All right. 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. I want to thank everybody for joining us both here live today as well as on the webcast. A couple of housekeeping items. 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. Second, a couple of people have been asking about Wi-Fi. We have Wi-Fi. 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. With that, we'll kick start the day in just a moment. Thanks and enjoy.
It's okay. You can clap. How are you? Welcome. It is great to have all of you here at Under Armour. We already had a quick introduction across the street. In order to get here, we forced you to cross a freight train line and walk by a tank. 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 were here.
One of my favorite stories is from my partner, Shuichi Yasuda, 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 million year to date. We've been partners for a very long time. 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 three to five 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. 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 two 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 billion revenue brand with ambitions to double by 2016. As we stand in 2015, those ambitions have become reality. 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 three main points: who we are, where we're going, and frankly, how we plan to win. 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. 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.
This is not a day about patting ourselves on the back as much as it's a day of laying out the next three years and giving you an indication of what the next 10 years looks like, very much like the first 10 years of our time as a public company. Following my remarks, you're going to hear from our team, then I'll return with a few members of my management team to answer questions at the end of the day. At Under Armour, we have strategies and thoughts for us as a business, we call them our lessons. We call them our whiteboards. These are the things that are in my office.
I keep them three panels across, five panels deep, I use this to discuss sort of the culture, the energy, the passion of the day, 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. We like to say at Under Armour is that great brands are like great stories, every great story has a beginning, and middle, and an end. Our job as a company, 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.
Our job is to manage it, is to curate it, is to make sure that chapter one makes sense to chapter two, to chapter three, to chapter four. That frankly, we're not jumping too far ahead, 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, brands are meant to be thoughtful. They're not just meant to hypothesize. Brands are meant to have a point of view. 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. 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 what helps shape the impression of what is a company. 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. I was trying to compel them to come join our team.
They were working out on the West Coast, Pacific Northwest kind of place. 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. Your expertise, the way everything you've done in your life has led you to this moment. You'd be perfect for us." I remember them just pausing, and she sort of stops her chair, and she goes, "Why are you so crazy passionate about this? It's not exactly like you're curing cancer here." I remember her saying that to me and me sort of having this like. What does that mean? My God, questioning the meaning of life. What am I doing every day? Are we just checking out T-shirts and the kids and stuff?
What's the value of our company? It was a few weeks later that I was actually out shopping, and I was in a store. Like we do, it was in late afternoon, probably around 4:00 P.M., and I'm watching people shop, and I'm standing by the Under Armour section. It's what you sort of do in our field, and it gets a little creepy. Many of you know about this as well. All of a sudden, this mom walks in, and she's got these two little boys with her, one eight, maybe 10 years old. They're both holding her hand. All of a sudden, they walk up, and they're standing at the end of the power aisle, and the little boy sort of stops the eight-year-old, grabs his mom, and just goes, "Mom, stop." He goes, "Look, look.
Under Armour, Under Armour, Under Armour." The mom sort of pauses. She gives that look like, "Don't go over there. That stuff's expensive. We didn't come here to get that." I'm watching it happen, and I'm giving the boy, I'm like, "Go, go." Sure enough, the mom gets distracted. The little boy breaks away. He runs over to the section. He grabs one 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 power aisle. He goes, "Hey, Mom." He goes, "Look at me. I'm wearing Under Armour. I can do anything." Like this.
It reminded me, more importantly, it taught me, what is a brand? What does a brand do? Because I can march a 12 scientists in here and tell you why we make better footwear or better apparel and that we technically are better here or there. It's not any one product or any one thing. 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. The thing is, what brands do is that whether you thought you could do this, now you believe you do this.
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, it goes into every product that we make, and we never, ever violate that trust. This kid had an edge, and that edge was Under Armour. 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.
It doesn't come down to people making decisions of 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. 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. It'll 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. Like every great brand, brands start and they need a central purpose.
For us, that purpose is called our mission. Our mission is incredibly simple: make all athletes better. As we say to do it through passion, design, and the relentless pursuit of innovation. 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. As you think about the passion of leadership that we have in our team, all that always comes from the top. For our top, it begins with our board of directors. I'm very proud, I think, of some of the diversity we've brought on our directors and some of the new opinions and perspectives we've brought recently.
First and foremost, we brought on George Bodenheimer, the former president and executive chairman of ESPN, Inc. and formerly ABC Sports. We also brought on Karen Katz, the president and CEO of Neiman Marcus Group, who just filed their S-1 to go public, so be nice to her. She's a good person, and she gives me a lot of great counsel. As I think about the way that we apply to 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, I'm going to take you through some of the puts and takes of what the last 10 years have been like for us.
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. 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. 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 nos. 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 eighth 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 Bull Frog, which means he was the longest-serving Navy SEAL on duty. You don't hear Eric's name a lot, it's curious because he was also the first Navy SEAL who ever reached the rank of three-star admiral and then ultimately four-star admiral, where he retired.
Eric is one of those quiet leader, actually published a paper called "The Quiet Leader." 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. One particular time, I was speaking with Eric and I was asking him, I said, "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. We're trying to wonder, should we stick to the plan? Do we go this way?
What do you do?" 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, "You know, Kevin, one thing I always tell my troops is that we always found that when the map differed from the terrain, we always suggested that they go with the terrain." You can think about the best-laid plans. You can think about what we told you in 2005 about what was going to happen. 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 over-promising and delivering speaks to that. As we talk about over-promise and 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 the plan. In fact, the same message that we told you on our roadshow in 2005 is essentially the same message that you're going to hear today. Five 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.
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, with less than 20% of our total business, sounded crazy and nobody believed we could do it with this Jockey men's football brand. To take the collective apparel business of men's, women's, and youth, which has been a rocket ship for us, 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 2005. To take those product categories of apparel and footwear and tell those stories market by market across the globe, and where 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. As you're going to hear, it's a model that will continue to drive us forward. Let me give you some then and now. Let's look back at 2005. In 2005, we were basically a compression company, focusing on pioneering this new category. You think about what sporting goods was. How could 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. 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." With it, we created this category called compression. From our founding in 1996 to going public in 2005, when we used to have 100% market share, by the time we went public, we had about 64% market share in 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%. While still demonstrating market thought leadership and dominance in things like compression through category explosion, like bringing and signing deals with DC Comics and Marvel, you see the Supermans and Batmans and Iron Man compression shirts, what better person to wear compression than superheroes? That superhero is something that we look to infuse into every product that we do.
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 2005, 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 category and have grown women's, youth, and footwear, each of the businesses larger than the size of our complete company in 2005. Henry Stafford's going to take you through some of our merchandising and what we're doing, then Kip Fulks and Peter Ruppe will be up on stage to take you beyond that.
Beyond me, and what you see happening right now, is things that we had last year, what we defined as the Year of the Woman in 2014 from our I 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. In that time, we've added over $3.5 billion. 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 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 were just announcing our intentions the following year to go after football cleats, which everyone laughed and scoffed at. Looking back on it, if you're going to start in a category that's going to take a 240-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. We learned that. After 10 years of being in the business, we're proud to report nearly 40% market share as the number two player in the space, with eyes set on being the number one player in the very near future. Now I'm a young guy, so the near future could be several years.
Along the way, we weren't just making football cleats because it was football cleats in 2006. It was baseball cleats in 2007. It was training shoes in 2008. It was running shoes in 2009. It was basketball shoes in 2010, this evolution of us as a company. From where we launched and we first told you our first story of the vision that this company had, we made no footwear, in 2015, we'll make nearly 30 million pairs of shoes. You can think, what is 30 million pairs of shoes? Compare that to our competition, who makes nearly a half a billion pairs of shoes. I can tell you, we don't enjoy playing number two to anyone. 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. Again, Kip, my original partner, and Peter are going to take you through that in great detail. In 2005, we operated in just four countries, U.S., Japan, the United Kingdom, and Canada, which is the drive. 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 Maurath 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. Nearly one year early, we've already eclipsed that original goal.
In 2005, our direct consumer business consisted of just a single U.S. website, as I told you, across the street. Again, we had those four domestic Factory House stores. Today, there's 23 stores, the 24th or 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. Growth, all these things. We talk about terrain. I mentioned that with the Admiral. This is a company that specializes in terrain because when you were here just two years ago and you asked about a digital strategy, we're frankly a company that didn't have a digital strategy. We thought we did.
Our digital strategy at the time consisted effectively of a heart rate strap and zero community. In that time since then, we've created this word called Connected Fitness, behind it, we've created, I think, a new industry and coordinating an industry. Connected Fitness is not a new growth driver for us, 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. 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 two years ago.
In doing all these things and buying, making the three acquisitions between MapMyFitness, which didn't happen until December of 2013, after you'd left, Endomondo based in Copenhagen, and MyFitnessPal in San Francisco with their community sizes and plus how they're growing. The last time that we spoke to you, we told you we had 140 million 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 million registered users. Today, we're telling you we have over 130 million registered users downloading more than 100,000 of one of our four apps every single day and growing. Scale, scale. The opportunity here remains a bit undefined, but we believe this area will be additive across our five growth drivers and part of what differentiates us as a company.
I'm going to expand on this in a few minutes, Robin Thurston's going to go a little bit deeper with Connected Fitness a bit later. 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 five of them. One other good Admiral, I'm giving a lot of air time today, and he'll appreciate that. Actually, he won't. He doesn't like being talked about. 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 whoa." We've never done that here at Under Armour either. 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. We're very proud of what that means. Took us five years to get to our first $5 million, the next five years getting to our first $300 million, five years beyond that to get to our first $1 billion. 15 years to our first $1 billion. It took us three years to get to our second $1 billion, one more year to cross our third, and this year we're going to record $1 billion in revenue in just one quarter. Firmly on track to make good on the last target we gave you at our last Investor Day of $4 billion by 2016, delivered almost a full year early.
We've enjoyed 21 consecutive quarters of 20+% revenue growth, more than five years of 20+% 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 two companies in the S&P 500 that can make that claim, and we're very proud of that and what that means. Frankly, we have no expectation of that stopping anytime soon. To focus and to continue on this market trajectory, we're going to focus on something we're calling market expansion. We think about market expansion in every single category we enter, 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 to a consumer.
We will buy capability when it's appropriate, however. 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 Roadshow. It was five cities in five days, which like 33 is easier than 43 doing a stunt like that and coming back from it, like on day two, I'm starting getting the 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.
Launching a product internationally for the first time and taking that Curry Two 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 sq ft Brand House on Huaihai Road right in the central shopping district in downtown Shanghai. Watching Steph and seeing the multiple clinics that engage fans. Again, I told you about Manila with more than 10,000 people filling an arena and thousands more waiting outside. The reaction we had to this was really overwhelming. It demonstrated, of course, Steph is a superstar, but man, it demonstrated the global demand for this brand right now. This is a connected world and people know the Under Armour brand and they're asking for it everywhere.
With more than 1 million people tuning in to the live stream of our final event in Shanghai, watching Steph, generating more than 3 billion impressions on this five-day tour, through both traditional and social media. We have, again, let me underscore, Stephen is a global superstar, and he's our athlete and he's our partner. We are committed to building basketball into a billion-dollar 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's 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 U.S., it's about 20%-22%, 23%.
In Asia, in general, it's 30%-35%. In the Shanghai store where 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. 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 18-33, 25% Gen Xers, 34-54, and 2% are baby boomers. We currently have 11,143 teammates across 16 different countries.
That's up 35% from just two years ago, your last visit, when we had 8,256 teammates. Up 1,745% from 2005 when we had just 604 teammates the day we went public. 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 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 four themes that really define our culture here that we require of our teammates. Number one is to act like a global citizen. Number two is to think like an entrepreneur. Number three is to create like an innovator.
Number four, probably most importantly, perform like a teammate. You can't emphasize that enough of what it means in growing. Again, A types hire A types, B types hire B types or C types, and it moves down the line. Finding the right people that fit our mix. Let's talk about the teammates and the qualities we look for them, because we recently spent time in an offsite with our executive team, and 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.
You may have heard me say before is that one of the things on my whiteboard, it says, employees get things done, partners get things done. Owners get things done, done. That's like, "Hey, did you do it? Did you get things done?" "Yeah, I got it done." "Did you get it done?" "Yeah, I got it done." No, did you get it done, done? Like at Under Armour, it's about every last detail all the way through, and we do get things done, done. We thought about these characteristics for them. The first characteristic we came up with, number one, as we're bringing people on the team, bringing experts in that are highly competent, functional experts in their field, bringing in 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. 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." It's not simply questioning, always looking for the next thing, but always asking, do I have best practices? Can we create what new best practices should look and should feel like? 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 a team who checks all these boxes for us is Terdema Ussery, 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 into 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, São Paulo, and so many other destinations that demonstrate our international appeal and our willingness that we are truly a global company. As we build these teams, one thing we know is that every great team, we need a great house.
A great house that isn't just something that feels good and is that fluffy, that allows us to truly work better. 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 that's going to give us room to grow at the rate 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, it's something that we have to deal with.
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. I'm bringing the tank with me, and we might build a freight train through the center of it also. The new campus is going to cover over 50 acres of waterfront property that'll 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 project, and to emphasize that, but it'll 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 the local community and help beautify our city. The past two 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 three years from now, five 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 great investment for our shareholders as well.
I am aligned with you as a shareholder, and I understand more important than anything, that when Under Armour wins, we all 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. There's two 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&D department compared to so-and-so's R&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 four 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. 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 sent it to the experts at Under Armour who could help me? 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, and we then invite them in. We hold a trade show in our arena, which you'll see later this afternoon in the basketball arena. We set up a trade show and let our own teammates vote on what do they think the best idea is. The last six finalists we had, I think we're working with five 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 back here that encourages entrepreneurship. Again, to let people know about that flow of technology, innovation, and understanding from Under Armour.
What we want to do is we want to bet on the field. The final piece is what does betting on the field mean? Again, it means it's not 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, as I think about sporting goods as a whole, I went to the CES convention. Walking in there, I remember being overwhelmed by all these incredible consumer electronics companies. I'm looking, and here's Samsung and Sony and LG and all these incredible companies. I couldn't help thinking to myself, how much brainpower went into that convention? How many smart people worked at these companies?
The idea at CES this year, if you remember it was not only the flat panel television, but it was taking the flat panel television, which is probably maybe nine, 10 inches in depth, and reducing it to the super flat television, which was five or six inches in depth. The really innovative companies were focused on the super flat television, which is two to three inches in depth. I'm thinking to myself, every single company just had their own version of the same idea. I'm thinking, I don't know, what does Sony have? 150,000 engineers? Samsung, 200,000, 300,000? LG, 50,000, 60,000? You're looking company after company, I'm thinking, how much wasted brainpower is on this? Going, what if?
What if we had these people, because after the 10,000th engineer is working on the idea for the super flat panel television, is it really helping drive and change that industry? Then I looked at my own industry, sporting goods. I'm thinking, how many engineers are we hiring every year? Because we're not. It didn't exist in our industry. 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 five 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 MyFitnessPal 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 and a community, meant virtually nothing.
Today, standing with the largest digital health and fitness community in the history of mankind, with more than 150 million users and growing more than 100,000 every single day, we're incredibly confident about what that is going to help do for us. We have 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've recorded 6 billion articles of food have been logged just year to date into our apps, and more than 1.3 billion workouts, 208 million of which were runs. 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, 600,000 to 700,000 of them, in 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. Let me take you through a personal example, and let me introduce you to Sophia and Darian. Sophia 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. Darian's 34, owns his own IT consultancy, which makes him a road warrior. Eating right on the road's a challenge, he's getting any kind of routine for working out.
As you're going to see in this short film on Under Armour Record, it's not just for teams or elite athletes. Under Armour Record will be the way to change people's lives and effectively help enrich them. Let's take a look.
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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. There must be a billion connected things in 2010. The estimates by 2020 or 2025, somewhere between 25 to 50 billion connected things. What are we doing with all this information? We expect to be the destination. We expect to be the ones that synthesize that information. Where it's going to live, it will live on Under Armour Record. Introducing UA Record 2.0. How many of you know how many days last year you got sick? If it's zero, I got you. Right?
You know it was those two days. Do you remember when? Do you remember why? Do you remember what happened? Imagine if, let me take you through a day in the life, and let's just look at Sophie for a second. She's a doctor, she doesn't get a lot of sleep. She only slept four and a half hours last night. Really, there's five 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, can you imagine as we look to track this during the week, there's two 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, then tell us if 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, the doctor pulls out a manila envelope and says, "How are you feeling?" 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 I could give him these, how much have I been sleeping, laying this month over last month? How have I been feeling? Which is the idea of if I want my weight, again, if Sophie wants to show you on her phone, she doesn't want to see it, if she touches on this, it will show her weight for her, then when I remove my hand, it will go back. You look, the last thing is a subjective, how do you feel? Imagine having the ability where you can just look back and go, how did you feel five days ago? If you rated yourself every day one to 10, and on days where you were sick, you rated yourself like a six or five or less.
Imagine you could track and say, how many days last month did I rate myself a nine or a 10? 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 I active? Did I work out? How much was I weighing, how does it affect weight? Having data, having critical data about ourselves, imagine what you do about your own portfolios, you care of none of this about your most important asset. Let's start where we are. We believe this is a vision of where we can go someday. Again, this isn't being broadcast out, this is internal eyes only.
Imagine what this can mean and where UA Record can be important of where we take and we truly analyze these six pieces of data, sleep, exercise, activity, nutrition, weight, and ultimately, how do you feel? How will this work with the University of Notre Dame football team? Opening weekend, they started out and made a 31-3 victory over The University of Texas at Austin. When they play University of Southern California, wouldn't they want to look back and say, "What did we do that week? How active were our players? Did they exercise? How much sleep did they have? And how do we replicate that exact instance for the University of Notre Dame football team?" We will of course, start there at the pinnacle with a top athlete. 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. 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 will hear from Paul Fipps, our CIO, who will talk about the security that we will have around this program, as well as what we are going to do to synthesize this information into what we are going to call a single view of our consumer. As a brand, we do lots of great things, signing athletes, signing teams, developing apps, and more.
We look at our whiteboards and going back to what my whiteboards are, these are lots of cool things. There is one cool place and one sign that always rings true. My whiteboards are written in all these different colors of ink. There is 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. While we may be evolving into a global technology company with aspirations of being the greatest company in the world, which is what we are 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, and 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?" First of all, he said, "Number 1, I'm an athlete." Then he said, "You know what?" He said, "They're a company that actually fit my game." He used the words and he said, "I'm aggressive, I'm young, and I'm fearless. I think Under Armour shares that mentality with me." You know what? He's absolutely right.
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 his fourth Super Bowl to Carey Price and his NHL MVP, Lauren Holiday, Kelley O'Hara with the Women's World Cup. Misty Copeland, the trailblazer, the first African American female to be named a principal dancer at the American Ballet Theatre and a cover of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People on the Planet. Stephen Curry, the NBA champion and NBA's MVP and three-point winning contest. Jordan Spieth winning two of the four 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 U, who's scored once again yesterday. This list goes on and on. Being aggressive, young, and fearless has helped us truly in becoming this growth company. When I say being a growth company, what does that mean? Let's get to it, I'm going to let my team talk in a minute. We are a growth company, 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 billion company in 2014, approaching a $4 billion company in 2015, I think people see us much, much larger than that.
As we said earlier, when we innovate, we win, 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 that we expect to seize now because we believe that taking advantage of this opportunity is going to create greater brand equity that helps lengthen the runway of growth you will find from this company. Now is the time for us to invest in our future. 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? 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.
Our definition of victory as we look under 2018, our next Investor Day goal that we'll give you, is that we believe that we will be a $7.5 billion company by 2018. 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. Let me put this day in context. I told you I'd tell you who we are. We are a growth company led by five 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 billion target from our prior Investor Day nearly a year ahead of schedule, and we will hit that new target of $7.5 billion 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. 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. 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 million by 2018. Our job is to deliver both near and long-term value while simultaneously investing in our growth. 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. 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 $7.5 billion revenue target by 2018 is the next milestone on our path to becoming a great global brand. We're thinking bigger, which will require 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 $7.5 billion brand. That is not our end goal as one number. We are, as a company, truly just getting started. I want to thank all of you for coming and joining us here today in Baltimore. 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.
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. 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. Cheers. Thank you.
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. 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 Charged 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.
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. 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. That'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. We've succeeded because of it.
A quick history. Others built their brands on footwear. We built our brand on apparel, as you see, that's important. We think it provides leverage for the future in innovation. The world was loose fit. It was cargo pants and parachute pants, we came out with tight-fitting compression apparel. It was a sea of $5 cotton basics, we brought to the floor at retail a $50 ColdGear mock turtleneck that provided the funding to build the brand and the business over time. The world was bricks and mortar. We had 1-888-4-ARMOUR, our 1-800 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, Under Armour came out with ads that were dark and gritty and intense, it set us apart.
The others, they featured the advantaged. We featured the underdog, something people could relate to. More importantly, they featured the advantaged at the end of the road, celebrating victory. We celebrated the road. The sacrifice, the blood, the sweat, the tears it 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. The list goes on and includes products. $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.
Finally, the world copied our grr, dark, intense, gritty advertising with football players. We partnered with a ballerina who inspired the world just the same and continued to grow the brand even as we elasticized the brand. 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. 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 and startup companies or looking at gadgets. Under Armour went big and bold, and we scoured the world and we found the three best, the three best companies who were doing it differently.
Not about the gadget, but about the experience, making an experience so relevant for the consumer that they built a community that's now grown to 150 million people. Which for me is huge because my job ultimately is to take those 150 million people and make them say, "Wow!" That's my job. Every time they put on an Under Armour shoe, an Under Armour shirt, just make them say, "Wow!" They're self-selected to care about their bodies, their fitness, their health. 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 four 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 when people expect us to zag, we did 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. Just think of it as embracing who we are. We embrace our heritage as a company built on performance apparel. As you see, I think you'll find in some of these technologies that I'm going to show you, it provides us real leverage and an advantage. The other thing we embrace is this open platform that Kevin talked about.
Partnering with 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. Finally, we embrace the science. 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. Without further ado, 2016, a glimpse into the future. First, 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.
We did SpeedForm three-dimensionally molding shoes in 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. I'm not going to take you through every yarn because Peter Ruppe is going to take you through this shoe in more detail. Rest assured that from heel strike to toe off, this shoe is designed down to every yarn 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 forefoot.
It's called Dyneema. It's unbelievable. 15 times stronger than steel of the same weight, yet so light that it floats. 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. No worry about your toenail poking through the front of your shoe. Yet it's still soft and supple and comfortable, everything we want in a shoe. Finally, as if that's not enough, it's highly conductive. Highly conductive that it actually provides a cooling benefit to your foot. 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 Charged Foam bottom, again, brought to us by Dow. Unbelievable step-in comfort, super soft, 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, yet it doesn't just build the brand by being premium, it also builds the business. 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 Microthread. This is part of building that talent engine that Kevin talked about. We hired a guy named Randy Harward from Patagonia. Done some of the most amazing textiles ever invented, including ColdGear, which we turned into a basis for our business, an engine for our business. 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." 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. Along with stretch comes the elastic that provides the stretch. 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. We've done a great job of engineering around that in products to date. Here we can design from the ground up a bi-component yarn, which is what you see on the left in cross-section, at the molecular level.
Literally, it's drawn through one half of the yarn at a different crystalline stage than the other half of the yarn. Why am I telling you that? Because it allows the yarn to turn into a coiled spring. Basically, takes a yarn that has no stretch and gives it the mechanical stretch of a coiled spring. What that means is no more rubber in your shirt. What that means is performance. We'd love to have 5% better performance. We're looking at 30% faster dry times, 30% less weight. 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. We can blend it. We can add it to all sorts of different things.
Across end uses, across categories, the science supports it. What I love personally is the anecdotal response. This is the guy who's wearing it in August and says, "You know, I just go for a run every morning, every morning I get out of the shower and I'm still sweating. 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, you just leave the air conditioning on in the car for the entire month.
People are coming back to us and saying, "When I wear this shirt, I wear the golf shirt, I have to turn the air conditioning off in the morning." 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 one penny to the cost of the garment, even as we add all of this performance. CoolSwitch, 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 ColdGear Infrared. In ColdGear Infrared, we were inspired by the way ceramics were used to manage heat in space travel.
We coated the inside of a garment with a ceramic print, which did something amazing. It basically caught the heat that was being emitted off the body and held it to keep you warmer longer. The best part about it was the success at retail, a huge commercial success, $100 million in year one at wholesale. Far from a one and done, we've built on the platform, and it's now a $200 million platform in year three, and it continues to grow. Now we approach hot weather and managing heat. CoolSwitch does it by using three ingredients in a print that have never been used before, and they provide cooling in different ways, which you can see in the graph. The first way, the first ingredient is highly conductive. As soon as you put it on, it feels a little cooler.
The whole time you're wearing it keeps you a little bit cooler. That's the separation you see between the blue and the red lines here. To be clear, blue line, red line, two identical textiles. The exact same textiles on the exact same wear, two different identical workouts. The only difference is that the blue line represents the skin surface temperature when the shirt has the print with the three components on it. As the wearer warms up, and this is about the 15-minute mark here, you can see the gap widen. The gap widens because the second ingredient is temperature sensitive. 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.
Finally, if you're late in the golf match, the sun's 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 ColdGear Infrared. We want to build a platform. We think it can exist across lots of different end uses. I was definitely looking for a V-neck 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.
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, 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 midfoot. 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. We hired a guy named Steve McDonald who designed more million-unit pairs of shoes than anyone in the industry. 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. The truth is, when you have a lasting board or a strobel board, to get away from that flat, hard feel, you cover it with a sock liner. 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 biomechanists 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. It's starting in training because that's our heritage.
That's where we started, covering the journey of the athlete, 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 comes along once in a lifetime. 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. 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. It feels less modern and more like a Ford Model T production line combined with a Middle Ages cobbler's bench.
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. 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. Ultimately, our vision is local for local. That's where this goes. It enables us to make great product as great as our brand, and to do it globally. Made in the U.S. for the U.S. market.
Made in Brazil for the Brazilian market. That's where we're going over time, ultimately continuing to make those 150 million people say, "Wow." Before turning the stage over to Robin Thurston, who's going to tell you more about those 150 million people, I want to provide you with just a glimpse of what the future holds. 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. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for your time and enjoy your glimpse of the future, the Lighthouse.
Good morning. How are you? Doing well? How many people did the workout? Raise your hands. Fun, huh? My name is Robin Thurston. I'm the Chief Digital Officer here at Under Armour, 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 two years after the acquisition of MapMyFitness is that brands inspire, they innovate, and they evolve. The brand mission, make all athletes better. Connected Fitness is a natural extension here. How can you make all athletes better if you's not measuring what they're doing? We have simply two goals in Connected Fitness. The first is create the most amazing digital experiences for the consumer and create that daily relationship with them.
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? How do we get here? I'll give you a little history. We made a big bet on community. You all know that. You know the investment that we made. There were really three leaders here. I'm the Co-founder of MapMyFitness, now Chief Digital Officer. Mette Lykke at Endomondo, who we purchased in Copenhagen. She's now grown into a role of running and sort of thinking about the MapMyFitness audience and the Endo audience that had similar functionality coming together and leading our international strategy out of Copenhagen around digital.
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 in North America. Kevin Haley have already announced the number, and we launched this product called UA Record, but today we have combined, bringing these together over 150 million registered unique users on the platform. It's over 100,000 new people a day in 2015, 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. Scale matters to build a community, bringing this together. Scale is a big part of it to win in this category.
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% by 2018, that means there'll be 385 million people on the platform. By 2020, almost 650 million. Even if that slows down to 20%, we'll have over 300 million by 2018 and 435 million by 2020. We think there's 1 billion 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 MapMyFitness 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.
Kevin went out and looked for a group of people, happened to be MapMyFitness, 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? Obviously, we made a big bet on community, pulling these communities together, and I'll talk about how the architecture's come together. What do we see behind me? These are all of the workouts so far in 2015. There's two things you'll see here. It's at scale and it's global. 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 product. Big scale.
What does this look like and how does it support the growth pillars that Kevin talked about earlier? 63% of everyone on the platform is female, 42% international, 71% under the age of 40. Clearly aligned with the areas that we want to grow into. 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. 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. Looking at the 150 is important. We're watching those numbers, more importantly to us is retention.
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, just in terms of scale, it's about 115 million people that watch the Super Bowl every year. With 150 million people we can have that conversation with. 60 million of those, this is the average active user base over the course of 15 month by month, and we'll be reporting this number on a quarterly basis to you at earnings. 60 million 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. We look at a couple of other components. Foods as an example.
Kevin mentioned 6 billion 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 with certainty is that there's 100% correlation between how much people work out and how much gear they buy. We're looking at workouts very closely as a metric for that engagement level. 1.3 billion workouts year to date and growing. How did 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 eight years old, how far I rode, where I rode, what I ate, my weight, everything in a journal. It's not like athletes weren't doing these things. The move to the cloud or to servers and pulling that data online really started to happen in 2005. You almost had a 15-year stretch where you almost went journals to spreadsheets, then online. 2005, you start to see a proliferation of this. Fitness tracking apps. When the iPhone first launched, I mean, we had two of the first 200 iPhone apps in the market with MapMyRun and MapMyRide. 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 they 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. Future Girl's playing up here, Kevin and I met for the first time in the summer of 2013, we got together in New York, showed me this video, and he says, "Hey, I made this video for you." I was like, "Wow, that's cool." 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.
The acquisition of MapMyFitness happens. We realize that Under Armour has a lot of assets in the athletes, et cetera, as well as functionality that we were missing on the MapMyFitness platform in areas. We put together the strategy not only to launch Under Armour Record, but as well as acquire Endomondo 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. 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. You have to have a place for all of that to come to. What does our team look like?
I will tell you, I am just super excited about the team we have put together, not only with the founders that I mentioned before, they are here to build this vision with me, Kevin and the team. The rest of the group that we brought in and were able to get to come work here at Under Armour with us is exceptional. We have 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, 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, we're a tech company. There's a lot going on here. 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 24/7, 365-day relationship through understanding sleep, eating habits, how you're working out, content that you might read, and how your shopping, both in-store and online happens, and bringing that together into a cohesive experience to enrich your life. We have four 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 four things.
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. Bringing that picture together to allow us to provide these rich insights back to the customer. Where are we right now? We launched Record at CES last year. This current version you can download in the store. I think it's the top five app today in the health and fitness store. We were still missing some parts and wanted to talk to and understand what the consumer needed. We have a big upgrade to the interface that Kevin talked about. Showed you this earlier today. The four 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.
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 two areas in the social and challenges that had to be part of the product. How many people participated in the steps challenge over the last couple of weeks? 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 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 two and a half times as much activity on the platform than someone that doesn't.
Social is a key part of the engagement layer for us to win and create these areas. What do we ultimately want to do? We clearly want to equip the community. We want to get them shirts, shoes, accessories. We 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 into a central database, user profile, location, activity, fitness, sleep, nutrition. But most importantly, the cycle. I started MapMyFitness in 2006, and I will tell you that the first 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.
Being able to provide deep insights, recommendations, real-time information, training plans, content. 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. What is a platform? Building a platform, our view, 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? Today, when you log on to MyFitnessPal or UA 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, bringing all of those together. A single data warehouse and an open architecture that third parties can develop to, whether those are other applications, whether those are advertisers that are on the platform, connected devices, and in the long run, our own shirts and shoes business. Today, we have over 200 partners and 6 million users connected through our open platform that are driving data and creating connectivity. Let me give you an example. Let's say that you're a HumanaVitality 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, only if the user allows it. They have to authenticate it, they have to allow it gives them access to take their data and get credit for those things. Over 200 partners today and growing. Connected Fitness, the overall device platform. Data's a big deal here, making it seamless for the user to connect all these devices. 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. You need a place where all that can go. Our platform connects all of those tools.
50 partners today, over 400 devices, 12 million users on our platform have connected those devices in, and it's helping fuel the growth of this ecosystem. This year, one out of eight people that buy a fitness device will be synced on our platform. They will have synced it back through the open platform to our environment. Advertisers, we have a lot of partners that still advertise on our open platform, and it's important here. I'll give two examples. There's hundreds of partners, 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 will hear later today from Matt Mirchin talk about, also driving their points and rewards system, similar to, say, a Walgreens, et cetera, using that open platform. In the long run, if you think about today that we make 280 million, essentially, shirts, shoes, accessories in a year, if we believe they are all going to be connected 5 or 10 years from now, it could be more than 1 billion units. They all have to connect somewhere. It is our platform that is going to allow us to do that. It is the single platform we are 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.
Later today, you are going to hear from Henry, Matt, Jason, Kip about how we are leveraging the data into other areas of our business to essentially personalize the experience. I have 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 data. Nutrition, hydration, fitness, the gear itself, it is going to change activity in general, not just high-level sports in the NFL, but everything. Yoga classes, everything will be changed because of this hyper-personalized experience. We are going to create content, communications, experiences, recommendations, and product that we deliver to the customer. What does this look like from a holistic perspective? Kevin talked about Sophia. Historically, on Sophia, we didn't really know that much.
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. Weight, BMI, heart rate, all of those things. Importantly, if you look at inactivity, exercise, nutrition, and sleep, we start to pair those things together. If you take an example of we know how much Sophia might sleep over time, we know how much maybe carbs she might eat during the day and what activities she is doing, we can pair those things together and give personalized insights to when she might perform at her best. Maybe there is a certain amount of sleep that she needs to really perform at her best. We will be giving those insights through the application layer.
How have we been doing from a marketing and sales perspective? Because I think that is the big question many of you have in the room since we made the acquisition. Here is some early insights. What we did was our consumer insights team, they basically surveyed right after the acquisitions, the database of Connected Fitness people. Then we reran those surveys just at the end of August. There is a couple questions we certainly were looking at. Brand awareness was a big one, purchase intent. What we have seen is in less than six months, we have increased brand awareness 3%, which is massive, but 8% internationally. Big changes on the brand awareness side. On the purchase intent side, we asked the question at the very beginning, how many people have essentially purchased gear in the last 12 months?
We asked that question again later. That's already up 29% on the platform and growing. 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. It makes sense, right? They're working out a lot. We said, "You work out more, we know you're going to buy more gear." This talks to the impact of the broader Under Armour business that we have. What are the direct Connected Fitness drivers? Under Armour acquired really two 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, MapMyFitness 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. We've had good success with offering a premium service to MyFitnessPal. Next year, we'll be launching more premium services across the base. We definitely think there's a big opportunity in those categories. We also think there's 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 million 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. 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 clearly in the lead right now, and I think we have the right team to pull this together. It's a virtuous cycle.
We have to equip, get the best product, accessories, et cetera, 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. 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. 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. I want you to maybe open the lens for a second and think about the opportunity that we now have by essentially being in this category and creating this Connected Fitness category. Today, we're in a $250 billion sports and apparel market, and we're clearly going after that. With these new assets, we now potentially can play in a $2 trillion food and nutrition business and an $8 trillion healthcare and fitness business. CF, Connected Fitness, provides this opportunity to leverage the premium brand into these new categories and going from billion-dollar markets to trillion-dollar 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. In summary, these are the three 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's 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. 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. This will be your chance to see some of the innovation that Kevin Haley talked you guys through this morning. Also, get 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 globe. And finally, for those of you who have logged into MyFitnessPal, this is your chance to log your food across the hall as we fill up for the rest of the afternoon. 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 P.M. As we said two years ago, this is a bit of a working lunch, so we'll see you guys then. Thanks.
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. 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. It's really the soul. The soul of our brand weaves 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, and 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, 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. 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. That's Kevin at Maplewood Athletic Association at 12. Kevin is wearing what we think is a flannel shirt under his uniform. When you think about this is where it began for our brand.
In the winter, his ColdGear was a flannel shirt under pads. In the summer, it was a hot, heavy cotton tee. What he knew back then is he needed a solve for this. He didn't know how yet. He was 12. 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 did they do it? Back in 1996, and our founders are still here, which is incredible. We talk about this once in a generation kind of opportunity.
Where did it start? It started with a single compression category invented, did not exist before, in E39. 1 style. Life had to have been easy back then. It was easy because it was 1 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. When we think about 2015 and beyond, what does that mean as we get pulled into more and more categories? It means we better think about what we did in 1996, and we better apply it every single time.
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. Steve Battista is with us today. His team invented and thought through this idea of I Will. As we thought about what that really means to the consumer, and as we listened to the athlete, this is a unifier that we maybe didn't even expect to be as big as it is. 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 and this brand. You could speak to Ridge Reaper and Hunters. That guy is scary. You could speak to women through Misty, all with the center of I Will, and it works every single time. 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. 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. 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. 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 it exists to today. Bold, loud, breakthrough voice. Historically, we would be nervous when thinking about things like women 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. When we talk about, again, the elasticity of our brand, 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. 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 there 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.
This one is less about the DNA of our brand, but it's about where our brand is headed. 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. As you hear and think about how athletes live, it's about 24/7 as a proposition, and we're just scratching the surface there. Finally, youth. Again, going back to 12-year-old Kevin in 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. We realize as we capture market share here, we grow him and her, and we keep them for life. That's the longevity of this brand.
That's the generational nature of this brand and what we believe in. You saw this before. You're going to see it again. This came from Jordan Spieth. 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. 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, Kip, and Henry talk about this later, is the product. We are about delivering innovation and story. ColdGear, HeatGear, Charged Cotton. Everything we do is about changing the way athletes dress.
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? It's really through two pillars we talk about constantly in this building. It's physical armor, it's shirts and shoes, and it's emotional armor. It's Big E 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 24/7. That's the proposition, and we must change the way athletes live. 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. This third pillar is our secret sauce to success every day.
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. We understand the brand, we understand the message. Let's think about the consumer experience. This is kind of you guys in the audience right now. 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, 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. Yep, there's 30-second spots, there's 60-second spots, there's traditional media, but this is the game changer. You heard Kevin talk about Stephen showing up in China for five days, 3 billion 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. 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 three hours later in an SUV to Misty. It was 50,000 roses, and it was incredible.
When you think about the media that comes from that's again what our brand does and what we're super excited about. 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 the last year and then talk a little bit more about how we'll capitalize on them. Take a look.
I believe they're the best in the game. Very aggressive. Young, fearless.
I'm excited we made you guys laugh. That's awesome. That means we're doing our job. Okay, 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 womens killing your business. That's how we think about it every day, and it's really about understanding and gaining the insight to really break through. Let's use womens as an example.
You've heard Kevin and team and Brad talk about the financial opportunity that lives within the land of womens. Womens is an area we confidently say will be as big as mens, and we approach that business with that aggression every single day. Kelly Cortina is going to get up and talk in detail about the business and the opportunity. What I want to share with you guys is the approach we took to finally get into her 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. 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 are we expressing the story?
We need to go through and we need to reevaluate our approach. Traditional brand marketing, sports marketing approach, find athletes, team sport athletes. Check, we did that, we weren't resonating enough. We realized people like Misty, supermodels who are hard-ass trainers, I think I'm allowed to curse in here, are incredible for womens. Gisele was a huge add to our brand that frankly we wouldn't have thought about before. After we filled these holes that increased the aperture of conversation for womens, what we were able to do is then reevaluate how to reach our female consumers through these women. We brought our athletes to women. In 2015, it's about one-to-one 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. Misty came out.
Around the globe, Gisele 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 billion impressions to date, 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. Again, we've got to make sure that we're delivering the right product to her at the right time. Again, first phase was brand awareness, relevance, love. Second 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++ presentation everywhere we go, that's exactly what we've done. At the end of the day, when we think about womens 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. When our brand shows up, that's what we deliver every single time. Global football. This is an awesome story. 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. 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 scored two goals in the Champions League. He is a young, aggressive, and fearless athlete that is going to represent our brand in this category, in this sport. We also onboarded clubs that think about the youth approach to football and the professionals, the most elite clubs in the world, Tottenham, São Paulo, Colo-Colo. Around the globe, this is the global opportunity. We are setting ourselves up for success. The last piece was authenticating through story. When we think about this from a global football perspective, again, Memphis is our guy, we are going to lead with that story. But it is about what are we going to stand for in the category?
From a storytelling perspective, we talked to the footballer, and we wanted to know, by the way, from eight 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 is about before the game or practice, and it is about after. Okay, kind of no duh. That is 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 are lacing up their boots. When they are lacing up their boots, they are thinking about the game that is coming, they are thinking about the practice that is coming, and what they need to do to win.
Then the key moment that they kept talking about is when they unlace, when they take off that lace, and they think about, what did I accomplish? Or what didn't I accomplish? And what am I setting my goals for next? Our brand is about next. It is about learning, but moving on to crush the next. We kind of loved that idea. The idea of Slay Your Next Giant is exactly that. What happens before the game, what happens after, and what is the goal you are going to set to kill it next? Let's look at a quick video that sets it up.
We are just getting started.
The cool thing about this story is it feels authentically Under Armour. 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 two goals in the Champions League his first game, after the game, he's in the dressing room, he takes off his lace, he posts this picture. That's the relationships that we have with our athletes that drive a story that a commercial could never tell. 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. Our core target consumer, to be clear, is eight to 16. It's the kid. It's the young footballer. What we don't always do is show that kid in the work, except for if we're talking youth. What we know is youth is spread in every single category that we play, and it's a critical part of our success. 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, what you're going to see are footballers that are the years of eight years old to 10 years old, coupled with a Memphis Depay, 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.
You're a football team. You're okay. Don't pat yourself on the back. You're just getting started.
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. Translating when necessary, but the message and the voice always consistent, always the same. That's global football, that's women's. Those are two 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. 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 it 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. What do we do when that happens? We leap 50,000 feet forward and we reset the conversation. In training, a $2 billion opportunity for our brand, a 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 UA Record and Connected Fitness or what we're doing from a brand perspective or social and digital. Every athlete trains to be their best. What's happening, what the insight 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. What you see is, you see Curry get MVP. You see Curry win the championship. You see Misty as Prima Ballerina. You see the Masters champion putting on his jacket. 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 want to 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. This idea of Rule Yourself is that you are the sum of all your training. 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. That's what we want to 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 that we can visually separate ourselves from the competitive landscape again.
When we think about this idea of Armour, 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. 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. 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. This is the most powerful conversation our brand has had in our biggest category. Again, we're just getting started.
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. 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. Let's talk about selling some shirts and shoes. Right? 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 $7.5 billion by 2018. The next part of the story is the how we are going to reach $7.5 billion by 2018. Here you have five 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 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 in 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. 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. 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. That builds an emotional connection with consumers. The end result is athletes pull us into categories, and that's 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 nine key categories. What does pulling us in mean? It means the consumer expects us to be there. To understand how we ended up at these nine 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 first compression T-shirt. The next sport we were pulled into was lacrosse with that same compression shirt. Before you know it, women were looking for that same performance, as were their younger brothers and younger sisters. Our history shows we have a track record of being pulled into categories. At the end of the day, our innovative product scales. What is happening right now is the same exact thing. Athletes are demanding that we innovate in categories like basketball, in running, in global football, to name a few. We are being pulled into these categories. 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.
We have our men's and women's training business, as well as our very substantial outdoor business. 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 Sophia and the insights that we will learn from runners like Sophia. Our Connected Fitness platform has data on over 205 million 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 eight runners in. We have data on over 205 million runners, and think about the potential for the running business that we will build. Basketball, it's the second-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 eight categories you have up here, we have double-digit market share in only one, 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 $7.5 billion that we were talking about in 2018. On this slide, we have nine categories that we're going to focus on. I'm sorry, eight categories, but earlier, I mentioned nine. We have the opportunity to meet athletes' needs, of course, in the gym and on the field.
In addition, we will meet their needs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Today, we are introducing the next great category by Under Armour, Under Armour Sportswear. We will outfit the athlete on and off the field, bringing a unique and distinct point of view to sportswear. 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 Pruess, 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 the athlete.
Our athletes want this product from us. The most consistent request we get from athletes and 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 two largest competitors do and what they're doing in sportswear. You can see from this slide that our two largest competitors drive around 25% of their revenues globally in sportswear. They have about $12.5 billion combined in revenues. We're at zero. 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. This is really a strategy to reach significant scale in 2018 and really beyond 2018. It is the next great category by Under Armour.
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 1 growth strategy at Under Armour is to innovate product. 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.
Our bodies are now ready to have immense untapped potentialities.
Awesome. Future Armour. 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. 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 three years. With apparel approaching $5 billion and footwear reaching $1.7 billion 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.
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, 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.
When you take the strength we have in our training business and you look at our footprint that we're going to expand internationally, you can understand why we are very excited about our men's business. Our youth business is also on a tremendous run. The demand for this product around the world is incredible, 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 with us for decades, 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. For today, we want to give you insight into two 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, she will walk you through where we are going. Kelly, please come on up.
Thank you, Henry. Good afternoon, everybody. I am really excited to be here. 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. 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 are 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 have heard a lot about it today. It is our heartbeat. Since we last saw you, the leadership team has been busy.
We have been assembling a starting lineup of industry experts as well as brilliant young talent in product management, materials, innovation, and design. We are inspired. We are committed. I will draft from the anthem that so well resonated with young girls, female athletes, and athletic females around the world. 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. We are 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 have seen our brand awareness among women heighten. Demand for our product is growing. She is asking for more. This is incredible and a huge opportunity for all of us.
Let us take a look at some of the growth indicators that we are tracking. Over the last three 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 expertise in performance. Our business was founded on the team athlete. It is our most established business. We are seeing over 40% growth over last year. 40%. We know that the team athlete trusts us. We will dress her as she grows up and as her outfitting preferences evolve. What we also know is 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. There are over 10 million women running in the U.S. alone, which you will hear more about from our footwear team. One of the areas we are devoting a lot of attention to is our Connected Fitness platform, which is two-thirds female. Digital and social platforms are a gateway to our consumer. We can learn every single day from over 100 million women and growing. It is an incredible resource for our product and design teams. We are thrilled. All of this is really, really good news. Health and fitness are a top priority for her. We are well positioned to grow with her. We get it. We understand her. We will stay current with her.
Most importantly, we will change with her. We're entrepreneurs, and we see the white space in the market with this consumer. 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 three areas. It all starts with the consumer, 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. 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 Collection, where function, innovative materials, and flattering fit meet style.
The Armour Bra Collection takes the entire category to a new level.
Okay, when we talk about women's product, we cannot just talk about amazing technology and innovation. 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 trend, and you'll hear Henry talk about our growing capabilities to be faster to market. This is a major opportunity with our female consumer, and it's an absolute must. 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. 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. 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 in 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 Armour 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. We have the beautiful shot of Misty in our new ventilated muscle tank. You saw this earlier on Sophia 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.
Going strong since launch is our back-to-school favorite fleece collection, which is super soft fleece, which gives her that post-practice staple that she 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. A personal favorite is the Downtown Knit Jogger. These are silhouettes you haven't really seen from Under Armour before. 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 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 seven days a week, at the gym, on the run, and to and from. We're 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. In order to talk more about the exciting opportunities we have in footwear, I'd like to introduce Kip Fulks. Kip has worn many hats in his years at Under Armour, and he is the President of Footwear and Innovation.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Kip Fulks, 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. The catalyst for change is innovation and connectivity, 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. When it's paired with actual observation, which is in our DNA, we have the opportunity to leap the competition. Let's take two simple questions. The first, should men and women wear the same running shoes? With 205 million 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 million runs is between one and seven miles, women log more runs than men. They actually do it more on Tuesday, and they don't care about weather. Men run twice as many marathons. Looking at these insights, we find that men and women don't run the same way or the same distances. Why are shoes built the same way?
Shoe construction has traditionally been the same for men and women. 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. Matter of fact, as they increase over a long period of time, they change several brands as they become an accomplished runner. Sophia is one of over 700,000 people, runners, who use a feature called Gear Tracker in MapMyRun, 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. 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, 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 our sourcing and manufacturing partners are partnering with us like they have never done before. 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 innovation to the consumer. We also have to build the team. We have to attract talent like we've never 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. 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 100 teammates to footwear. 14 of them in the last year have been VPs or senior directors. It's not really about the numbers. It's really about quality and expertise. They're coming here because our brand is on fire. We've brought in an experienced leader in women's, a world-renowned biomechanist, and a head of sourcing, just to name a few. We're building capability knowhow.
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 million units of capacity to us in anticipation of our growth. 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 1 way we're elevating is through the field of play. The viral sensation of Stephen Curry breaking ankles of his opponents, wearing the Curry One. Lauren 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 1 way we're going to elevate the brand through footwear.
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 Ruppe, 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 come up and talk to you deeper about our footwear business. Mr. Peter Ruppe.
Thank you, Kip. I really want to thank Under Armour. I really feel very grateful and honored to be here. Founders like Kip and Kevin, the energy of this place is really, really remarkable. From the inside, you can really feel what a great culture it is. 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 us. World-class manufacturing partners we didn't even have two to three years ago. We've changed that landscape just in the last six 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 is how much support you have wherever you reach into this organization.
Everybody's pulling for us to be successful in footwear. We love the challenge of it, and we embrace the support that we're getting. 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. We've got to bring in footwear. That's our mission. We've been building capability. I've 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 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 buying completely. They got the mission. They're on it. We're accelerating growth today, and we're just getting started. 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. A little bit deeper into it. Three buckets, kind of a familiar theme. We'll break it into threes. It starts with product leadership 2015 is really our 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. It's always about storytelling.
I'm going to break it down into these three. Let's start with the product piece of it. Obviously, for us, this is a foundational time. I'm going to talk about three 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? Then I'll go into the franchise part of it as well. For us, gaining product leadership is job number one, and we're building momentum there. Our goal is simple: make products as great as this brand. Let's start with our photograph of our player that you saw earlier with Henry. This depicts where we started from, right? Young player going through his drills. This is where we started, American football. 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." 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. You've heard about the Highlight before, but I'm going to come back to it in a little bit. What's happening here in football and why we're almost the market leader there has also been happening in basketball. 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 proud of.
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 U.S., 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. 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? It enters us into the game that's at the higher level, where performance and lifestyle meet in the world of basketball. We love that. We embrace it. We're really ready to charge forward with what we're doing with Steph.
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. Like Steph, we're charged by the belief that we're going to be able to accomplish great things in the world of basketball. It just starts with the Curry One. I'm going to talk about Curry Two in a little bit. 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. At the same time, Outdoor Retailer in January, they give it Best in Show. Not Best Footwear of Show. A lot of products hit Outdoor Retailer Best in 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. You also look at a very seamless upper, very clean with a unique closure system. We're stepping forward, doing things unique. Opens us up to possibilities in the performance segments of hiking, trail running. There's also seeds of ideas here that you'll see coming in other areas of the business as well into the future. Really proud of what we've accomplished here. Now let's talk about performance running. 2015 marks the year that we really stepped into the performance running segment in a big way. Gemini is the first step. Launched it in February. SpeedForm construction. I'm going to talk about that when we talk about franchises. Charged Foam.
I spent, maybe four months at Harbor East, right down where most of you are staying, I spent a lot of time in the Brand House. I spent a lot of time just 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 in Dallas, Texas. A couple of high school football coaches, both named Ryan, buying some New Balances, $75 gray-blue shoes. They didn't 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 the nice gray Fortis that we had. "Try it 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 somebody like Sophia would be drawn to. Now let's talk about the Bandit. We just released that in back-to-school time period, $100 price point. Like the Fat Tire, a couple of awards here. The industry's starting to take notice. Best Buy in Runner's World magazine. 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. As we look beyond this, when I stand here two 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, we'll talk a whole lot more about our women's business and how much we're doing for her. With this performance leadership, we're just getting warmed up. We just had a breakthrough year in 2015, we're on the pivot point now where we're going to go from here. Let's shift over now and let's talk about building franchises. If you've studied the industry for a while, you know that most really great concepts in footwear start small. It takes the brand's belief to stay with them, to nurture them, to develop them, to amplify them in the right ways, they scale.
That's a discipline that we're developing, we look at it in three levels. 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. We've got a great design team to bring that forward. 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 close to the ground on it, understand what the values are of that product and how to leverage them going forward. This is how we developed innovative products and convert them into franchises over time. As we do that, it's critical for a growth company. Because franchises will give us stable growth. We'll have more predictable businesses going forward.
We can take that into manufacturing and do a better job on getting good pricing and raising our margins. By doing it, we also can free up creative resources to develop new concepts. It's real important that we develop this practice. Let's take it and give you a couple of examples. The first one, I'm going to come back to football, where I started with product leadership and the Highlight cleat. 2012 is when we started. Cam Newton was the first 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 it together in a cleat with a great plate on it. People went, "Hmm, that's interesting.
We like what you're doing." 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's 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. 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. We do that in 2013, market share doubles. Go through 2014, as you can see, the game continued. We continued to elevate, continued to sell through. Now as we're standing in 2015, Highlight, fourth year out there in the marketplace, three years as the number one selling football cleat in the U.S.
Number one sport in America, number one cleat in the business, bigger than anything by Nike, anything bigger than what adidas. 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, we led with a high top cleat. We extended the market. We raised the average retail price. 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 where we'll pull the margins up. Most importantly, what you heard Kevin talk about earlier, nice shift in market share, 17% in 2013, 42% in 2015. We're just getting close to taking a leadership position, 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. 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, then they're back at work. They've got spring ball, they got passing leagues, they got training, then they're back in the course. We're back on the field. 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.
This product is awesome because it really takes color and is really powerful in that regard. That's a 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. We zig when they zag, we deliver the unexpected. Last time we were in front of you, I wasn't here, we talked up SpeedForm quite a bit. We're really excited about the platform. As Kevin said, we're a factory making shoes. 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. 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, right where we want them for comfort, for support. 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. We do know this already, it's a much better way to make footwear. 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. We're covering there on the premium level, then 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'm to show you this for 2017, number of products there, because 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. 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's 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. It's incredible. There's three different zones of compression with this knitted upper. 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. That's what we're doing in the running area. With SpeedForm, we're carrying it over into other sports. 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's on them, all eyes on speed. We want to make sure that we're delivering for them, and we're going to use SpeedForm 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. 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 working for him just straight out of the box, and we're really, really happy to have that resolved. For both these areas, winning the game in speed is going to be one of our next big franchise areas of focus for both American football and global football. Kevin Haley touched on another one. We only got a couple more SpeedForm examples, but you get the point. We're committed, right? That's the AMP. Great training product.
He already talked to you about it. I want to note again that it's part of the SpeedForm package, and 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. The last one that I'll talk about is basketball. Yep, Curry 2 just getting launched. It is a SpeedForm product. 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. We're excited about the ability to launch this particular one as well. With Steph, obviously, there's franchise opportunities there, right?
Chapter by chapter, all of the photo from the tour here just shows that we're just getting started here. Generation one, generation two. In the works right now, the team's actually in Asia trying to finalize Curry 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. He's been a great partner for us. He's also a great person to tell stories with, right? He's been one of the first ones for us to master how to tell stories through footwear. 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 can see some of the slides here.
You heard some of the results of the Shanghai store. If we average lows, double digits, 11%, 12% in normal wholesale. In Shanghai, in that launch, it was over 70%. People are real 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. We're really excited about what's going to happen come the late October when we launch it here in the U.S. and how it's going to play out, and excited for the season that Steph's preparing for right now. Before we get there, we've got global football and we've got Memphis.
If you look at Steph's shoe, the Curry 2, you'll find a little etching in the tooling that says, "I can do all things." We think about the physical armor that we present with our product. We want to make that emotional connection not only to the public, but also personally with the player. 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. We wanted to take that and talk about it as dream chaser, celebrate it, honor him.
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 the laces of his shoe and connect the story all the way through. Here, score my first Champions League goal. I think he did that already, right? Done it a couple of times maybe? Kind of past that one now, 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. 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 a footwear story. With them, we are making the connection in the world's two largest sports from footwear up. In the process, we're building long-term equity with today's young athlete. Start to close it up for you and move on to the next section. 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. Most importantly, we do it through telling stories and really making that emotional connection happen. We do that, we'll continue to scale the business and have great success.
As we look at our footwear business, we predict itself out into the next year. What we see is $1.7 billion in revenue, which is a 40% CAGR. A nice, healthy growth number for us. When we really look at that, it's just on the way to doing something even greater. As I look at where we're at, we're a lot more like this little guy from Manila over here. He's got the T-shirt on saying, "I got next." If you know anything about playground basketball, that's a bold assertion. It's my game now. For us in footwear, it's our game now. We got next. 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, we're really excited about the opportunity that we have. In a minute, Henry Stafford's 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. We transition, let's get a little look at our young fellow from Manila and see a little of the game that he's got. Thank you.
Thanks.
Yeah.
All right. Awesome, Peter. Okay, a couple other things. You 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 $7.5 billion, 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. That is exactly what we are doing in building this merchandising capability.
If you looked at our business two 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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. I want to stop and take a minute and kind of veer off of merchandising, but 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. 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. He came from Armani to Under Armour and logically took over our Hunt Fish business, right? What Kevin learned there was adaptability and how you look at a brand and how you look at a market. What we then did with Kevin is we moved him to China.
He built our office and launched our brand in China, gaining incredible and valuable global experience. 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. My point is not just about Kevin. I probably need to take him down a few notches after this meeting. 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. Now let's talk about speed. Speed is the fourth strategy on the how we are going to get to $7.5 billion 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 four times a year as opposed to our past, it was two times a year, and this is a huge deal. We have done this in all product categories. This has enabled us to essentially reduce our product life cycle 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 manufacturing, what Kevin Haley talked to you about this morning, it leads to our drive to become the best manufacturers of footwear and apparel in the world. That's our goal, and we are driving very hard to get there. 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. To do that, we're going to start with North America. I'd now like to bring up Matt Mirchin, who's our President of North America.
Matt has been with Under Armour for over a decade. He has 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 Mirchin. I have been here for about 10 years or so, and 10 months in this current role. The first two months I spent on the road meeting with accounts, walking retail, spending a lot of time listening, quite frankly, and learning. 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. The reason our customers want more from Under Armour is because the consumer wants more from Under Armour. That speaks directly to the power of the brand, and that demand has fueled and will sustain our 20%+ growth quarter after quarter. We are proud of the brand that we built here.
We view ourselves as the underdog, quite frankly, we like being the underdog. While we have grown and taken market share, we are just tapping into the tremendous opportunity that is out there for us in North America. Before I get into the business today and take you through the numbers, I would 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 four pillars. Kevin hit this earlier today. It is the founding principles of Under Armour, make great product, tell a great story, service the business, and build a great team. 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 are starting to build that connection with them with footwear as well. I would 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 Cleat, you heard about this earlier today from a couple of different speakers, Kevin Haley talked about zigging when everybody else zags. The marketplace was coming down in price. Everybody was trying to go low and minimalistic. We came out with $130 shoe, high top shoe, we also took a big risk on the marketing side. This was Cam Newton's rookie year.
We decided to put the shoe on one athlete, one player as a rookie, 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. Big bets with big partners, that has built and allowed us to establish that franchise in the Highlight Cleat, the number 1 football cleat in the market. This works across sports. It is not just football. Another great example is through basketball, leading with the right athlete with Stephen Curry, great product with the Curry One, the on-court exposure that Curry has generated for us. Leading vote getter in the All-Star game, winning the NBA championship, also winning the NBA MVP. 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 basketball, or other superstar athletes, whether it be Bryce Harper, Lindsey Vonn, Jordan Spieth, Misty Copeland, are helping drive our 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 60/40 graphic program, jogger pants, the Play Up Short in women's, the Armour Pant, 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 Adrienne about compelling storytelling and Henry about getting the right product at the right place at the right time. As we build out stronger capabilities through our sport and 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, Eric Ogbogu, my former teammate at KPs at the University of Maryland, and at the time, an NFL player, and took his six foot four, 275-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 other mannequins in the marketplace. That idea sparked the development of better fixtures, more compelling imagery, and an overall better shopping experience that represented the passion and energy of the Under Armour brand. We continue to elevate and reinvent our space. Here's a recent example from Scheels. This store opened about three months ago in Overland Park, Kansas.
For those of you not familiar with Scheels, they have about 25 doors. They're based out of North Dakota, Fargo. Probably not many people go there. Here you can see four 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 golf mannequin giving 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 Highlight cleat, basketball, running, training, we are in the business. We are taking this approach across channels. We're testing a concept right now at Champs called The ARMOURY. 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's 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 maintained 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. The fourth 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. 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. Heard a lot of people talk about team today. We continue to build out our team in North America. Over the last three months, and more importantly, the last two weeks, we've added three 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 one. 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 2011 through 2014. 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% CAGR. 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 from? Let me give you a few examples. It's going to come, one, from our current distribution across all channels, whether it be mall 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 will 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 Stafford 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. Training, 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. 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 three 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 on underarmour.com. We're also selling it in the concession stands in the arena. 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. 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. You can buy with the team marks, 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. With that extension, we can now take Under Armour apparel.
We can put the NFL Scouting Combine logo on that product, in addition to putting Ravens or Giants or Jets team marks or logos on that product and sell it across all of our current distribution. Last, we just signed a new NBA deal where we're actually going to be the outfitter in 2017 and 2018. The NFL deal starts in 2016, by the way. The NBA deal starts in 2017-2018 season. We're going to be the official Combine supplier for apparel and accessories for the NBA. All the players going to the NBA Combine will be wearing Under Armour apparel and accessories. 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. Last, through the acquisitions of MapMyFitness and Endomondo and MyFitnessPal, we now have about 87 million 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. We're excited about the additional opportunity it 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 MapMyFitness where they generated in three weeks 20 million views, 57,000 click-throughs, and they recognized 100% increase on their sportsauthority.com sales and attributed that directly to dealing with this MapMyFitness 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. We're also using our 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. Here are screenshots from Cabela's, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Macy's.
Department stores, sporting goods, and outdoor that are using imagery that's similar or the same that's on underarmour.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 one or the number two 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 one 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. 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. 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. Like I said earlier, we're not going to be satisfied, and we're not going to stop till we're number one everywhere. We talk about elevated product 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 and the volume of their store.
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. The 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 two categories, basketball and run. As you can see behind me, these are basically the Foot Locker, Inc. banners plus the Finish Line. They make up the 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 a 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 mall. 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 the mall, 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 grow and expand our brand and business. We had incredible success of the Curry One 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 One 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 Two 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 ARMOURY. It's been up for about three months right now, and it's still early to say success, but the results have far exceeded expectation to date. This gives you a pretty good view of the store.
On the right, you can see the window, and we have The ARMOURY 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 sq ft. 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 Mudiay, tying imagery. We've taken key elements from the Brand House, the thrones, the chairs that we have in Brand House, using those elements in the mall, things that we've learned from Brand House, 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 Kip Fulks, who is an avid outdoorsman. I very rarely ever give Kip credit, but he is an out-of-the-box thinker. We created, through Kip, a UA TV 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 are 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 to buy their activewear. Behind me, you can see Macy's Herald Square in New York. It is 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 will 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 are focused on elevating our consumers' experience wherever they interact with the brand, and we are building mutual profitable businesses with our partners. DTC.
While we are enjoying incredible growth at wholesale, our DTC business is growing at 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 for 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. They 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. The Stephen Curry signature shoes sold out 95% on the first day in Brand House. Our Chicago Brand House, which you see here, is getting about three times the traffic as our average Brand House, and we have walked Chicago and had customers walk Chicago, the Brand House.
Based on the experience they see on how we merchandise and elevate the brand in a 30,000 sq ft environment, they are actually taking some of the products and some of the merchandising and bringing it into their doors. Factory House. We are going to have 50 million people in North America walk through our Factory Houses this year. Our youth business is over-indexing. It 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 are 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 at a pretty good timing right after Augusta when Jordan one sold out in two days.
Kelly and Adrienne 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. In closing, I'd love you to take away five 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. Digital is key in both our direct-to-consumer businesses and working with our wholesale partners. Now I have the pleasure to introduce our next speaker. Charlie joined us about three years ago after spending roughly 20 years in this industry, and he's come in 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 after listening to what he's doing in international. It's my pleasure to bring up Charlie Maurath, our President of International.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks, Matt. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to present an update of Under Armour's international expansion strategy this afternoon. Two years ago, I was standing here and presented to this audience Under Armour's international expansion strategy until 2016. 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. By 2016, we attack. We will get bigger, better, and faster.
I also presented the international strategic business plan and its five 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. About infrastructure, which is about setting up offices, distribution houses, and IT systems. 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 one year ahead of the original plan. By 2015, we will achieve our 2016 international business ambitions. 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 Jordan Spieth, Memphis Depay, the Welsh Rugby Union, or Jarryd Hayne from Australia. Most of you may not have heard about him. Jarryd is a two-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. After a year of training and four weeks of NFL preseason, the long-shot novelty became a reality. We also utilize 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 two weeks ago and the Siam Center in Bangkok. We drive engagement through digital and Connected Fitness. We do things differently to be disruptive in key markets. This event is called the Armour 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, one, 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 two 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 four 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 consumers 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 four pillars of greatness: make a great product, tell a great story, provide great service, and build a great team. 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, to be premium in each of these channels and look the best wherever we show up. What do we do? Let's talk about wholesale. We focus our expansion at premium pinnacle locations such as Selfridges and Harrods in London, Sporthaus Schuster and SportScheck in Munich, and we build strong strategic key partnerships with top regional accounts that allow us to represent the brand in an elevated way. 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 250%. 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 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 omnichannel 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.
By 2018, we will have 30 localized e-commerce experiences covering approximately 80% of the key markets around the world. Jason LaRose will present more on e-commerce later. Last time, we talked about focus on key regions, key markets, and key cities. We continue to be very disciplined with our geographic expansion and cadence of new market entries with own subsidiaries, distributors and partners. I just want to give you here an example. By 2025, 2 billion people will live in 600 cities in the world. These are 25% of the population, but they will represent 60% of the GDP. In 2025, 75% of those 600 cities will be in emerging markets. 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 present in approximately 10% of those 60 cities, which gives all of you an idea of the opportunity that we have ahead. Let me start with our biggest region, EMEA first. We focused, as I have told you, our efforts in the three biggest markets, U.K., Germany and France, which represent 70% of the business in this region. In 2016, 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. 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 is about an obsession with being better, stronger and more powerful. As you might have heard, in Germany, close to my heart, by the way, we have signed FC St. Pauli, a football club that resonates with our core consumer and our brand. Recently, they were nominated the fourth most popular club in Germany. Even so, they are in the second division. Just to give you an idea, what you see over here, this is the way they welcome their opponents at evening games. For those of you who do not understand what it means, willkommen in der Hölle, it means welcome to hell. Another good news.
To further strengthen the brand in key markets, we anticipate announcing two 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 us 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, Erick 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.
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 three 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 UA e-com sites in our market attack. 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. 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 two 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. Let's jump right in.
The last time we met, we had just opened our Brand House store in Harbor East and were about to open our store in Tysons Corner. Six 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 Brand House store on Huaihai Road. It's our largest store outside the U.S. at approximately 15,000 sq ft. The opening was on the final day of our five-day, five-city tour through Asia with NBA MVP and UA athlete Stephen Curry. What an end and a beginning. As we like to say, we are just getting started.
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?" Let's level set with where we are today. We ended 2014 with 226 locations globally. That includes both our owned and operated stores, as well as our partnered stores. We're in 11 countries with 1.1 million sq ft 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 billion sporting goods business is done outside the U.S. 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. We will be vigilant. We will focus on always being brand right and business right. If you leave here today and remember only five 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 new connections with athletes and showcasing the world of Under Armour. We tell a great story. No one can tell our story better than we can.
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 four walls. We have seen our Brand House 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 two of the largest drivers of broadening our access. 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. We're pursuing a three-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. 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 sq ft in the U.S. and over 12,000 outside the U.S.
Tier 2 drives the business and builds awareness. They're operationally efficient and financially self-sufficient. These will be smaller in size than Tier 1, but they will still make a very big impact. Lastly, Tier 3. Tier 3 protects the brand. It is controlled off-price distribution that expands our reach and supports our full price points of distribution. In this omnichannel, customer-centric world, taking a holistic market approach is key to our delivering against our objectives. As we dive into each one of the tiers, we'll start with Tier 1. Tier 1 is the pinnacle point 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 1 location. We are on track to have over 1 million 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 OptoJump. 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 Two 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 in run, hunt, fish, studio, golf, basketball, and train. These stores will not make up a significant portion of our door count, they will be a significant contributor to brand heat, they will drive performance for the other tiers and the wholesale 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 gauge, engage, excuse me, local athletes on an ongoing basis. 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 multifaceted role in our portfolio. They reach more athletes.
Over 50 million athletes walk through our Factory House stores globally. 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 Brand House 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. 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, 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. 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 a 20% CAGR, International will be growing at close to 10 times that rate. Our store count growth will be 12% in North America and 75% internationally. The international growth potential is large, and retail will play a huge role in that. 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. Where do we end up in 2018? By 2018, we're 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 million sq ft 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 million athletes visiting our stores each year. We are truly just getting started. Just a reminder of the five 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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 in question, I guess. The strategies are really what we're here to talk about, hopefully pretty quickly here today. 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 five sites around the globe. Today, we have 23 sites. Tomorrow, we have 24. 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 of 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.
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's not the day we launch our site in Brazil. Our site's been up in Brazil for over a year. 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 São Paulo Futebol Clube.
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. That's a great example. Denmark, we talked a little bit about Endomondo. We launched our Danish site two weeks ago. That Danish site was launched in a country where 45% of the adults have the Endomondo app downloaded onto their phones. 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 just reality in a country where we have limited distribution, but half of the population now knows a lot about Under Armour, and that's what 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'll take us from 70% of the GDP we cover today to over 80% of the GDP by the time we get there. This lines up perfectly the way we think about distribution in brick and mortar and how Charlie talked about market expansion. We do it from one single approach so that 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. Stephen 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 three-point contest. Digital's a really important place for us to be able to tell that story at a moment's notice as it happens. Behind me, what you see is a commercial, and we played this commercial and it did great in both broadcast and online. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds 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, 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.
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 Stephen to help us design a particular shoe, or what goes into Charged Foam, 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 Stephen, who cares about Under Armour. Our ability to let him go to the bottom of the ocean on that content is really what's made a difference. Not only is that kid coming to search for it, Curry is the number one search term on our site year to date.
Pretty important for us. 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. They're diving into that content in a year when Stephen's having an amazing time, and we have a chance to tell that story and engage that kid in our brand. 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 two Curry shoes sold out online in minutes, less than ten.
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. We'll go back to the story of Sophia. 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. 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. We have the ability very quickly to say, we know the difference. We know how far you run. 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, your 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. All those pieces of information just give us a better chance to make really smart recommendations. When we do, then, we can have Sophia in Chicago very quickly having an awesome run in new gear that's just right for her. Maybe we send 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 store. 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.
If we switch gears and talk about mobile, this trend is not new. You guys cover this space. You know, everybody says mobile's growing a lot. For us, it's even more. If you went back four years, less than 5% of our traffic came from a mobile device, and when we were together two years ago, that number was 28. Today, that number is 57% year to date, which is higher than most people. 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. 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. 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. 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. While mobile's accelerating as a percentage of traffic, our mobile business is up over 120% this year. 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 product.
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 a 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? Every brand out there has one, or most brands have one. What's different is what you can do with it. Most people build a brand, they build an app. When they build the app, it's for the people who love the brand.
If you love a brand, you download it, you put it on your phone. A couple million 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 million people. It's not building an app that's hard, it's building an install base that's hard. You launch brandx.com and you put an app up there, who's going to download it? Getting the downloads is hard. Integrating into 150 million people who have already downloaded you is a very different situation. 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.
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. Those are the types of things we can do because we know that customer's 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. We can do that very quickly because we have 150 million people. While the technology is available to everyone, the install base isn't, and that's really what makes this so powerful for us. Omnichannel, 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, they say it anyway. It's been going on for eight or ten years, right? When people say it, I think they mean a whole bunch of different things, 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-com business." If you buy online and we have it in the store, we'll get it for you. If you're in the store and we don't have it, we'll get it for you from online. Cool.
Not that cool, 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, we're doing those things, that's fine, 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. 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 one customer equals one relationship.
Not a relationship with that store, 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. 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, that's not the point. The point is we're building one single relationship with our customer, and it's our customer's passion for us that allows us to have that two-way exchange.
When we talk about those partners, we do have partners out there, 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, that's our intent. Whether we're talking about macys.com or we're talking about Tmall, we expect to look great. 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. We work very close with our 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 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 hundreds of millions of visits to our stores and our own properties, our partners have billions more. What we're committed to doing is doing a great job for our hundreds of millions and still capturing everything we can in those billions. We're not competing with our partners in digital space. We're really just trying to look great. When we look great, we believe we're going to win because we believe we make the best stuff.
Let me leave you in summary with just a few things if you'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 four times as much digital traffic through mobile as we do today. Four times, even when we're up 57% today. That we're making investments in omnichannel, but those investments are in our definition of omnichannel, not everybody else's definition of omnichannel. What it all is going to lead to is five times the business. We're going to approach five 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, five times is very doable for us given what's happening in Connected Fitness and how we're driving traffic. I hope that was a good, quick summary. I'm the guy between you and a break. I'm going to tell you we're going to take about five minutes, then Brad's going to come up, nobody wants to miss Brad, I know that. We're going to take about five 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. If you want to do those things, you got five minutes, and then Brad will come up, talk a little bit about financials and operations. Thank you.
Awesome. Welcome back. Every single day of managing your expectations, every single day. All right, we got six chairs up here for Q&A. We got 38 minutes to get to Q&A. I'm going to wrap it all up here, talk about the financials. I'm going to get a little bit of help from Paul Fipps on the technology side, too. You've heard a lot from our leadership today. Everything from where we are to where we're going. Probably most importantly, from my perspective, where we're investing. From innovation, to product, to channels of distribution, and more, you've heard two common themes across today. First, how success is changing how our business looks. 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 five growth drivers, the success of these growth drivers changes our landscape drastically. Two 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 two 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, our revenues. At our last Investor Day in 2013, we targeted a $4 billion revenue number by 2016.
Our current 2015 revenue guidance of $3.84 billion 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. First, 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 billion. Fast-forward to earlier this year when we provided details on our Connected Fitness strategy in New York. We added results from 2013 and 2014, where we over-delivered, in part due to the execution of our footwear and international strategies.
At that time, we were guiding 2015 revenues of $3.76 billion 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, we'd be a $6.8 billion brand by 2018. What does that mean for us right now? The last seven months have allowed us to further understand the opportunity around Connected Fitness. 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 is inclusive of our current 2015 guidance. What it shows is that we are adding an incremental $1.5 billion 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 $1.5 billion is almost the size of our entire business just three 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 the $7.5 billion in 2018. First, 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 billion business, doubling the size of the business since 2014. Connected Fitness revenues of $200 million 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%+ CAGR and more than double our revenue from just under $2.8 billion in 2014 to almost $6 billion 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%. Wrapping up all the different revenue slices, there's some big stories going on through 2018. First, we expect all of our businesses to remain above a 20% growth rate. Second, our largest business areas, apparel, North America, global wholesale, will all double in size. In case you haven't done the math already, global direct-to-consumer at a 30% CAGR will grow nearly three times the size of its business from $900 million in 2014 to $2.65 billion in 2018. Footwear at a 40% CAGR will grow nearly four times the size from $430 million in 2014 to $1.7 billion in 2018.
International at a 50% CAGR will grow five times the size of its business from $270 million in 2014 to $1.35 billion 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 the next few years. Let's talk about gross margin for a second. At our prior Investor Day, we provided a 49% gross margin target for 2016, which we were able to achieve two years early in 2014. The two 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 stated 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 two benefits I previously mentioned, DTC mix and product margin improvements, are expected to provide additional margin improvement over the next three 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 than 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 own 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 impact will carry forward in our comparison with our 2014 rates.
Based on all these factors, specifically the strength in our footwear and international businesses, over the next three 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 and 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&A and the investments in our brand that we are making. We specifically speak about SG&A in two buckets, marketing and other SG&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. 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. 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. As you heard in our 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 2015 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&A, let's break out business areas separate from support areas.
First, on the business side, two areas are consistent with our story for quite some time now. Two others are relatively new in the discussion. The two areas we've been speaking about over the last few years are footwear and international. First on footwear. Since our IPO 10 years ago, you've heard us talk about becoming a footwear brand. As you heard from Kip and Peter earlier, we are extremely proud of the progress we have made, especially over the last few years, and believe we are in a great position to accelerate this growth over the next three years. Today's success in footwear was built through focus and investment.
As you probably recall, over the last five 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 Kip and Peter said, we think this investment is paying off in multiple ways. Let's turn to another key growth driver for Under Armour, international. 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 four 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 the 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 five years ago, let alone two 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 and international did just a few years ago. A 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 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 and how we'll continue to focus and spend on this business. Beyond revenue, 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 could 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 Brand House stores, both in North America and around the world, are critical for driving premium brand awareness and serving the 24/7 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&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&A to modestly deleverage in total over the next few years. When you wrap that all together in the P&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. The revenue gross margin investments I've spoken about resulting in a targeted operating income of $800 million by 2018, representing a 23% CAGR in operating income and more than doubling our $354 million 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 seven 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 am speaking of today. These investments give us confidence in sustaining our impressive top-line growth expectations for longer periods of time. This is far more important than focusing on shorter-term 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 million while standing firm on the high end of our operating income dollar range at $408 million. Hopefully, you were 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 three 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, investment is 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. What's going on below the operating income line? There's 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.
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 $7.5 billion 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. The 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 three years to improve into the mid-30% 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%. 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 be coming from the need to support working capital growth to support a 25% revenue growth company. You 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. First 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 plans 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'll be looking to expand our direct-from-source-to-customer shipping programs, 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 system side, we have spoken about our recent initiative with SAP. Before I go on to CapEx in 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 Fipps, our Chief Information Officer. Paul has a storied career as a CIO and has been with us for nearly two years now, first as SVP of operations, and most recently as our CIO. Paul?
All right. Thanks, Brad. Good afternoon. We need the slides to advance here. There we go. 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 Kip how we are changing the way we work and how a 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.
Like most companies, that has not always been the case. Let me take you back in time. Nearly a decade ago, we implemented our first enterprise resource planning system, SAP Apparel and Footwear Solution. At that time, we were a domestic wholesale performance apparel company generating $250 million in annual revenues with aspirations of becoming a multibillion-dollar brand. We did not have a large retail footprint, and we were not operating globally. By any measure, that significant technology investment was a winner, 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+% 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 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 nine years ago. With our sights set on $7.5 billion in annual revenue, and more importantly beyond that, now is the time to rethink how we run and how we grow our business. 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 two 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 three 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. Now make no mistake, this is a business-led initiative. 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. 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. 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. It'll be at the heart of the way that we engage that omnichannel consumer. First 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 multi-channel 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, in-memory technology, and access to more than 150 million 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. 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 data privacy is and will always be at the top of the technology agenda.
Through collaboration with our technology partners 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. 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 our important investments around CapEx. Historically, our CapEx as a percentage of revenues has trended between 3%-5% from 2010-2014. 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 2015. Given our current visibility for our capital projects, we expect this rate to remain elevated at roughly 8%-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 three 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%-3.5% of revenues. New revenue drivers are areas of spend that enable us to provide new revenue opportunities for the brand. An 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%-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 over the next three years is expected to range from 4%-5% of revenues.
Let's dive a little deeper into some of those, which you've heard about before. Campus. It'll be the largest contributor to our CapEx spend over the next three years as we build out the vision you saw from Kevin earlier around building global offices and world-class headquarters with the specific purpose of attracting the best talent from a multitude of industries needed to be a great global brand. Granted, that vision is over a longer period of time than the three years we're talking about, but obviously during the next three 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 third DC in North America this year and believe going forward, we will need to continue to look to invest in new distribution capacity to remain ahead of our growth and demand needs. Overall, we expect that our capital expenditures will remain at an elevated level for the next three years as we invest in capabilities, campus, capacity that are needed to continue to build our brand. 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 on 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 $7.5 billion by 2018. Our growing confidence in key areas like footwear, international, and 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. Yes, we truly are just getting started.
With that, we're going to bring the chairs up, and we're going to go into our Q&A session. Thank you very much for your patience today.
Great. Well, thank you, everybody. 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. Our 10th year, so I guess this is our fifth one. 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. Probably most, or just as importantly Where am I? On the end? The team that we have. I think all the presenters today did an amazing job articulating our vision. This coming together. We already have day jobs, so preparing for something like this always is a lot of work. I think it was incredibly well done by the team.
Hopefully, anything that we didn't cover today, we can answer for you now, and we open the floor to questions. We'll have two mics working, one active, and then the second one find the next person so we don't waste any time. Where are we first, Carrie? 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 where you talked about accelerating the investment as a way to lengthen the duration of the growth curve, given all the opportunities for the company, and elevated SG&A in the near term, medium term. Can you talk about the gross margin side a little bit more? I think you implied flattish gross margins. I think 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 innovated, more premiumized. I'm having a hard time understanding why gross margin shouldn't be lifting for this brand, given the strength and the innovation pipeline, et cetera. If you could address those.
Go ahead, Brad.
We'll take that in two pieces maybe, Omar. I'll take the first piece and maybe let Henry take the second piece on price. 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. 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. 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.
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 we're doing and looking at. What I would tell you is if you look at like businesses- 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. 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. The big thing is the footwear offset of our ASP increases in apparel.
Just one follow-up. When we think about the 25% revenue number, is it reasonable to think 5% of it comes from ASPs, 8%? I don't know if you've thought about it from that standpoint.
That would be a little bit high. 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?
Yeah.
All right.
Hi.
Hi.
Dave Weiner from Deutsche Bank. I had two questions, actually. Number one, I was interested in the local for local initiative you guys talked about. That seems like that 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. 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? Thanks.
I'm going to throw the answer over to the audience between Kevin Haley and Kip Fulks. I'll start with the fact that local for local, it's great for us to sit here in America and say made in the USA and how important that is. Whether it's freight, whether it's being close to the market, whether it's fast fashion retail, and the abilities for us to react and be really fast, that makes a lot of sense for us to do that. I'm incredibly passionate about the fact Henry touched on this, where what if we were the greatest manufacturers of apparel and footwear in the world? 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, we should be better.
One of the ways we can be better is better in our current supply chain. 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. It's still, you go and walk into a footwear factory, and there's someone with basically a cookie cutter working on the press and with two thumbs working on a pneumatic press that comes down and cuts the patterns out and saying, "No one has innovated this?" 20 years ago in computers, for instance, a computer that could be the size of a fingernail, took up the size of this room.
You look at that and say that innovation must be coming from somewhere. 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. Kev?
Sure. I think the opportunity here is both immediate and long-term, right? 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. 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. With time, it's going to be a major driver for us, 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.
Hi.
Lindsay Drucker Mann 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. I was hoping maybe you could give a little bit of detail on how you're thinking about the balance of stores. 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-
Yeah
...within your count, maybe squaring those two initiatives.
Sure. Where's Susie?
I'm here.
Go ahead, Susie.
Okay. As we talk about the 200 stores in North America, we're really looking to optimize the Factory House space. We'll get to about 150-160 locations. We will manage that from a center perspective, and we'll look to have between 40-50 locations from a Brand House perspective in North America. Brad spoke about the planned optimization of Factory House. We know we want to be in the best centers, we may have closures in that, but we will manage the overall number of doors and look to open the 40 to 50 Brand House doors.
You got it. 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. If you looked at the bottom 20%-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. 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. That's the model. We're going to be very consistent and focused in the coming years.
Where's the next question?
Right here.
Hey, guys. It's Camilo Lyon from Canaccord Genuity. You guys talk a lot about improving the supply chain. Spoke about adding a couple of seasonal drops to the calendar now at four, you were at two. 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 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.
Yeah. 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 air freight in the last few quarters as kind of a little bit of a headwind on the margin side for us as part of our ability to do that. Going forward, we want to have this product flow a little more naturally than having to air freight it. 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.
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 air freight it, you'd have the benefit of not having to air freight. It's definitely impactful, but not a huge amount, not a huge headwind for us right now. The flip side benefit won't be a tremendous benefit on the air freight side. 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. There's a lot of benefits kind of built into our guidance that are kind of being offset by the success of those two businesses, per se.
Just a follow-up. You put out the 25% CAGR targets on the top line. Let's dream a little bit and assume that because of the visibility you have 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 in?
Wow, man, we just talked about 50% growth years and 40% CAGRs and 30% CAGRs.
Yeah. 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 lines by 95% and 99%, respectively, and what's north of that. There's considerable investment. It's not that we're waiting for the money coming in 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 $7.5 billion by 2018. We want to be opportunistic with that. I think we want to make sure that we're putting the money to good work and being thoughtful about it. The hardest thing about a presentation like today is editing.
There's so many good things to talk about, and I still feel you got to hear maybe about 50% to 60% of it. There's a lot of things happening. I understand focus, and believe me, I know how important that is in any organization. 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 the next couple of years, and we're making things happen with campaigns that frankly, are a fraction of the size. So where I think the quality is as high as it can go. I think you're seeing other campaigns that maybe have five, six times the budgets behind them, too.
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 is going to be the next great global brand.
Yeah. Hi, it's Eric Tracy with Brean Capital. Right here. Brad. Hello.
I can't see you, man.
You would not believe how-
Right in the middle. Right in the middle.
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 sport-specific category, maybe importantly, the timing with which we can start to see the channel, geography, segmentation that I think the brand's been seeking for a while.
I would say in terms of timing, I'll work backwards. Really focus on spring of 2016. The first aspect of that is really segmentation. I have Charlie right here. Kevin talked about travel this morning. We have combed the market in the past 18 to 24 months, 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. I think you'll see that in the first half of 2016. We have basically a team of 40 plus merchants who are end use focused in-market. If 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, they're focused on that basketball category and also getting some lifestyle apparel into China. They're focused on that. 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. 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 benefit of that in the early part of 2016.
Here's a little bit, just following up on Connected Fitness for Rob and maybe Brad, too. Again, just to clarify, the $200 million through 2018, specifically direct, how will you all measure the halo effect it has across the brand? Will you all be communicating those measurements to us over that time period?
Some of the metrics I put in there, we're certainly using things like average order value of somebody coming from Connected Fitness. 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 understand that customer all the way through the value chain. 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. 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 is we're still learning a lot about the business, obviously. Just breaking it out into the direct revenues and direct costs obviously is very easy to do, so that's where we started, just breaking out visibility to the things that were easy to break out. Going forward, I think we still have to 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. We have to work through thinking about how we're going to talk about that going forward as we get more clarity around where those benefits are going to be.
Next question in the back row.
Hi.
Sam.
Sam Poser with Sterne Agee CRT. A couple things. Brad, the SAP. Is the SAP system you're putting in, is that a customized system, or is that something that is an SAP that they do and you're just using what they have?
If I have to answer a technology question- we're going to be in more trouble. I know enough to be dangerous, Paul can answer that question for us.
Good. Okay. Our strategy with SAP.
Turn this on, come in the light. They can't see you.
Yeah.
He asked me to stay. All right, our strategy with SAP is really, this is a new implementation for us. This is not your kind of the old upgrade process that you've seen other companies go through. 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?" That's the long answer 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.
That's starting the middle of next year, I assume?
We will. We have a very large program, as you can imagine, where we got some of our best teammates coming in that are dedicated to the actual project, working alongside SAP for the implementation, so.
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 can take that one. Sam, I knew I'd get a question from you. Does everyone know Sam was my first boss in retail?
Oh, man.
Oh, I know. Big news, right? As I said, we're looking at major gateway cities for the flagship. We are looking in Europe, we'll be looking in London, as I mentioned. As we look outside in Latin America, we're 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's 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. 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. 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 two main competitors in the same market, they have 8,000-9,000 stores of distribution. 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-1,500, and we're just guessing at this point.
I think what the role that digital's going to play is really going to be evolving. Without question, you need a physical manifestation of the brand. Any of you who 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. You really feel the brand, it really helps us activate in a big way.
Great. Thanks. It's Erinn Murphy at Piper Jaffray. I guess I had a two-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 tastes? 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?
Henry, you want to go?
Yeah.
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. 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. We're very comfortable in 2016 and beyond.
To add to what Henry 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. The two biggest region 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 two, three, four years to get really into profitability. We are extremely positive.
Again, adding to what Henry 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.
Question right here.
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-
Sure
...as partners or competitors as they build out their own ecosystems and communities?
Yeah. I think the biggest differentiator, people ask a lot about, where does Google and Apple sit, kind of the two biggest players, Google Fit and Apple HealthKit. We really see them as partners from an integration perspective. It makes it easier for the customer to potentially get data in, so our syncing with those environments. 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. I would call Apple HealthKit and Google Fit really the pipes from those devices in areas. We're very strong partners with them. Google Android just did a big feature for Record that drove huge amounts of downloads. We've done really well on Watch since it released with all four applications.
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. They are definitely major partners. Fitbit is also a major partner. Biggest integrator just from a data perspective on MyFitnessPal, on MapMyFitness. 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. From a user perspective, data should be shared both ways. If somebody wants to take data back, we're not holding them back from doing that in the open platform.
Then just-
Let me take a minute to just sort of shape the broader conversation as well for the company. Hopefully it came across today as 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. 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 and 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 happens when Samsung comes out with a T-shirt?
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. That's how we're really pressing the team and what has led to the entire Connected Fitness initiative as a whole, 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's cool?" I think those are the ones who are going to be left out in the cold. We, A, want to have a great, cool logo, and that's Adrienne, that's our marketing team's jobs to ensure that that's happening.
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?
Okay. 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.
When it does happen, we'll do it first.
Yep.
Last question in the front.
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, "Kevin, this is one of the top 10 investor days I've ever been to. I've been to over 500." I was like they looked at me and he said, "Isn't that great?" I said, "Well, who's number 1 then?" "We'll get better next time.
Well, Kevin, I want to ask you a question about your whiteboard. I saw a story with you once where I think you had on your whiteboard said, "27/24, never again," which was kind of a play on a football story from a while ago, but also was about you didn't want to see SG&A grow faster than sales, and there was a fiscal year plan that came to you, and it was SG&A was going to grow 27% and sales was going to grow 24%, which led to the whiteboard comment. 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. I 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 pound-foolish to not invest that money today and not go after becoming the global brand that you want to be?
Yeah. One of those often-asked questions I get from people is, when it's an entrepreneur or someone else and they say, "Give me a piece of advice. Tell me, what do you think? What do you know?" I always struggle with the answer. Henry actually said something one day that actually really rang true with me, he said, "It's important that, what are we famous for?" To really frame the thing, like what is Under Armour famous for? Now that's my answer, when I say to people, "What advice can I give you about your business?" Saying, "Focus your business on becoming famous for one very important thing." At Under Armour, I feel like we've done that. One of the keys and the other things in order to running a good business, I believe, is focus.
What we say here is that we want to do everything. We expect to do everything. We expect to play in all categories. From launching shoes, of the 5 categories in shoes that we launched into from 2006 to 2010, we said, "You know what? We're not launching any 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. As we look at that, we're not opening new businesses. We're not thinking about, frankly, additional acquisitions. 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 five key growth drivers, we think it's really important. We think it's going to be incredibly additive.
Frankly, we still think it's a bit of a work in progress. So when you're asking for the $200 million by 2018, yeah, 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. There's also this massive upside that we believe the lottery ticket, the return is worth the investment. So you're right. That 27 versus 24, we walked into a year and said we were de-leveraging walking into a year, and you're going, how does that happen? These are part of the lessons that you learn in 20 years doing it, 10 years as a public company. 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% range on the operating income side, and you look and say, could we do more, should we do more? I believe that the value of this company is not built in a few bips of operating margin improvement in the short term. I do believe it's something that needs to play out over the long term.
What I want you to understand is that, when I use the whole analogy about the map differing from the terrain, 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 and resume of investing in things that create and bring return to the company. I do believe there's certain things that 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. We're in the deep end of the pool. We recognize that more than anyone else.
I want you to understand is that beneath it of it all, we have the underpinnings of this efficient shirts and shoes business, which is highly profitable. 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 two Connected Fitness companies, was talking about how our other businesses, our mature businesses, are actually leveraging right now. Without doing any of these other things, 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.
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," I just don't believe that that is the case. I want you to know, we appreciate, we respect what that means. I think that it's up to us, this management team, to be prudent about the way that we're spending those dollars and putting them appropriately. First 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 billion, we're very small in our industry.
We believe that for us to create and to get to scale, that achieving size is very important for us right now, too, to give us the additional revenue dollars, to give us the additional investment dollars that'll 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. 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 was pretty good. You guys want to grab these and take them off? It's been a fun day, hopefully, for you. Just let these guys grab them. They're grown-ups. They can do it. We always have one final surprise for the day, and we wanted to do that. Today would be absolutely no different. For all of you, I don't know how many sports fans are in the audience. Sam Poser, I see you there. I did not know the Susie McCabe fact, though, either.
We wanted to bring out a very special guest. That one today is someone who happens to actually be. Let me make sure I don't mess this up. He won the 2014-15 Most Valuable Player trophy for the NBA. He won the 2014-15 championship out of a little place called San Francisco for the Golden State Warriors, and he won the Three-Point Contest 2014 NBA All-Star Game. Ladies and gentlemen, help me welcome to the stage Mr. Stephen Curry. Stephen, what's going on? Wonderful.
Appreciate you having me.
How are you?
Check, check. There we go.
Your mic's okay?
Yes, sir. How's everybody doing?
I think they're okay. They had a good day.
All right.
You spend 50 hours on a plane with another man for five days, you learn a lot about them. We could've used a couple more weeks before we saw each other again, right?
Yes, sir.
You know what? It's always good seeing you.
Great to see you. Glad to be on campus, obviously in front of you important people.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're coming off the heels of a great trip, taking the brand overseas to Asia. It was a lot of fun. I'm glad to get a little bit of rest on the back end, though.
Did you fall asleep when you got home?
Right away. We had a little vacation with my family right after. I got to spend that good time. Obviously back here to the East Coast.
Yeah, we're good. I know. Appreciate you coming down too, Steph. When we were over in Asia, first stop we did was into Tokyo. It was an amazing event. I think probably, I think you were impressed, you loved it, and you handed it over to the audience, walking into Manila. Let me just set it up for everyone. We head into the Mall of Asia. We were hosting this event. It's a 10,000-seat arena. Literally there was thousands of people outside as well, holding Curry signs, chanting your name. Walking in there with "The Champions Here" song playing.
Unbelievable
what was that like for you in just sort of moment in time, pinch yourself?
That was a very surreal day. Like you said, this one arena came to just see us.
Yeah.
Walking into the back of the stage, like I was here, and hearing the crowd and the whole drum preparation, and like you said, the "Champions Here" song. It just kind of was a nice come-to moment of just enjoying what basketball has done for me, for the brand, and being able to share that with all our fans all across the world. I go to All-Star weekend every year, and they have All-Star Saturday night, where there's the three-point shootout, the dunk contest and all that. It was basically that event just for us.
Right.
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 to dunk, which I rarely ever do. That was fun.
You said that to me, and I said, "What's this like?" You go, "It's like NBA All-Star weekend, but I'm the only one here." It's good to get that attention, isn't it? I think we were talking about the first time that happened was, for us, it's obviously that's been watching in your entire life. You've been an underdog, you were under-recruited. I think people always look past you and those kind of things. Then coming and watching sort of the last couple of years and what you've done with your career, what has that been? 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 of trying to rattle the world, I really attached to that from day one when I was introduced to your guys' vision and our vision.
Yes.
Basically, the last three years have been a lot of hard work. Being a part of a great team on the court and off, which is obviously huge in anything that you do, if you want to be successful, is aligning yourself with the right people. I've been fortunate enough to have a great situation out in the Bay Area with the team I'm playing with, 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 overcoming adversity with injuries, 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.
The last two years, Under Armour's had a huge part in that, keeping me on the floor, keeping me healthy, allowing me to not really think about ankle injuries and things like that, just worry about putting the ball in the basket. Hopefully that story is inspiring to a lot of people.
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 We had lunch with Yao Ming.
Yao Ming.
Which was like, when he's sitting down and you walk in.
They could put that picture up there.
We should put it up there. Yao stands up, and you think you're ready for it, and then he stands up and you're like, "I can't believe how tall he is." People look at Stephen and they're saying, "I could shoot like that," maybe, right?
Yeah.
It only costs you, like, 1,000 shots a day since you've been three years old.
You put the time in. You don't need to be 240 with a 40-inch vert.
Right.
Blazing speed to do what I do. I hope that definitely resounds well more than any other guys.
You have that too, so that never hurts. Coming of age, I think a cool thing is actually when we launched the Curry One, I'll never forget the expression that you had is that we did this event in our Soho store in New York. You're pulling up on Broadway, and there's a cool video of you actually doing it. 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. There's probably like 3,000 people just crowding the streets, 4,000 people. You have this look on your face like, "Are they all here for me?
Yeah.
Right?
We turned the corner and like you said, you see this seven deep from the stores to the street all the way down that side street. It all kind of hits you, like, "What are they doing? Are they here to see me?" That kind of deal. My agency, who was kind of handling the event on my end, were trying to get us to go around the back because they didn't want us to go through the crowd. I'm like, "No, let's go through the front of the door. We're going in.
Right.
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. Give everybody just a little bit of basketball predictions of the year, and then I want you to tell one more story before I let you go. The team winning championships, what does it all mean? Before you even go into how you come back and do it, but what's the biggest lesson that you learned of going from somebody that was always you could've done it, maybe done it, to actually having broken through and won that ring?
You realize how hard it is to win a championship. It's been put into perspective for me over the course of this 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. They'll never be able to say that about me and my teammates, and that is something they'll never be able to take away from us. You understand just how hard it is to get there, and obviously, for the Warrior organization hadn't done it in 40 years. I hear stories about all our fans that say they were season ticket holders back in 1974, 1975, when we did it the first time. Excuse me. They've been waiting. They've been waiting.
It's been really cool to 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 one through 15, had a role, and there's something special about that. We can look back and really enjoy that team that we have, and obviously, thankfully, kept that team pretty much the same.
Yeah
coming into this year. It's definitely a 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.
Right
and we're going to work for more, and not be complacent with just one. I don't think we'll fall into that trap at all. I'm excited.
Do you still call yourself an underdog?
I keep that mentality, even though that might not be my title, I keep that mentality because I know we're going to be the hunted this year, obviously.
Right.
As long as I keep that same mentality that's gotten us to that point, then I think we'll be all right. We're two weeks away. We start training camp two weeks from today, actually.
Right.
I'm in shape. I'm excited, ready to go.
Great. Done with the banquet circuit. Done with the Asia tours, right?
Yeah.
No more ESPYs to pick up.
No more award shows. No more.
Jimmy Kimmels. You're good.
I got to check out one more late night next week in New York.
Okay. They tape it Friday. It's okay.
That's right.
That's right.
We'll be back to work two weeks from that. I'll get a little bit more golf in, maybe.
That's right.
Spend some time with the family.
You're a scratch golfer, which goes to let me ask this question then. Upon signing, when we did this Let me switch it to golf for a second. When Jordan, one of your partners, and you guys were texting back and forth-
Yeah
...during the championship. The other thing, you were helping him out 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. What Jordan said when they asked him, they said, "Why'd you pick Under Armour?" He used this phrase. He said, "It's an aggressive, young, and fearless company," which matched his game and sort of felt him. He said that, he said, "I'm an athlete, and I relate with the company," all those kind of things. With you, there's this amazing story as to how you actually selected Under Armour. Coming through, he'll know this, I'm putting him on the spot for this one.
His daughter, Riley, probably, I mean, it was like Riley for President signs.
Yeah.
in Asia. It was crazy, the overwhelming support for Riley. Little did I know until you're on a plane with another man for 50 hours, do these kind of stories come out. Tell me the story about how you actually ended up selecting the Under Armour brand, who actually made the choice.
Yeah. Like you said, we were two weeks probably after our initial meeting. I tested out the product. We were wearing the Spawns at the time.
God sent Spawns.
Which I actually, I liked.
Oh, yeah. There was a chapter for the Spawns. We needed the Spawns
the colorways for the Warriors and all that. I liked them right away. My heart was already kind of leaning and ready to make that change. We're at my agent's house in Hermosa Beach. That's nice, by the way, right?
Wait, don't say any other brand names as you go through this.
I got you. I know how to do that.
Okay, good.
We're all sitting at the house, and I have three boxes of shoes sitting in front of us. It's me, my wife, Riley at the time.
You guys know the other two, right?
Agent, family.
Okay.
Like, "Hey, Riley." We're just going to play around. She's about 14, 15 months at the time. Like, "Hey, Riley, Daddy's having a hard time picking his shoes. Which shoes do you like the best?" 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. I'm like, "All right, this is off to a good start. Here we go." She picks up the other brand shoe, looks at it again, takes a moment, surveys it, puts it in the light, she chucks it over her shoulder again. I'm like, "All right, she probably going to chuck the last one, too. This is like she thinks it's fun just to throw it." She picks up the low-top Spawn. It was 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 her day. I'm like, me and my wife looked at each other, looked at Jeff.
Yeah
My agent. We're like, "All right. Let's do it.
I know.
It's Riley.
She didn't chuck it, right, because Riley knew. Riley for president.
Riley knew.
Riley for president. Okay? Maybe one last piece of formal business, then you're actually, because I don't know if you knew it or not, amongst this crowd, there's a lot of incredible shooters out here.
That's what I've heard. That's what I've heard.
Some of these guys wanted to play a little game of.
We might have to discard the jackets, but after that, we'll be good
They want to play a little game. I know they call it horse, you call it Curry.
Right.
You said you're going to spot them C-U-R-
I gave them maybe the two Rs. Nay.
Okay. C-U-R-R. We'll see. We got a little competition out there. We'll do that in a minute. Before we do, one piece of official business. You got that envelope sticking out of your pocket.
You saw it, didn't you?
I did see that. What is that thing that's in your pocket?
Well.
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. I brought this with me, hard copy, to really establish our partnership for the next 10 years and be able to announce that today. This is my signed contract, and I'm looking forward to the future, the next 10 years and beyond, obviously. We'll do some great things, and I'm proud to be a part of Team UA.
Thank you, man.
There you go.
Awesome. My man. Awesome. Thank you very much. Awesome. As a part of this contract, you're also now a shareholder.
That's right.
Right? You can probably get some counsel from these guys on how they're doing, how the day went. Don't be like them. They ask hard questions.
Yeah.
They don't applaud a lot and things. Like you soften the crowd up. With that, a huge honor for us here with Steph and to have Steph here. We're going to take everybody from here. We've got some cocktails over by the store, then we're going to meet out on 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? Thank you all very much for coming to our Investor Day.
Thank you.
Great seeing you. Thank you, Steph Curry.
Thank you. Thank you, man.
Awesome. Congratulations.