Obama'S Running Shoes, Andrea And Nike, Made 1 Billion Dollars.

One day in November 2011, President Obama, like usual, jog along the path of the White House, holding a pair of black and white three color andmar presidential version.

The left hand thumbs up, which was photographed by the media, and made Andemar, the sportswear manufacturer, famous.

Inside and outside the founder and CEO Kevin Plank's office, he wrote the team motto written over the past year, from floor to ceiling whiteboard walls: "promoting the inevitable", "perfection is the enemy of innovation", "respect everyone, and not be afraid of anyone."

He said these commandments were designed to make his employees act like entrepreneurs.

Planck's guidelines will be instilled to them in the week of new training, and written on all corridors at Headquarters: thinking like entrepreneurs, creating like innovators, doing things like teammates.

"Winning is part of our culture and culture is built on habits," Planck said.

Perhaps the official mission of the company is to try to "make all the athletes better."

There has always been such a view on high-performance clothing, but recently it has been given a new significant meaning.

Gamble with Nike

Over the past two years, Andrew spent nearly $1 billion to buy and invest in 3 leading manufacturers and food tracking mobile applications in the industry.

This allows the company to have the largest e-health community in the world, including 150 million users.

Planck envisages all users and their health indicators as a huge data engine that can drive everything from product development to marketing.

Although many observers questioned whether Andemar could generate quick return on investment, neither of the three companies was profitable, let alone shirts.

It's hard to get a place in the market.

As a former college rugby league player, Planck relied on his own initiative and founded Andemar in 1995.

At that time, there was only one simple idea: the sweater underneath the protective clothing of the players would be dragged down by their sweat when they were soaked in sweat.

After making a wet, sweat and fit alternative made from a woman's underwear, using prototype, and having his former teammates try it, Planck opened a store with his grandmother's help and got the first big ticket from Georgia Institute of Technology before going bankrupt.

The company then opened a new market for performing costumes and went public in 2005. Currently, it sponsors some of the world's top athletes, including Jordan Spieth, Stephen Currie and Lindsay Vaughan.

Now, Andrew has 13500 employees and nearly 4 billion assets around the world.

But Planck is still an entrepreneur, pursuing the bold dream of leading the company to replace Nike as the world's largest sportswear manufacturer.

In 2014, Andemar surpassed the second Adidas in the American sportswear market, but still ranked third in the world rankings.

Moreover, Nike is still much stronger. In 2015, Nike earned more than 30 billion dollars. That's why Planck is so eager to make progress.

Like Andrea's App, Nike has about 1/5 users on its Nike + platform, but in 2014, the shoe giant shut off its "burning Bracelet" health tracking business.

Although the real work is just beginning, plank has absorbed the ambition of Google and Facebook to change the world.

He envisaged that the Andemar link health project will "fundamentally affect global health".

In February, the company began selling a pair of biometrics health devices and a smart weigher jointly produced by HTC, a Taiwan smartphone company.

These measures will enable Planck to compete directly with apple and Fitbit, a new American company that develops health LOHAS products, in the rapidly growing market for wearable devices.

Fight for App

In July 2013, Planck first contacted Austen App developer, founder of MapMy Fitness, and CEO Robin Thurston for the first time. After two weeks of meeting, Andemar bought the start-up company for $150 million. Thurston continued to be responsible for App and became Andemar's chief digital executive.

In the meeting with Thurston, the first thing Planck did was play a video concept called "the future girl" made by Andrew earlier this year.

It shows the beginning of a young girl's exercise from wearing touchable clothes in the morning. This dress can provide data and even use fingertips to change colors.

Combining performance products based on performance data and interaction technology is a top priority for Andemar, which is the intuition of Planck about how the world will change.

A few years ago, Planck led a team to build an "electronic" product, and put forward a E39 Compression Shirt with a heart rate sensor for recording athletes, but it was only a small demand.

This experience led Planck to understand that Andrew could not compete with those Hard Suits Inc that employ thousands of engineers and have been making incremental innovations.

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After the completion of the acquisition, the progress of plank and Thurston was unusually slow, and they spent time planning the digital pformation of Andrew.

Thurston identified four key points of health - sleep, fitness, activities and nutrition.

Once this idea is concerned, Planck has an opportunity: the application device can not only become a collector of people's motion data, but also become a central processing unit to pform data into useful insights.

In March 2014, they spent $more than 500 million to acquire another two companies: MyFitnessPal in San Francisco (my health partner), a nutrition recording system for people to record food, and Endomondo (Sports Tracker) in Copenhagen, a private training program, almost all of which are outside the United States.

Andemar suddenly had the world's largest digital health company, hundreds of engineers and a large number of user data.

By acquiring App such as Map My Fitness and My Fitness Pal, plank turned Andemar into a technology company that understands how consumers exercise, eat and eat more.

Product development under consumer insight

Only one big problem remains unsolved: how can we help Andemar gradually disintegrate Nike's dominance or at least sell some sportswear?

There is a low red brick building through the rail track of the Andrew Park, which is the Innovation Laboratory of the company.

There, Kevin Hayley, director of product and innovation, led a team of biochemists, designers, engineers and psychologists to develop shoes and clothing products.

There are meteorological rooms to recreate different sports scenes, equipment for stretching and compressing materials, gait analysis system, washing machines and driers, 3D printers, laser cutting machines and countless other machines.

The more you go in the long, narrow lab, the more secret equipment you will find.

The prototype mechanism is built by only a small number of employees and managers, and must be passed through biometric scanner.

Before taking over the innovation lab, Hai Li established Andemar's consumer insight department.

"The secret of our success is that we are consumers," she once said.

But gradually, we are older than our customers. "

Using focus group interviews, the company used brand sponsored athletes to make product insights, sent researchers to investigate people's wardrobes, and applied online surveys.

However, Andemar did not know exactly how people used it after they bought it.

With Andemar's Connected Fitness (link health) App, he can get product design clues from 150 million target users who download App: "you can know how fast they run, how far they run, how often they go, even what brands of Greek yogurt they drink."

It usually takes 18 months to develop a piece of cloth, but Hayley wants to finish it in 1 months.

The company obtained an average running distance of 3.1 miles from MapMyFitness's data.

So we got a good reputation in publishing.

At the same time, the company added a "charged foam" insole tailored for that type of running.

More than 60% of the users of Connected Fitness ("connect health") App are women, while women only account for 30% of the sales in andream clothing.

And Andrew only 11% of its sales are internationalized, but 35% of App community users are outside the United States.

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Of course, high-risk bets on App will only be rewarded slowly.

Andemar recently increased his expectations for the next two years and estimated that net income could be doubled to $7 billion 500 million by 2018 (higher than the previous estimate of $6 billion 800 million).

Only about 2.7% of the revenue comes from App. 200 million.

But Thurston compares his e-community to "super large daily users" and is one of the quickest and practical ways to use App as a way of promotion.

For example, a device called an equipment tracker can enable Connected Fitness ("connect healthy") App users to record shoes they wear every time they go running, and remind them according to the mileage of their runs when they buy new shoes.

Cooperation with Zappo, the largest shoe seller in the US, makes it easier to order.

83% of Andemar's consumers are more willing to receive health information after fitness, so when users record their running situation, they can have an advertisement pop-up.

According to the company, the orders from App on Andrew's official website are 26% higher than those from other external channels, so establishing electricity providers in App is a top priority.

Andemar is tracking the real habits of users, and the data is more and more precise.

Ideal is full, products should be monopolized.

"I love monopoly," Planck said. "Because when I monopolize others, I can freely buy things everywhere.

If someone sells to my territory, they can not only roll up the box cars, but also pay taxes. "

He is trying to describe why it is far from enough to buy MapMyFitness; only when he controls all areas of the electronic health experience, will the real opportunities come.

If you want to really understand the athletes, you need to observe 24 hours a day what they are doing.

He bet that the private data of athletes will upset their health and the future of Andrew.

In February of this year, a App named UA Record was born. It is a comprehensive health instrument developed jointly with HTC equipment. A bracelet, a chest matching heart rate meter and a connected electronic scale are made of smooth black material, multi section red plastic material and reading device inspired by scorecard.

This App gives people an open platform for processing health data with any device.

About 1/5 of Americans download his App, so he wants to help users not only record their running time or weight loss, but also compare data to millions of other groups like them and provide valuable insights.

The system sounds too simple or a bit too smart, depending on your dedication to health.

For plank, of course, the former is: "when I woke up in the morning, my wearable device told me how long I slept, then I went to the bathroom and stood on the scale, and I had to exercise, so I put on the heart rate meter, and these data were uploaded to the shared cloud.

Then I walked around the whole day, and the health tracker recorded how many steps I had taken.

Finally, what I ate today, if I want to use MyFitnessPal to record everything, that's good; if I don't want to, I will just answer my day's ease, ordinary or heavy weight.

Planck liked his chance, partly because of the beauty of the locker room promoted by Andrea and the reputation of the brand, which could turn into any related product, because he now has more user health data than the technology giant.

"If I am right," he said, Connected Fitness ("connect health") App will "become a powerful push to turn us from shirts and footwear companies to real technology companies; if I am wrong, it will cost US $710 million".

He concluded: "the only thing we know is that we always make money."

Although Andemar has a limited reputation among Chinese consumers, it certainly will not miss the Chinese market.

In April 2011, Andemar's first Chinese store opened in Shanghai port Hui square, and opened 3-5 stores in Shanghai and Beijing in 2012.

After becoming famous brands in Shanghai and Beijing, Andrew plans to go to Harbin and other northern cities to cover the second tier cities. According to the successful experience in the United States, sponsoring athletes and fitness coaches will make the main promotion tools.

Thankfully, Andemar's business in China has also been opened.