Under Armour
Taking Under Armour into the world of Connected Fitness
My role: Design/UX VP, team leadership for UA and MapMy products, platform design liaison with UA marketing executives.
Under Armour had huge digital aspirations, but Nike and Adidas already owned strong digital experiences that cast a halo on their merchandise. With only prototype-level fitness products, UA needed a software company with millions of users. MapMyFitness became its Connected Fitness division in Austin.
The job was two-fold: grow MapMyFitness under the Under Armour brand, and create new fitness and marketing experiences to steer 25+ million users toward UA product.
Problem: The performance apparel giant needed a real digital product hub, not a just logo on a fitness tracker.
Solution: Get fluent with the brand, lead the design of UA’s first digital product, UA Record, plus the broader connected-fitness experiences around it.
Benefit: A social fitness hub tied to UA’s athlete roster and campaigns, with MapMyFitness craft underneath.
Results during my tenure:
Shipped UA Record as the app/web hub for all UA connected fitness experiences.
Named primary inventor on a patent for Record’s activity tracking visualization.
I Will What I Want campaign platform was unprecedented female athlete support.
Never done before Jumbotron video of real MMF data, at the NYC SoHo flagship.
‘I Will What I Want’ – the campaign that transformed a company.
Our first launch was the UA Women’s I Will What I Want campaign platform experience. The campaign featured Gisele Bündchen, Lindsey Vonn, and Misty Copeland, telling their stories. We created a platform to ask women to share their own story of ‘will’ – their will to win, do, achieve. With lessons learned, we expanded to other UA groups and athletes and transformed this experience as UA Record.
Per digital agency Droga5: “Under Armour’s uber-masculine image had become a polarizing barrier to women. I WILL WHAT I WANT changed that image by celebrating women who defy expectations and ignore the noise of outside judgments.”
The entry beckons with exclusive athlete content.
Actual athlete profile pages allowed direct access to UA stars.
Our flagship: ‘UA Record’ brought all athletes together.
At the end of the I Will What I Want campaign, we reinvented it into UA Record and broadly opened the concept. This cemented UA’s claim on social fitness and activity tracking: challenges among friends, an enhanced activity feed, and continuing to support Under Armour athletes (Andy Murray, Lindsey Vonn, Misty Copeland, and more), integrating their stories into the audience at large.
Follow all your favorite UA athletes from the start.
A dashboard of all topics and activities.
Movement, sleep, workouts and friend content.
The patented activity ring + smartwatch view.
The entire day’s details & correlations of data.
Badges, challenges and leaderboards.
Our NYC SoHo Jumbotron video was like nothing seen before.
The UA Manhattan flagship store had the largest Jumbotron of any store in the world. We made a video story and statement about the scope of MapMyFitness using real, anonymized user data to create views of people working out in New York City.
