Kevin Plank Quotations

Brand is not a product, that's for sure; it's not one item. It's an idea, it's a theory, it's a meaning, it's how you carry yourself. It's aspirational, it's inspirational.

My first real business was bootlegging T-shirts - I was just a dumb kid. You go to a concert and pay $25 for a cotton T-shirt that says 'Rolling Stones,' 'Lollapalooza,' or whatever. On the outside they're 10 or 15 bucks. We were the guys selling them for 10 or 15 bucks.

Motivation, passion, and focus have to come from the top.

Randy Edsall is a good, strong, decent man who is working his tail off on behalf of the University of Maryland. And there are more people that want to spend their days burning things down than building it up. At least just stop rooting against him. You know, give the guy a chance.

The sports apparel industry was dominated by the big shoe companies. But there was a void in apparel and I decided to fill it.

My love of horses began in College Park, with me and 10 friends on two couches and a keg of beer in the back of a truck, heading to Pimlico at 6 A.M. to mark our place in the middle of the Preakness infield, where we never saw a horse run.

You're convincing these big, tough football players to wear what was essentially women's lingerie. There was a little bit of a Jedi mind trick that needed to take place. The product really spoke for itself once guys felt it and touched it.

I'm usually a pretty intense person. Give me an inch, and I'm going to go.

All we're trying to do is change how people think about fitness. And build Under Armour into the biggest brand in the entire land.

You need to put your hands around the throat of your business, and you need to run it. There's no other way.

I'm a big advocate of the power of positive thinking, particularly for small businesses.

Before Under Armour, the only choices you had were to wear a short-sleeved cotton T-shirt in the summer or a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt in the winter. Why not make a better piece of equipment for underneath the shoulder pads?

I was always telling people I was doing great, even if I wasn't.

I wake up in the morning and I think about one brand. I don't have enough time to wake up twice and think about two.

Any self-respecting entrepreneur has borrowed money from their mother at some point.

As foreign as it would be for you to go running in regular shoes, I want it to be just as foreign for you not to work out in your Under Armour.

I wanted to make the world's greatest football undershirt. But I realized that no team sport had equipment for apparel. Apparel was an afterthought.

When you see most companies get big, they want to shout about all they've done. But the consumer wants to know: 'What have you done for me lately?'

I realized early on that I was pretty good at organizing. A lot of it was about control. While my friends were out getting hammered at concerts, I was making money. I am a control freak.

I was a general business major, which meant that in any business school and particularly at Smith School, which is a very good school, you do a lot of team projects. Well I was the guy who gave the presentations for the team projects.

It's a fire, it's a passion to get out and to create and to innovate. And that I've always enjoyed and I've always been very proud of is that the people I've done business with, the people around me have always made money.

We need to stop making wide-body seats on airplanes, stop accommodating that, because it's not healthy.

Best merchants are the ones who dictate cool, not those who try to predict it!

Where can we take no the product, but the idea?

Great brands are like great stories. And every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And our job is to make sure that every chapter of our stories makes sense to the one in front of it and make sense to the one after it. There is no such thing as an overnight success. You have to get up and put your work boots on every single day.

One of our first customers asked me how big we want to be. I said I want to be really big. Later, it bothered me that I answered that way. Now I say I just want to be a great company.

There's an entrepreneur right now, scared to death, making excuses, saying, 'It's not the right time just yet.' There's no such thing as a good time. I started an apparel-manufacturing business in the tech-boom years. I mean, come on. Get out of your garage and go take a chance, and start your business.