Author Archive for creelyle22

From Locker Rooms to Runways: The Under Armour Brand Journey

Under Armour was founded by Kevin Plank in 1996. He was 24 years old and started out his company where most young entrepreneurs do, his grandmother’s basement in Washington, D.C. While in college Plank was the special team’s captain of the University of Maryland football team. So naturally he was into sports and saw an opportunity for a clothing brand. He expressed how he hated having to change out of sweaty t-shirts worn under his jerseys. He found that his compression gear stayed dry, and he realized he needed to create his clothing out of that material. His early sales were out of the trunk of his car on the East Coast.

His first big sale was $17,000 worth of gear. He sent his first prototypes to his teammates and friends to see what they thought of it. With this exercise he was then able to tweak his design and fabric choice with their feedback. Kevin decided to use the British spelling for “armour” since it was still available to be taken for his clothing line. Under Armour got a huge deal when Warner Brothers used the brand in two films, Any Given Sunday and The Replacements. When it was all said and done Plank was able to purchase an ad in ESPN The Magazine which earned him and his brand $750,00 in sales. In 2000, Under Armour became the main outfitter of the ne XFL football league. From there they earned many investments in the millions of dollars range. From there they were able to put funds to better branding, commercials, and store fronts. One main thing that has stuck is their motto “Protect this house”. This motto has been around for a very long time and is an example of keeping and sticking to something that they believe in. As many of us know, Under Armour is a very successful brand that was formed from a need for better athletic gear and look where they are today!

 

Figma: A Design Powerhouse

Origins

Has anyone here heard of Figma? I hadn’t heard of it until a few years ago. But If I were to ask if you have heard of Adobe, I bet many of you know what it is. Figma is a design platform that is a web-based design tool that allows users to create, share, and test digital products and services. It is often looped into the same group around designers when talking about Adobe and its many products. Figma’s founder Dylan Field was just 20 years old when he and his classmate Evan Wallace released it to the public. While Field was working as an intern for Flipboard and LinkedIn he was spotted to have great potential. Which they most certainly were not wrong. Against Fields’ parents’ wishes he decided to drop of college at Brown University to participate in the Thiel Fellowship program which led to him earning a $100,000 grant from Peter Thiel co-founder of PayPal.

Future Trends

It took 4 years of testing and development before it was released to market in 2016. Figma has a flexible feature set and a freemium pricing scale that helped take some market away from Adobe. Figma saw great success during the pandemic due to so many having much more free time to learn about things and software that interested them. Figma soon grew to 850 employees and was set to be bought by Adobe for $20 billion. However, this deal soon fell through in 2023 and both companies agreed to terminate their merger agreement. As of the summer of 2024 Figma was on track to hit $700 million annual recurring revenue. Nevertheless, Figma is a huge powerhouse when it comes to general design and I have found it is incredibly powerful at website design, something that think Adobe is lacking. It is a very great resource to know both design software’s because there are things that one does better than the other.

If you would like to learn more please visit https://www.figma.com/about/

Pixel To Persona: Safiya Nygaard

Safiya Nygaard is a very successful American Youtuber from Chicago, Illinois. She attended Standford University, studying English and Drama. She quickly noticed her love for production and began working for BuzzFeed in 2015. She started her career at BuzzFeed creating the popular show called Ladylike with a few others. After she left BuzzFeed she was able to put more effort into her own YouTube channel. She has gained over 10 million subscribers since she started posting on her channel in 2017.

Collabs, New Brand, and Other Opportunities:

YouTubers certainly are entrepreneurs but not what some people would think. YouTubers advertise content and as they come into their “voice” that then turns into a brand and this has been successful for many YouTubers including Safiya. Safiya has been able to be a part of many great projects and opportunities. Some of these projects include creating a lipstick collection with popular makeup brand: ColourPop. Aswell as collaborating with fellow YouTuber Cristine Rotenberg AKA Simplynailogical with a limited-edition collection of nail polish from Cristine’s brand Holo Taco. Safiya also owns her own apparel brand called Fiendish Behavior which is a perfect embodiment of who she is. She has added her makeup experiments to her hoodies, t-shirts, stickers, tote bags, blankets, and sweats. Safiya would call her clothing style as “comfortable vampire” which means wearing all black in comfortable styles and textures.

She is known for her series called “Bad Beauty Science” which essentially means mixing large amounts of a single type of products and creating a “Franken” etc (She has mixed almost every type of makeup product together).  This has iterated into many off shoots of channel topics. She loves testing “Weird Fashion” such as Platform Crocs, 9-foot-long jeans and many many more. Recently she has moved into showcasing her cool travel opportunities with her husband also fellow YouTuber Tyler Williams. They have visited an underwater hotel, slept in an Igloo, slept in a Japanese Capsule Hotel, and again many other places. As a fellow viewer and subscriber, I like to say she is an investigative channel of weird things but weird is a good thing because that makes the content very interesting. I found her channel in 2018 so I have been a loyal lover of her content for 7 years and still enjoy every aspect of her videos. One other detail I would like to mention is when she has a video idea she will do whatever it takes to complete it just because she is that interested in the topic. Some of my favorite longer more deep dive type videos include, “I Stayed At Every Hotel On The Vegas Strip”, “I Ate At Every Celebrity Chef’s Restaurant On The Vegas Strip”, and “I Got An 18th Century Makeover” just to name a few. In her 18th Century Makeover video she got the opportunity to live out her childhood dreams and visit Colonial Williamsburg and get to wear 18th century attire and get to participate in activities there. In her earlier videos she would mention how she wanted to go to Colonial Williamsburg and now she finally got to go. It was really cool for me as a fan to see her get to visit a place she always talks about, and I was very invested in videos like these.

Conclusion:

These videos take a lot of time, planning, and funding. I am amazed at the work that is put into these videos from Safiya, Tyler and their team. Both of them are also relatively young being 32 and 33 years old. They all have been working very hard on this channel and brand since they graduated college. As a long story short I really wanted to showcase at least one YouTuber in the blog post agenda and I think it is a very interesting type on Entrepreneur to research.

Here is Safiya’s YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbAwSkqJ1W_Eg7wr3cp5BUA

(I tried every method but I was unable to add any pictures, her thumbnails are really eye catching)

Ryan Lecchi: The Medical Engineer

This week I wanted to look for someone who has innovated the medical community so when I found Type Strong, I knew I needed to write about it. It’s founder Ryan Lecchi was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes his senior year of college in 2019. Ryan was very active in college and kept running into the issue of his CGM sensors getting knocked off while playing. The monitors are very expensive, and Ryan started using some other adhesive patches with some flaws and he thought he could design better ones. This is where he put his Mechanical Engineering knowledge to work. Eventually he was able to come up with a system to make the patches and soon after he released them to the public. Type Strong makes adhesive patches that go over most diabetes devices including the Freestyle Libre, Medtronic Guardian, Dexcom, Omnipod and Insulin Pump Sites. Ryan mentioned he had no idea what to do when it came to the business side of things. What helped him out was that he was very passionate about product design and functionality and on the outside, he seemed to know everything when it came to the business side. He was able to obtain the Covid-19 stimulus payment to start things off as well as support from his universities I2N an Entrepreneurship101 online program.

Early and Current Success:

At first it was slow going in terms of sales, selling only a couple of packs of patches per week. Now Type Strong has a huge online market in Australia and as of recently Type Strong can ship to most other countries. Type Strong is also stocked in other online retailers such as Diabetes NSW & ACT and many pharmacies across Australia. Type Strong was named as a top 4 Finalist in the Small Business category of the 7NEWS Young Achiever Awards NSW ACT in 2022. Type Strong as grown a lot since then and recently have gone into the business of selling pouches to hold insulin pens and needles.

Concluding Thoughts:

Type Strong is a perfect example of seeing a pain/need and innovating off of that which is very inspirational. I hope that this article can show that nothing is always easy, but nothing is impossible.

Bringing the World Together with Coffee

The Climb

Francois Reihani is someone I think needs more light shead on his amazing companies. Francois is a child of imigrant parents from France and they moved around many times from, Mexico, to LA, to finally Dallas. Francois has been working for most of his life, his dad had a heart attack which meant he and his sister had to step up to help with providing for the home. He started as a car salesman and become the highest seller on the west coast that year at just eighteen years old. Francois went to college and had many dreams about becoming an entrepreneur. This turned into opening a restaurant, which was named Pok, a poke bowl restaurant, with the help of partners. He sold his shares and set his mind on opening The Brightside Project which is apart of the La La Land Kind café.

What it is

The café is designed to help teens that have aged out of the foster system learn valuable life skills and internship opportunities. It may look like a simple coffee barista job from the outside but they are actually learning the in’s and out’s of customer service training, mentorship opportunities and much more. The internship lasts 8 weeks and at the end of it, the participants are helped with job placement, housing, schooling, and therapy.

 

Name Origin

La La Land Kind Café instantly caught my attention due to its name. Francois mentioned he was looking at his life in his young twenties and he said he hated the person he has become. This is when he decided to change his life completely and start the La La Land Kind Café. Although it sounds like it is associated with the musical romantic comedy La La Land, it technically has nothing to do with it. The meaning behind the name is that it is a place where you can go and feel a true sense of joy for life. I think he took inspiration from the plot of La La Land as that movie is very whimsical and shows real dreams in action. I think this calls back to Francois’ life very well as he was so sucessful almost as if he was dreaming up how his career would go but in reality he made it come true. He continues to make dreams come true every single day.

 

Matt Mullenweg: The founder of WordPress

Where it all began

Born and raised in Houston Texas, Matt had a seemingly normal childhood to most. He was introduced to the technological world through his father who was acomputer programmer. Eighteen-year-old Matt loved to blog on a platform called b2/cafelog. This site soon was taken down by the owners and this is where Matt decided to launch his own site with the help of his friend Mike Little. In 2003 he and Mike soon built what we know as WordPress, and it was widely received by the public. Matt was only eighteen at the time of founding WordPress and he was still in high school. Due to his chronic migraines Matt was absent from school and this could have kept him from graduating but he was able to push through. After high school Matt continued his education at The University of Houston and chose to study philosophy and political science. During college Matt still worked on WordPress and grew more and more detached from his schoolwork. This lead Matt to drop out of college in 2004 to focus on WordPress entirely.

At nineteen years old Matt was offered a job at CNET in San Fransico which allowed him to work part time on WordPress. He stayed at CNET for only a year as he wanted to work full time on WordPress. Matt began building his team adding former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider to join as CEO. Over the years Matt has joined several other ventures such as Automatic, GitLab, Global Multimedia Protocols Group, and helped launch Ping-O-Matic. Ping-O-Matic is a mechanism to help notify search engines about blog updates. These ventures led to Matt having an amazingly successful career with WordPress. WordPress powered about 40% of the internet in 2021 so one can only imagine how much it has grown in just three years. Approximately 400 million people visit WordPress sites each month. Overall, Matt Mullenweg is someone that is forgotten by most but as we can see and use in class WordPress is a very collaborative and easy service to use.