Patrik Frisk
Analyst · Baird. Your line is now open
Thanks, Kevin. In the past four months, I have traveled to Europe, Central America, Canada and all around the United States, meeting with many of our top retail accounts, manufacturing partners and the Under Armor team, and even working the floor in our own stores engaging with consumers. Following strategic deep dives in the areas I have direct responsibility for strategy, supply chain, product, marketing and sales, we have absolute clarity around the challenging impacting the company. The related root causes and the steps necessary to address them. It’s a new time and a new time requires a new playbook. And that’s one of the reasons I’m here. And what I see here is an incredible team, a team that’s used to winning. And I also see an incredible brand, a brand that is winning, but one that is not fully optimizing its strength or potential. Today, I’ll detail some initial observations and put context around our strengths and opportunities. As Kevin mentioned, we have numerous work streams in place to address our current challenges and structural complexities. Our year-end call in mid-February will provide even more detail on our plans and we’re working toward a comprehensive Investor Day next year. To build on the operate fuel innovate construct, let’s start with innovation and the importance of making great product, because our success must start and end with making great product that lights consumers, distinct, authentic, and unbelievably high-quality product, it’s our reason for existing. Blending high-performance innovation with function and style has been and will continue to be at the core of who we are. Under Armor is a performance brand. Looking back over the last few years, we’ve been inconsistent with this promise, that inconsistency stops now. Going forward, you’ll see us accelerate our purpose as a performance brand by doubling down on innovation and creating even deeper connections with our consumers, underscoring how Under Armour makes you better. That’s not to say, there’s a pause in our current pipeline though. So now I’d like to take a few moments to review some highlights for the rest of this year and into early 2018. Starting with apparel, our focus on investment around staying lighter longer has resulted in a more diversified, less key item focused assortment. New silhouettes, styles and expanded offerings in key technology platforms like Threadborne and Reactor combined with our growing sportstyle product continues to show solid demand. With our Threadborne platform from lightweight highly breathable T-shirts in warmer conditions to our fleece, seamless, and ColdGear Reactor collections for cold weather, our execution has never been sharper. This is an early, but good example of becoming consumer led, listening to their needs and delivering a layering solution that doesn’t sacrifice function for style. While we remain focused on continuing to lead with our performance positioning, another category showing strong traction is our sportstyle product. And although not yet approaching meaningful scale, these products along with early reads in our Unstoppable collection gives us confidence that we’re taking the right steps towards creating balance and our performance sportstyle offering to better align with ongoing trends. Switching to footwear, our year-to-date performance has fallen short of our expectations with results being negatively impacted due to lower demand in our North American business, especially the sports specialty channel and the continued overhang in basketball. Accordingly, we are working diligently to proactively fine tune our footwear playbook and ensure we deliver the right innovation, style and price to value equation at the right place and at the right time. To touch on a few highlights, we launched the Curry 4 Basketball shoe earlier this month, first in China and then around the world versus its predecessor, the Curry 4, used a much more direct design process taking steps to vision and ideas and bring them to life through elevated design and functionality. We’ve also revamped our flow and scarcity model in a very different approach than past versions. Less than a month in, the response has been incredibly positive from consumers, retailers, influencers and media. Moving to our largest footwear category and biggest long-term growth opportunity running, we remain focused on delivering innovation, innovation in manufacturing and innovation in functionality and performance. Starting with manufacturing, we’re excited to announce our limited release, UA Charge Patriot footwear in November. The Patriot is the first footwear to come to market from investments in our advanced manufacturing Lighthouse center right here in Baltimore. Available in men’s and women’s styles, it’s an important step in driving design and innovation closer to market with every shoe assembled here in the United States. And very exciting for us is the spring 2018 launch of our new cushioning platform called HOVR, that’s HOVR. The new HOVR cushioning system features the rare combination of superior energy return and impact absorption. They wrapped the HOVR cushioning in Under Armour’s energy web technology to control and direct energy right back to the runner stride. The goal here was to give runners a zero gravity feel and that’s exactly what HOVR accomplishes. This new platform becomes our third distinct cushioning technology along with Micro G and Charged and further demonstrates our commitment to running as one of our largest growth opportunities. And the technology in these shoes is not only limited to cushioning. Our first shoe using HOVR also features our next generation embedded connected sensor that tracks distance, cadence, pace and shoe life. This ties into our overall Connected Fitness strategy connecting runners to our global community through our run apps. The HOVR launch demonstrates the first true manifestation of digital, meaning physical, providing runners with advantages that make them better, smarter and capable of more than they ever knew possible. Our Connected Fitness strategy stretches beyond connected shoes with an ecosystem of nutrition, sleep, activity and fitness. With more than 220 million registered users and growing, we continue to lead in digital health and fitness from athlete performance to athletes recovery, driving brand awareness and ultimately selling more shirts and shoes. Moving to operate, an area where I’ve been spending the majority of my time. This is where I believe I can have the largest impact to establish more consistency and our ability to delight the consumer, strengthen our brand and deliver sustainable profitable growth. In order to drive stronger operational discipline, I’ll break it out into three key areas, structure, process and go-to-market. From a structure and process perspective strategically and mechanically, I see a company that has in many ways willed itself to get to where we are today. Our approach has certainly been successful in many fronts, but inefficient in others. While we stand up our category management structure, we’re making real-time course corrections to improve our speed, efficiency and quite frankly, our profitability. In this effort, we’re in the weeds, working to create dramatically better synergy between how design, supply chain and our segmentation approach is supported by our merchandising, demand creation and distribution structure. Within our quickly evolving matrix organization, it’s just about that organization. From standardizing everyday procedures like planning, business reviews and the use of data and analytics to establishing a team, capable of making business and brand right decisions quickly, we’re optimizing our ability to commercialize and make our business stronger and faster. We’re also executing on our restructuring plan to narrow our focus and shift our privatization into areas with the highest opportunity for growth and profitable returns. And we have implemented systems upgrades, including the July 1st launch of our integrated ERP Business Solution. This includes our point-of-sale, warehouse management, inventory control, merchandising and product allocation systems in both North America and Europe. And while these enhancements are designed to enable us to more effectively and efficiently operate our business and ultimately enhance productivity for the long-term, the implementation caused disruption in our supply chain operations during the quarter. This led to delayed shipments and loss of productivity, which negatively impacted our third quarter results. During this system migration, we have encountered a number of change management issues impacting our workforce and manufacturing partners as they adapt to the new platform and processes. That said, while this is a key factor impacting our fourth quarter and full-year outlook, we’re seeing improvements to our service levels and expect them to begin to normalize through the balance of the year. And finally, we’re managing our brand to the marketplace by adjusting our inventory strategy to work toward a position, where we can better protect the brand and drive healthy growth in our direct-to-consumer and wholesale channels. In total, once the structure is set and the processes in place, that becomes the core of our go-to-market and GTM strategy. This end-to-end approach then becomes repeatable ensuring a more consistent and predictable outcome. Crucial to a successful GTM strategy is consumer insights, an area that we see as a tremendous opportunity to both strengthen and elevate. In this respect, we’ve begun to work on a consumer segmentation study, targeting more than 20,000 people from around the world, coupled with tens of millions of active users in our Connected Fitness community. The combination of this rich data set will help to more clearly define our global consumer target. Defining our consumer will further enhance our ability to maximize our GTM strategy from product design, development and manufacturing to marketing, segmentation and merchandising. At the end of the day, addressing our structure process and go-to-market opportunities is an engineering undertaking that becomes an incredibly powerful tool as we look to reduce the friction in our current 18 to 20-month product calendar down to about 12 months. When well done efficiently and repeatedly, it yields flexibility, flexibility for choices and strategies to fuel this brand and to – and our ability to engage, maintain and grow our consumer base. And on the macro level, what’s happening right now is a change in the consumer, how the consumer chooses to engage with our brand and how they choose to shop our brand. Achieving our growth potential means, we need to continue to fuel the brand to maximize our connection with consumers. We have one of the most unique brand communities on the planet, the relationship we cherish and never take for granted. As consumer behavior shifts, we must ensure that we are delivering compelling, creative and inspiring content as quickly as they are moving. The speed and relevancy at which we can promote our brand ethos through our storytelling is critical to our success and ensures a seat at the table and consumer’s intent to buy. Category management, digital and obsessing the details of product will enable Under Armour to continue to deepen and strengthen our connection with the consumer, while we continue to delight and inspire them in new ways they have never experienced before. Before handing it over to Dave, I will close by saying that in 2017 and 2018, we are slowing down to speed up. What does that mean? It means that independent of the macro factors compounding the outlook for our North American wholesale business, we are simultaneously reengineering our foundation, sharpening the organization and learning what it means to operate as a big company. Based on my 30 years in this industry, I’m resolute and optimistic about the opportunity for Under Armour. Within use we’re delivering today, it might sound a little bit out of sync. But I assure you, we are clear headed and well aware of the issues at hand and a tremendous amount of work ahead of us. Nearly a year into what we believe will be a two-year journey, the strength of this global team are accelerating global scale and share willingness to evolve and become a better company is undeniably confidence inspiring. Dave?