Kevin Plank is the co-founder, chief executive officer, and chairman of Under Armour. His own company is one of the top companies in the sportswear industry, and he has worked very hard to make it so. Plank played football when he was younger at the University of Maryland, and while there, he also worked on his side business, which was a flower delivery venture. He made quite a bit of money for himself through his business and learned a lot about the ins and outs of being an entrepreneur during this time. During his time in college, Kevin Plank also made a discovery. His discovery was that shirts made out of synthetic fabric didn’t hold onto sweat like standard cotton shirts did.

Since no one had considered making shirts out of this kind of fabric, he got to work putting together his creative idea after he graduated. The first shirts he made were skin tight shirts that helped to wick sweat away. He was working out of the basement in his grandmother’s house in the beginning and was driving around Maryland selling his unique product out of the trunk of his car. He had an initial goal, and that goal was to create comfortable shirts that football players could wear underneath their pads. Kevin Plank recently recalled some of the events of his company’s earlier days.

He remembers a lot of his marketing strategy done in those days was done through word-of-mouth. He even admitted that the company’s logo came about by accident and that he almost named his company Body Armor instead of Under Armour. USA Today helped the company rise to prominence quite accidentally when it featured the Oakland Raiders quarterback, Jeff George on its cover page. It wasn’t long after this that the company began to receive more orders for its products. Kevin Plank was recently honored by the UCLA Anderson School of Management with the John Wooden Global Leadership Award. During his acceptance of the award, he commented that a company is like a sports team and that each of its divisions play different roles just like players on a football team do. Plank has continued to find success by building some of the best business teams in his industry.