How I Did It: Kevin Plank

For the founder of apparel-maker Under Armour, entrepreneurship is 99% perspiration and 1% polyester.

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As told to Mark Hyman

Kevin Plank's unremarkable career as a college football player hardly ranks him with the greats of the gridiron. But Under Armour, a bright idea hatched during his days as a walk-on fullback at the University of Maryland, has taken Plank, 31, to the end zone in the sports apparel industry.

This year, Under Armour Performance Apparel, the seven-year-old company Plank launched from his grandmother's townhouse in Washington, D.C., ranked second on the Inc. 500 list and will top $110 million in revenue. Its perspiration-wicking clothing is worn by baseball stars Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, countless other sweat-soaked pros, some 100 college football teams, and the cast of ESPN's sports opera, Playmakers.

I've always been a hustler. I don't mean that in the literal sense. When I was 14 or 15, my brother Scott, who works with me at Under Armour, came back from Guatemala with a bunch of knitted bracelets you see at Grateful Dead shows. Scott had this proposition for me and my brother Colin: "Listen, there's a Dead show coming to town. We'll go down and sell these bracelets and make a lot of money." We took the subway down. At noon, Scott said, "We'll meet back here in three hours." Later, we meet up. Colin--he's a writer, works for Disney in L.A. now--said, "I sold the first two. Then I started feeling guilty about how much money I was charging, so I gave the rest away." Scott, who's more of a finance guy, loves the Wall Street thing, says, "I made about 70 bucks." I say, "I have about 580 bucks in my pocket. And I need more bracelets." Right there, I knew I was pretty good at this.

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. I started with a friend at Maryland. He'd buy the T-shirts at $3 and sell to me at $4. I'd put on this vest, a big floppy hat, and grow my beard out for three or four days. Then I'd walk around and sell T-shirts. Eventually, some real Dead heads figured me out: "Hey, you're not a Dead head, you capitalist pig. Get out of here!"

One of my clearest memories of college is my strength coach at Maryland saying, "Plank, stop worrying about all this other [business] crap and just commit yourself to playing football. You have the rest of your life to do these other things." But I could never stop. I remember thinking how much fun it would be just to sit at a desk and think, "All right, how are we going to make a buck?"

The idea was to create a T-shirt that wouldn't hold moisture--more important, that wouldn't hold the moisture's weight. As I developed the prototype, I began to get samples out to a network of college and pro players I had access to. From high school and college, I knew guys like Jermaine Lewis and Frank Wychek and Eddie George, players who had gone on to play in the NFL. I remember reading about this small [apparel] company that sent Mike Tyson a hat, back in the early '90s. Out of nowhere, he put the hat on during a post-fight interview. These guys ended up getting orders for a quarter of a million dollars. There was a little of that to my thought process.

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