Today we’re going to talk about the power of collaboration, innovation, and sustainability in building brands that make a huge impact on consumers while leaving a smaller impression on the Earth.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Eric Liedtke, Executive Vice President of Brand Strategy, Under Armour, formerly of Adidas and Unless Collective.
Eric Liedtke has served as Executive Vice President, Brand Strategy since August 2024. Before joining Under Armour, Mr. Liedtke was the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of UNLESS COLLECTIVE, INC, a zero-plastic regenerative fashion brand acquired by Under Armour in August 2024. Before that, Mr. Liedtke spent 26 years at Adidas Group, holding senior positions in footwear marketing and executive roles as VP of Brand Marketing, SVP of Sports Performance Brand Marketing, and Head of Sports Performance, culminating in his roles as Brand President and Executive Board Member from 2014 to 2019.
RESOURCES
Under Armour website: https://www.underarmour.com
UNLESS Collective: https://unlesscollective.com/
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited.
Greg Kihlstrom:
Today we’re going to talk about the power of collaboration, innovation, and sustainability in building brands that make a huge impact on consumers while leaving a smaller impression on the earth itself. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Eric Liedtke, Executive Vice President of Brand Strategy at Under Armour, formerly of Adidas and Unless Collective. Eric, welcome to the show. Great to be here, Greg. Thanks for having me. Yeah, looking forward to talking with you about this. We’re gonna go on a little journey here, trace your career a bit from your start at Adidas to the sustainable fashion brand Unless Collective that you started and recently sold to Under Armour, where you’re currently EVP of brand strategy. So I’d love to start with first with your experience at Adidas. And you know, while you were there, you helped to achieve some massive growth, adding over 8 billion in revenue in six years from everything from the Adidas ecom platform to being a co creator of Yeezy, and several other brands and businesses as well while you’re there. So you know, in 26 years at Adidas, I’m sure you’ve got a lot of stories. But if you had to think about, you know, the most relevant lesson that you learned early on in your time there, what would it have been?
Eric Liedtke: The most relevant lesson, um, I would say the, let’s, let’s look at it through a different angle. Maybe the advice I ever got was from my CEO when he put me on the, on the, when he put me as brand president under the board, he said, Eric, don’t ask for permission, ask for my advice. And I just thought that was such a great thing to say too. I was 46 years old. I was the first American being appointed to brand president role on the board of the German run company. It was in Germany. I was clearly over my skis, but he believed in me. He wanted to show his belief in me. And so he was giving me that subtle vote of confidence that you don’t need to come to me for everything. And it was just a lesson of leadership, a lesson of vulnerability, I guess, and transparency by him. I just really got so many layers of confidence just from that one clear, simple sentence, right? Yeah, just think like, that’s something I try to model afterwards, I try to really look to how I’m empowering teams and people around me, and make sure that they feel like I’m not here to, to take the fight out of them. I’m here to encourage them in their fight. But you know, it was with with advice from time to time.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, I love that. And I love the lesson that you learned from it, right? It’s, it’s the, you know, not only the humility, but the, empowering people to do that, you know, in large orgs, there’s, you know, lots of silos and hierarchies and, and all those things, you can kind of get sucked into that if you don’t watch it. So it’s, it’s great. Yeah.
Eric Liedtke: Micromanagement of management is real, right? So there’s more examples of a toxic workforce that’s people are just keeping their thumbs on everybody, then there is that and so it was a it was a it was a great, it was a great lesson. And what I try to hold dear to me each and every day.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, that’s great. So later in your tenure there, you had some amazing success with the brands and initiatives I mentioned at the top of the show. I’m particularly curious about the ecom platform success. Can you talk a little bit about what that effort took, you know, reaching 4 billion in 2020? And what was your biggest learning from that experience?
Eric Liedtke: Well, this is the age of e-com before Shopify, right? So, everyone was making their own services and their own solutions. I think the biggest thing on the e-com side was really, and again, I apologize to all the youthful people in your audience. It’s like, we had to decide what was e-com going to be? I think time, it was this is, you know, when we were doing this was really before social accelerated, right? It was really before all these other areas where you could express your brand. So Ecom was the end all and be all of not just the brand experience, but also the shopping experience. I mean, today, when you say Ecom, I think we all agree it’s a shopping. You go into a store and what does that store look like? But back then when we were trying to do it, it was really the expression of the brand digitally. It was the home base. So it had so much depth and layers to it that had to be built out. And so there was always this constant struggle in the organization between the sales organization wanting to drive transactions and optimizing the site for shopability and the brand side of the organization wanting to optimize for a brand experience as you entered in. So, just little things like homepages and what the PDP would feature and utilize and all those different pieces were, it was almost an arm wrestling match in every little detail. So, the biggest thing that we achieved, believe it or not, was who’s going to own e-comm? Is it going to be sales or is it going to be brand? And at that point, we decided to go on the brand side. The CEO that I previously mentioned, Herbert Heiner, who gave me that great advice, chose to say the brand would drive it, but you’ll do it in close coordination with the sales organization. But once you have the clarity of what’s going to be the first read, then you can start to build from there. But I think the biggest thing was, what is the digital expression of the brand going to be? And how does product fit into that? Because obviously, product is the best expression of the brand. So I think it still resulted in a net positive with the sales growth that we had. I think that sales growth was also because of the exclusivity strategy that we put in place around, you know, the easy ranges and some of the more, the more desirable product to drive traffic and growth there. So, but I would say it was, it was, you know, it was just really coming up with those kinds of high level decisions that then would, would, would, would, you know, ladder down into being, you know, the excellence on the ground.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and I mean, to your to your point, I mean, you know, ecommerce wasn’t, you know, brand new in 2020, of course, but like, there were a lot of it sounds like there were a lot of like paradigms that had to be created through that process, right? That didn’t, you know, you’re, you’re, in a sense, inventing some things as you went. How many iterations? Like, how did how did you approach like improving it over time? Because obviously, I’m sure it went through a few iterations, right?
Eric Liedtke: Well, yeah, I mean, again, this is not 2020. This is 2014. We were in this arm wrestling, right? So this is this is a good 10 years ago. And I know that we all assume that, you know, Instagram has been here forever. It wasn’t. Right. So, you know, it just we didn’t have a brand expression outside of your website, really. So we got into wearable sports. We got into a lot of different iterations that were, you know, how do we track data? How do we track athletes when they’re performing on a team sports or individual level from a heart rate to a GPS standpoint? All of that was being housed here because this is really before the app deck started to take off. And again, I want to recognize right now. that the sporting goods industry, with the exception of few, is really a laggard in this space, right? So now people will correct me with their history of AppDex and what was available from Apple at the time. But really, when you’re talking about 2014, 2015, even 2012, when we were developing these wearable solutions, before the Apples and the Samsungs and the Googles came along with their wearables, really Nike and Adidas and even Under Armour were doing that back in the day. you know, where do you host that? Well, it was going onto the site until it went to an app. And then, you know, so it was, it was a lot of different iterations where it was trial and error. And I will say, even from a provider standpoint, a global provider, trying to have somebody that can run your e-commerce shop so it’s consistent, super difficult to have that across the board. You know, and we, we ended up going with Salesforce early on and partnered up with them from the early days, which was, you know, I think a rich experience, but I guess the iteration I would point out to you and your audiences, we quickly and over time found that the brand messaging was not the best place to be housed on your site, and that we moved more and more towards product being the hero, and that I think ended up resulting in you know, exclusive distribution on site, and that ended up driving our revenue line so much more successfully than really just having too much layers for the consumer to come through. And that was all proven out by A-B testing and seeing like, you know, if you show this or you show that, how much traffic are we getting? How sticky is it? How does it move down the funnel? Yeah, yeah.
Greg Kihlstrom: So now I want to move to talk about Unless Collective, which was really created as an antidote to fast fashion, plus the increasing plastic usage just in general, you know, and minimizing that and, you know, and how it’s built on this idea of using sustainable materials and ethical practices. So can you give us a little background on, you know, Unless and what your goal was there?
Eric Liedtke: Yeah, so taking a little story, you know, as we were doing the turnaround at Adidas, we started to really speak to all aspects of our consumers. So our consumer, like as a sports company, of course, you’re going to make product that helps them jump higher, kick stronger, run faster. But you also have to recognize the culture of sport doesn’t stop when you leave the pitch. So you start to look at the lifestyle and you start to bring in musicians and artists and entertainers and collaborations. And then if you go to the next click, it’s like, oh, but they’re all looking at their phones all the time, and they’re kind of doomscrolling 24-7. What our consumers are telling us is they want to make a difference, they just don’t know how. So in 2014, we started a relationship with Parley for the Oceans at that time. And Parley for the Oceans is an ocean advocacy group that really started to drive home the idea that you can make beautiful product out of collected ocean trash, specifically ocean plastic. And we were able to make the first ocean plastic shoe and present it to the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. And that post that we did at that point, that we put out there in the universe, went so wide and so far that it showed that doing good can also be driving brand profits and advocacy. So I was able to use that to really drive that home to the board and really make it a big initiative. We started to pick a fight with plastic, and we started to do things. And with that, a kind of light bulb went off in my head. It’s like, well, what if we were able to do the holy grail of things, of not making things out of petroleum-based products called plastics and polyesters and nylons and spandexes and elastanes and all that stuff? beautifully usable, but really bad for you when it’s when it’s done being used. So what if we could use those things and go to the Holy Grail and say, let’s make stuff just out of plants and minerals. And so this idea kind of got in my head and it was in my head for a number of years after and I was doing as much as I could for Adidas at the time against this initiative. But ultimately, you have to just go outside the machine and raise some money and do a startup. to give yourself more permission and more flexibility to really fulfill this vision you have in your head. And that’s kind of what I did at the end. That’s exactly what I did at the end of 2019. I took the step to move away from Adidas and really go into startup mode. So raise some money. with the clear intention of creating a lighthouse brand that could show the world what I call regenerative fashion could mean, which is making things out of plants and minerals that could harmlessly go away at end of life. So it doesn’t create microplastics or nanoplastics that enter our blood and enter our lungs and enter our brains. It actually just goes harmlessly away and becomes good worm and plant food.
Greg Kihlstrom: You know, you touched on this a little bit, but I want to get a little more perspective here on, you know, what do you think was important about stepping outside of a large brand to get a less collective off the ground?
Eric Liedtke: Yeah, I mean, I think everybody, that’s always the big question is why, why did you leave Adidas? Like, why, why would you, why would you, why wouldn’t you just do it there? You can’t do it there because everyone knew that was the holy grail, like to build things more harmless, to go away harmlessly. But there’s so many competing necessities for the brand to focus on, whether it be, you know, building up, uh, building up 3d printing or whether it be, um, building your sales revenue, building your e-com, uh, doing collaborations with, sports teams, or with artists, it’s like, there’s a lot of hands in that in that initiative pile of resources that you so if even if you want to go on this road, it just wasn’t getting fed. And there wasn’t the patience to build something out like that. So like I said, I decided to step away because I could focus all my time on this initiative, because that’s what I want to because at the time, it was 10% of my time maximum I could put against this. And I could have the permission to be very thoughtful, playful and have investors that are understanding the concept and supportive of the concept and giving me the time and the bandwidth to focus and bring it to life.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love it. And I mean, for what it’s worth, I love that, that mission as well. I mean, I think the, I think it’s so important to, to start solving these, these problems and, and congrats on, you know, getting acquired by Under Armour as well. And I want to, I want to move to that, you know, last, but definitely not least talk about your, your new role at Under Armour. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what, what does your role entail as EVP of Brand Strategy?
Eric Liedtke: Yeah, so Kevin Plank, the founder and CEO, and I have been talking to each other for years. And what I would say is that We see a marriage of minds where he absolutely believes in regenerative fashion of what we’re building. He is very keen on creating this as I am, the systemic change in the industry that we want to see in the world. But he also knows that he needs to build a better operational underarmor from where it is today. So the idea that we came to collectively was if he could acquire Unless and put it under the Under Armour family, that would give us the ability to scale our audience and our distribution with, you know, plugging into their networks. And I could come in and sit on his senior leadership team, and help run the similar turnaround that I championed at Adidas. So that’s the basic pillars of what we did. So when you ask me what my remit is, my remit is everything to help Under Armour be a healthier Under Armour and help where I can as a guy that’s led a turnaround in the industry before. but really focusing on operating model, focusing on strategic business plan, focusing on really brand marketing and storytelling for the brand. So those are my big buckets of responsibilities, but ultimately I’m here to help in any way I can.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so, you know, to kind of go back to the, you know, we talked about e-commerce at Adidas and, you know, how you really transformed that since 2014. What does it look like, you know, 10 years later, you know, what’s, what does the landscape look like? And, you know, what are, what are some of the key challenges that a brand like Under Armour might have?
Eric Liedtke: I think every brand is battling every day to generate more brand advocacy with its consumers and differentiated product. At the end of the day, it’s a pretty simple equation. No one out there needs a new pair of shoes or a new hoodie, you know, for the most part, you know, our job is to create objects of desire that people want to lean into. And I always use the formula of, well, what’s an object of desire? Well, it’s, it’s a pretty, it’s pretty simple formula. It’s pretty hard to get right. It’s, it’s the right product times, the right story times, the right distribution. And if you can get those things, right. then you can really create instant success or desire for your products. People always say, what does that mean? Well, if you take the world’s best running shoe and you win a bunch of marathons and you tell that story, that would be a great story, and you sell that at Running Specialty, that would be a successful recipe for you know, fantastic, you know, super foam shoe with a carbon plate running shoe, you put it on athletes and win a bunch of marathons and promote it like that from a story standpoint, and you sell it at running specialty. Okay, that’s probably gonna be a winning formula. The next one may be, oh, you can take that same running shoe, and you can make it out of, I don’t know, regenerative materials like from unless, right? Now, that’s a cool story for people. They’re like, oh, my gosh, I can wear running shoe that’s better for the world. Great story. Where do I sell it? Oh, I can sell that at my e-comm store. I can sell that at my general distribution. I can pick and choose where I want to sell that. The next idea might be you take that same, you know, running shoe. and you do a collaboration with Ronnie Figg from Kith, you know, it’s a boutique in New York, it’s actually a boutique everywhere. But and so now I’ve got a desirable shoe from a different audience. It’s the same shoe. It’s a collab with Ronnie, maybe it’s a mid cut, maybe it’s a laceless, whatever it may be. And boom, I sell it only at boutiques. Now I’ve got three different recipes or formulas of objects or desires, same shoe, the same basic chassis of the shoe, slight different twists so you get efficiencies there, three unique different stories between innovation, collaboration, and materials, three different distribution things. That’s what I mean when I say building those out. To me, that is a critical thing for all brands to do. I like to model that I think I can help do that at Under Armour, because I think that, you know, people just don’t remember that. I know since I left Adidas, I think they’ve dropped that whole scenario, even though it led to a lot of success we had. And that’s their prerogative, right? I’m not here to, to say what’s right or wrong. I’m here to say what’s worked in my history and what I hope to drive into future successes.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And I think, you know, what you’re also touching on is, you know, just this idea of, you know, multiple stories, Customers want more personalized, whether it’s stories, whether it’s products, whether it’s experiences, you know, so there’s, there’s a lot of opportunity to reach a diverse consumer set just by and, and, but reaching them requires looking at this from a lot of different angles, right? I mean, is, is the future more of those stories in other words, as, as, as you go.
Eric Liedtke: Yeah, I think absolutely the future is more stories, more creative stories, and hopefully more purpose-driven stories. And what I mean by that is, listen, the world is in a very strange place. There’s a lot of fear. There’s a lot of anger. And I think it’s people like us that have positions to kind of bring peace and happiness and serenity to the world. And I say that with all, you know, In all seriousness, I’m not joking at all. I think the private sector can play a dramatic role in helping people live happier, healthier lives. We can also do the exact opposite. And I think right now, there’s too much spiraling down. So I live with a very clear mission and a very clear why for myself. And everywhere I go, I try to bring that with me. I mean, I don’t think the ocean plastic thing was an accident that we at Adidas did that with the people that we had there at the time. And I’m very excited about the desire for Under Armour to, you know, expand playing fields and help all people. And if you think about what Under Armour does, it’s like, you know, they’re the only I-95 located brand. They’re the only brand that comes from a hard-knocked city like Baltimore. They’re the only brand that, you know, commits to, you know, helping urban cities in their community, urban schools in their community, you know, have higher graduation rates. I just think there’s tons of great stories out there that we can use for the betterment of everyone. And yes, will it help sales? Of course. But I think only when you use the power of capitalism to create change for good, does it really stick. Otherwise, you just become a finger wagging person. So I’m all about creating that kind of powerful movement from any seat I can occupy.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I love that. And I guess just to dial in on that a little bit more, I mean, definitely, I mean, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve walked the walk, so to speak, with within less collective and, you know, and really started a company that was that really did it. Right. So what would your advice, I guess, be to a to a brand, you know, there’s a lot of marketers and brand people listening to the show. How do you really live that as a brand versus, you know, there’s greenwashing as a term and, you know, and stuff like that, like, how do you actually make some, some some real efforts there versus having this stuff just be something that a brand talks about?
Eric Liedtke: Yeah, I think the brand has to be 100% consistent in its values. If they use this for virtue signaling, that’s the most disgusting thing. It’s like you’ve got to walk the talk. You’ve got to be mission aligned with what you’re trying to say. That’s one thing. And I’ll stop there because that’s a whole different podcast. I think the second thing is to really, as a startup person, as somebody that has an idea they want to express to create a change in the world that they want to see, every change starts with a step. Don’t get disappointed if the first, second, third step is very difficult. Everybody I know that’s in the startup community is going through really hard times. The capital market’s dried up. They’re having a hard time scaling money. They’re having a hard time getting an audience. I was able to leverage my experience with Adidas to get Unless into a bigger company and relieve some of those issues so we can scale faster. Everyone’s got their secret power. And don’t let perfect get in the way better. And just like take one step after another, after another, and just be determined and dogged about it.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I love it. Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining today. One last question for you. I like to ask all my guests here. What do you do to stay agile in your role? And how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Eric Liedtke: Honestly, you’ve got to take time out for yourself. I think there’s too many Gen Xers out there that believe that, you know, the grind is where the beauty lies. I tend to go the other way now with a little bit of seniority and wisdom to look back. I think Take time. Get your mindset. Take care of your mental health. Take care of your physical health. Bring them both together in some sort of way. And then make sure you really carve out time for thinking each and every day. I’m a big believer in those morning hours where you’ve got some quiet time either before the kids get up or you’ve got some quiet time before the meetings start to really think about and let your mind drift. And it doesn’t have to be about work. You have to let your mind be. the best representation of yourself and see where it takes you.
