Visionary Chief Creative Officer Jeff Kling wanted to offer Fallon-friendly Under Armour more than just market growing advertising creative. Understanding the client’s larger goal of going beyond competitive maintenance to stand-alone brand value, he asked EGG to imagine an ownable new technology-for-product that UA could own.
Client:
(Fallon for: Under Armour)
The aggressive under-apparel entrant into the sportswear category had been enjoying double digit year-on-year growth, expanding through general sports apparel boldly into footwear and other saturated segments. Its CEO had maintained success not by resting on laurels, but by continually reinvesting in the future, and given structural issues with key sports-apparel channel knew that future growth could not be dependent on sports apparel alone. The company had already invested in connected digital services for its core customer.
Our mission was to find a category-creating new technology that could be productized across a range of items and that could be proprietary to the company for over a decade.
Knowing the brand’s core signal was “performance” we focused on exploring performance enhancement technologies outside of “new traditional” embedded software or aftermarket digital add-ons. From the beginning, we knew the technical focus would be in nanotech and materials science.
So we started at the core: with the athlete; A) everyday and B) advanced, at the performance edge versus the center. Testing physiological changes in these athletes during highest competitive activity ranges. This included heat mapping to see changes in muscular use by a variety of individuals in different sports.
We noted the consistencies between athletes of various sports after 10, 20, 30 minutes of high intensity competitive activity: a slight increase in temperature around any fat-bearing locations, due to access of this energy during activity, but a significantly higher increase in temperature in the areas of highest muscle density.
While part of our project vision charter referenced “body enhancement” for athletic men, the original focus was not cosmetic, such as the breakthrough brand “Spanx” (which focused on body shape/reduction targeting women). Additionally, we had analyzed the (unintended) success of compression suits and increased presence in high-level competition, now proven to speed recovery, increase blood flow, and therefore, improve athletic performance. This was base technology (meaning it was not patented as it was a market-adjusted blend primarily of spandex and nylon, and no technically new material).
Most materials expand when heated. In some cases, material modifications can be made to accelerate and increase the total expansion. We’d also started experimenting with materials that would contract at specific temperatures, working with scandium trifluoride (SCF3) to create a new material that would contract specifically in the heat zone associated with active fat-storing areas.
What we designed, and found necessary to split into two separate patents (utility and process), was a multi-segment combination that provided compression while expanding in key muscle use areas, while contracting in high fat areas, and providing enhanced bloodflow specifically to high-use (for individual athlete by sport) muscle areas for additional active recovery — and — increased power at key points of stretching, for muscles temporarily “passive” during specific movement.
By focusing on core material engineering and not after-market technology, we were also able to produce at a competitive price point.
However, we also realized we’d also created “Spanx® for men”; except with the opposite core function. Instead of hiding fat for spot-shaping, this line enhanced native musculature proportional to their own body (natural looking), while reducing fat-bearing areas simply by natural compression without expansion.
For the general everyday athlete population, this was the major brand hook, and we named the product Alphawear with it in mind, and developed an on (client) brand logo for fit.
In addition, Alphawear was not purely a cosmetic/esteem play. Aside from the added performance from supported and added flexibility, of course, as most performance experts assign a 5–10% increase/decrease in actual performance based solely on psychology, this surface physical enhancement also has a function in the athletic realm versus competitors and for the wearer. In the case of Alphawear, the increase is for the wearer, the decrease, the opponent.
