walking in there with the champ is here, song playing like, what was that like for you and just sort of moment in time pinch yourself?
That was a very surreal day. Like he says, this one arena came to just see us and it was walking into the back of the stage kind of like I was here and hearing the crowd and the whole drum preparation. And like you said, the Champions Here song is just kind of a nice come to moment of just enjoying what basketball has done for me, for the brand and kind of being able to share that with all our fans across the world. So I go to All Star Weekend every year and they have like All Star Saturday night where there's been a 3 point shootout, the dunk contest and all that. It was basically that event just for us.
So it was pretty crazy to see that many people come out to watch us, put on a clinic and show them some drills and I even got a dump, which I rarely ever do. So that was fun.
You said that to me. I said, what's this like? Because it's like NBA All Star Weekend. I'm the only one here. So it's good to get that attention, isn't it?
I think we were talking about the first time that happened was, I mean, for us, it's obviously that's been watching in your entire life. So you've been an underdog, you're under recruited, you were I think always people always look past you and those kind of things. And then coming and watching sort of the last couple of years and what you've done in your career, like what has that been? And frankly, going back to the decision with Under Armour, why us and sort of what aligned between Under Armour and yourself and your game and what made that choice?
You said it basically the underdog mentality is trying to rattle the world and really attached to that from day 1 when I was introduced to your guys' vision and our vision. And so basically like the last 3 years have been a lot of hard work, being a part of a great team on the core and off, which is obviously huge in anything that you do if you want to be successful is aligning yourself with the right people. So I've been fortunate enough to have a great situation on the Bay Area with the team I'm playing with and we've been able to obviously win a championship and blessed to be an MVP, which was a dream come true for me. You put so much work into it and overcoming adversity with injuries and like you said, being under recruited and all that stuff throughout the whole process. It's just a proud moment to realize all the work that's gone into it, all the people that have helped me along the way.
And in the last few years, Under Armour has had a huge part in that, keeping me on the floor, keeping me healthy and allowing me to not really think about ankle injuries and things like that, just worry about putting the ball in the basket. And hopefully, that story is inspiring to a lot
of people. So I think it's one thing that's really important about Under Armour too is that there's a kid sitting at home and even going through Asia, there's kids that aren't saying, look, we had lunch with Yao Ming, which was like when he's sitting down and you walk in and we should go ahead up there and Yao stands up and you like you think you're ready for it and then he stands up, you're like, I can't believe how tall he is. But so people look at Stephan and they're saying, I could shoot like that maybe, right? It only costs you like 1,000 shots a day.
For the time, you need to be 2 40 with a 40 inches vert blazing speed to do what I do. So that's I hope that definitely resounds well more than the other guys.
Well, you have that too, so that never hurt. So coming of age, I think a cool thing is actually when we launched the Curry 1, I'll never forget the expression that you had is that we did this event in our SoHo store in New York. And so you're pulling up on Broadway and there's a cool video of you actually doing it and you're getting out of the SUV. And there's literally there's a video that's shot from over top and it was a tweeted out shot. And there's probably like 3,000 people just crowded in the streets, 4,000 people.
And you have this look on your face like, are they all here for me?
Yes, yes, yes.
Right. We turned the corner. And like you said, you see like there's 7 deep from the stores to the street all the way down that side street and it all kind of hits you like what are they doing here to see me and that kind of deal. My agency who is kind of handling the event on my end were trying to get us to go around the back because they don't want us to go through the crowd. I'm like, no, let's go to the front of the door.
We're going in. So we hop out and just feel that energy and that support, which is pretty crazy and it's gotten even crazier since then, but all for good reason. That's great. So give everybody just
a little bit of basketball, like predictions of the year, and then I want you to tell one more story before I let you go. So the team winning championships, what does it all mean? Like before you even go into how you come back and do it, what's the biggest lesson that you learned of going from some of those always you could have done it, maybe done it to actually having broken through and won that ring?
Just you realize how hard it is to win a championship. I put it in perspective put it into perspective for me over the course of the summer just how many NBA legends and guys that are Hall of Famers and played double digit years at really high levels that never won a championship. And they'll never be able to say that about me and my teammates and that's something they'll never be able to take away from us. So you understand just how hard it is to get there and obviously for the Warrior organization hadn't done it in 40 years. And I hear stories about all our fans that said they were season ticket holders back in 'seventy four, 'seventy five when we did it the first time.
And they've been waiting. They've been waiting. And it's been really cool to kind of see our journey. And the way that we did it, doing it by committee, obviously, I want to be a leader on the team and drive that train, but everybody literally 1 through 15 had a role and there's something special about that. So we can look back and really enjoy that team that we have and obviously thankfully kept that team pretty much the same coming into this year.
So it's definitely different situation being the champs and having to search for a repeat and defend that title, something that none of us have ever been through before. But I think we have that mentality that we want more and we're going to work for more not be complacent with just one. So I don't think we'll fall into that trap at all. So I'm excited about it, Doug? I keep that mentality even though I might not be my title, I keep that mentality because I know we're going to be the hunted this year, obviously.
But as long as I keep that same mentality that's gotten us to that point, then I think we'll be all right. So we're 2 weeks away. We start training camp by 2 weeks from today, actually. So I'm in shape. We're excited, ready
to go. So done with the banquet circuit. Done with the Asia tours, right?
Yes, yes. No more SPs to pick up. No more award shows, no more Jimmy Kimmel should go. I got one more late night next week in New York, but Okay.
The tape is fine.
That's right. And then we'll be back to work next 2 weeks from there. I'll get a little bit more golfing maybe. That's right. There's a time with the family.
So you're a scratch golfer and which goes to so let me ask this question then. Upon signing, when we did this, when let me switch it to golf for a second. So when Jordan, when your partners and you guys were texting back and forth during the championship and you're helping him out in the when he was going for the try to complete the slam and some of the other things that happened during the year. And it's great to see that. I mean, the camaraderie among all of our athletes, they all help and support each other.
But what Jordan said when they asked him and said, why did you pick Under Armour? And he used this phrase, he said, it's an aggressive, young and fearless company, which matched his game and sort of felt him. And he said that, he said, I'm an athlete and I relate with the company, all those kind of things. And with you, there's this amazing story as to how you actually selected Under Armour. And coming through, he'll know this, I'm putting him on the spot for this one.
But his daughter, Riley, probably I mean, it was like Riley for President signs like in Asia. It was crazy, like the overwhelming support for Riley. And little did I know until you're on a plane with another man for 50 hours that these kind of stories come out. So tell me the story about how you actually ended up selecting the Under Armour brand and who actually made
the choice? So, yes, like you said, we were 2 weeks probably after our initial meeting and I tested out the product. We were wearing the spawns at the time, which I liked with the spawns. We the colorways for the Warriors and all that, we're I like them right away. So my heart was already kind of leaning and ready to make that change.
So but we're at my agent's house in Hermosa Beach. That's nice by the way, right?
So he's Don't say any other brand names you go through.
I got you. I know how that works. So we're all sitting at the house and I have 3 boxes of shoes sitting in front of us. So it's me and my wife, Riley at the time. You guys know the other 2 agents' family.
Okay. So like, hey, Riley, we're just going to play around. She's about 14, 15 months at the time. Like, hey, Riley, Natty is having a hard time picking shoes. Can you what shoes do you like the best?
And she walks over and she picks up one brand first, looks at it, the brand I was with, looks at it, messes around with the shoe and then just chucks it over her shoulder.
So I'm
like, all right, this is off to a good start. Here we go. So she picks up the other brand shoe, looks at it again, takes a moment, surveys it, puts in the light, chucks it over her shoulder again. I'm like, all right, this is she probably going to chuck the last one too. This is like she thinks it's fun just to throw it.
So she picks up the low top spawn, it's all black, I'll never forget it, picks it up, looks at it, and then just walks over and hands it to me like this and then walks about our day. And I'm like, me and my wife looked at each other, looked at Jeff, my agent was like, all right.
She didn't sell it, right, because Riley knew. Riley for President. Riley knew. Riley for President, Okay. So maybe one last piece of formal business and then you're actually because I don't know if you knew it or not, but amongst this crowd, there's a lot of incredible shooters out here.
That's what
I've heard. And some of these guys wanted to play a little game of math.
I have to discard the jackets, but after that, it would be good.
They want to play a little game. I know they call it horse, you call it Curry.
And you
said you're going to spot them, c u r I guess maybe the 2 r's. Okay. So c u r r. So we'll see. We got a little competition out there.
We'll do that in a minute. But before we do, one piece of official business. You got that envelope sticking out of your pocket. I didn't see that. What is that thing that's in your pocket?
Well, we've because I sent you something.
You sent me something. You were supposed to send
it back to me.
I was supposed to send it back. I knew I was coming. So I brought this with me hard copy to really establish our partnership for the next 10 years and be able to announce that today. But this is my signed contract and I'm looking forward to the future, the next 10 years and beyond, obviously. But we'll do some great things and I'm proud to be a part of Team UA.
So as a part of this contract, you're also now a shareholder. That's right. Right. And so you can probably get some counsel from these guys on how they're doing,
how the day went.
Don't be like them to ask hard questions. They don't applaud a lot and say, you soften the crowd up. But with that, a huge honor for us here with Steph and have Steph here. So we're going to take everybody from here. We've got some cocktails over by the store and then we're going to meet out in the arena, have a little contest and get everybody up and have you out of here back to New York, Boston, San Francisco and where else do you come from.
So thank you all very much for coming on our Investor Take care. Thank you, Steph Curry. Thank you,
man. Congrats.