GlobalGrind chopped it up with Ryan Drew, Director of Footwear at Under Armour after images of President Obama rocking a pair of Under Armour “USA President PE” kicks hit the net several hours ago! UA Ambassador of Cool Brandon Jennings also appeared in another image with the shoes, the Presential Seal prominent in the picture.
We grilled Drew about the shoe; here’s what he told us.
GlobalGrind: We got a glimpse of the Obama sneaker. How psyched were you when you saw him with them?
Ryan Drew: It was great! When something like that shows up, your email starts blowing up over the weekend and people start floating images around. It’s great, fantastic, underground marketing for us, and it’s appropriate because he’s a ball player.
How long does a project like this usually take?
Well, we always sit around the office and are constantly looking for themes to build product around. Most of the time we’re just looking for excuses to come up with new color-ways so we can just make stuff for ourselves. I think Brandon was in the office and I think I ran into a guy who was connected with President Obama at the Peakness. He was talking about how he was a player. We were going back and forth about Obama’s game, saying things like, Oh I can take him!’ And “he’s got a nice left hand, you know he don’t dish the ball.’ So, I was talking to designers and I said if we were going to build him a shoe, what would it look like? That always starts the conversation. Then its onto what’s the color, what the shoe; you know he likes mid cuts, he’s not a low top guy.
You start think about colors, what color is it going to be? Is it a navy blue? Is it a royal blue? What are the themes that you’re to put on them? I mean the graphics are great because with his presence, he’s done such a great job of branding himself! So, you’ve got all these logos that are public domain. We start pulling all that stuff and just really having fun with it. When we order shoes for Brandon, Brandon is an 11 ½ but we order test sizes in 12. We ordered these shoes and we brought a bunch of them in for all the guys in the basketball category because we all wear a size 12 and that’s basically how it started.
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Now this is a first, right? This is the first president to have his own shoe, his own sneaker?
Well, I don’t know that I would necessarily consider it to be his own shoe. I mean, if the President can have a P.E [Laughs] I would say that this is it. But this isn’t anything we built specifically for him. We built it for ourselves and the team, and as an internal project. It’s cool when it ends up on the guy who inspired it but it wasn’t anything that we set out to do.
The Presidential Seal, is that public domain? If you guys wanted to market the shoe for real, could you sell it, will there be problems?
You know what, to be honest with you, that’s how little thought went into this. There was never a plan to sell it. There was never a plan to even get them on him. We just thought, ‘If Obama had a shoe what would be on it?’ Well the Presidential Seal’s gotta be on it. Most player edition shoes have their number on it. Well what’s his number? 44. What’s the sock liner graphic look like? Those were all the things that went into it. We had absolutely no idea that it would show up in public, so that’s a great question. I gotta imagine that the Presidential Seal is public domain but I don’t think its anything that we would normally put on our shoes later on [Laughs].
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What can we expect from Under Amour next?
I think the thing you can expect to see from us is, now that the lockout’s over, we had a fantastic signing with Kemba Walker and Derrick Williams in the draft. So we’ve been waiting to get those guys on board. I think people are going to be impressed with both of those guys. They’re both dynamic players so we’ve been excited to get them on court and really have them prove not only why they got drafted but why we went after them so hard, why we were aggressive about them, and why we put them in our advertising. We’ve been running our “Are You From Here” ads for the last four weeks and those guys were featured prominently. I think people are finally gonna get the chance to see them on court and understand why we were so high on them. I think that’s the thing that you’ll see immediately from us. They’re both wearing shoes that we featured in this years range and we’re building product for them for the next season as well. So that’s when those guys will start to have product that’s a little bit more tailor specific to not only their playing type but their personalities. Similar to what we’ve done with Brandon.
Speaking of specific tailoring, any plans to have a customizable color ways available to the public?
Oh, man I would love to get to that point just so I can order my own shoe! [Laughs]. I love the fact that kids can go on and customize products. I think at this point we been doing this for 40 to 50 weeks, the competition’s been doing it for 40 to 50 years so their a little ahead of us when it comes to things like personalilizing your shoes online. I think when you see it, you’re going to see it from us as an organization and not just as a category.
