Gadgetory

everyone I'm Lauren good senior technology editor with the verge and I'm here today with Paul Pugh he is the vice president of connected fitness products for Under Armour and if you happen to miss Under Armour's announcements earlier this week at CES then you might have missed the healthbox which we're going to talk about as well as some other stuff that's going on with Under Armour right now Paul thanks so much for being here urghhh how are you feeling so far how's your si es going well somebody said it was day one but it's definitely not day one it's been a busy week and months in preparation for being here so it's super exciting but exhausting too yeah it's definitely exhausting all right well let's get into it so a couple days ago Under Armour and HTC put out the healthbox for people that maybe didn't see the healthbox it's a bunch of connected fitness devices all put in the same box they're also sold individually tell us a little bit about what's inside the box yeah I think I mean it it is a bundle but it's it's a point of view about really what it takes as an athlete to have Total Performance and so we very carefully curated what was going to be in the package so it's a risk-based wearable a connected scale and a heartrate monitor and the the real goal here is that we move the conversation just beyond workouts which is I think on Dharma as a sort of traditionally operated and brought products the workout space but we're really looking at the total total lifestyle of the athletes so that it is their sleep their fitness level there are general activity and nutrition and so the health box really brings that together so you can track all those things and get a greater awareness of how you're doing and then being able to improve your performance mm-hmm and I'm actually wearing the the new UA bands which is in the box I've been wearing it for a little while now you've got one on two well you have to be you have to be on on point right so I mean in a lot of ways to me as I've been using this I've been thinking it's a lot like some other activity trackers that we've seen it tracks your daily steps your sleep it has optical heart rate sensors which may be some other wristbands don't have and attracts a variety of different exercises so when I look at something like this I'm saying to myself it's not really the band you're necessarily trying to sell as the valuable thing here I mean you're really seems like you're really trying to get people more into Under Armour suite of apps yeah I think so apps now I've also been using the scale so there's a connected scale that now is in the health box it's 180 dollars scale on its own health box is 400 and it's kind of fun because when you step on it it says your name like for me it says hi Lauren it recognizes my weight and it tells me like how much more my don't have to lose or whatever it is but we've seen a few of these this year at the show polar has one now a connected scale and Fitbit has one whippings has one I like to say with the with the connected scale like you can truly never escape your weights yes if you step on it and you're and you're maybe you're appalled and you just you don't want it you don't want to remember what it is and it's it just gets sent to the app and it's there and the next time I open the you a record app it's my weights there yeah I mean I think it's you have to decide that that's okay I mean I think whether you're you know like whether you're logging food or logging your workouts or logging your weight you're just the general awareness of that process forces improvement so like there's behavior modifications that come with the awareness of that data it may not always be the number that you want to see but it does sit in your brain and may encourage you to make a better decision or in any number of directions in order to get you know so the next time you see that number it's the number that you want it to be right and you know I could think we try to be worse a serious company about performance and so you know like we don't want to sugarcoat it it's not we don't do sort of the you know good job like we're want to be very transparent about the information and let's you you know like come to terms with it and then but we're going to give you those actionable insights on top of that in order to you know achieve a good result and the idea is that when you send your weight or your activity levels from these different hardware products into the you a record app it's also going to your other apps it's going to MyFitnessPal stuff from that might run your goes into you a record right so you've got you've now have this family of apps that Under Armour's been building up over the past few years that you want people to sort of live in yeah I mean I think um the roots of the company to some degree it's been a very organic growth in itself and and Kevin the CEO he realized that community in the same way was helping to help propagate some of his agenda with getting people to be more aware of their fitness so he an armor made some major acquisitions in this space at bought MapMyFitness a couple years ago and then this year excuse me in 2015 they purchased My Fitness Pal and endomondo and we've just built an entirely an enormous community of users of around 160 million now on the platform and we really believe that community is a central element to you know like understanding like you know I gotta be motivated and then also having the data to extract really good insights about athletes that are very much made up like you then you can learn from one of the products that's outside of the health box you guys also announced our Under Armour's first pair of connected sneakers they're called the speedform Gemini and they have a sensor in them right so to track your runs so this to me says more than anything that it really gets back to Under Armour's core you are an apparel company you make a barrel and so if you look at the health box you say okay well there's a wristband there's a scale there's a heart strap right but all of that I mean at the end of the day you guys are just driving people back to buy more clothes right you know I mean it's we do believe that it's all connected like you know like the it is I mean that is the business that's driven the company's growth and and around you know making great apparel making great running shoes but we really understand that like it's not just like that can only get us so far we really want to be an experienced company where we're able to help people at every level of an increase in performance so like the company mission originally was you know to change the way athletes dressed and and make them down to the very bottom layer of their clothing and so now the transmissions really shifting to change the way that athletes live so that they have a total awareness of everything it takes and you know it's all additive it's not just what you wear but all the preparation that you went into your sleep previous night and what you're eating as well but then the next obvious question would be when does this tech actually just go into Under Armour clothing like I've been using a sports bra yeah I talked about this on the verge cast last night I think the li-like didn't know what to do about it I was like I've been wearing this bra but I have been wearing a sports bra that is connected sports bra from a company called ohm signal when I first liked that it looked at it I thought well this is really just a heart rate strap attached to the sports bra but the more I've been wearing it the more that I realize it's actually providing information like respiration rate and heart rate variability and things like that while I'm working out it seems to me like that's the kind of stuff like you know the hardware that you're working on the connected fitness products you're working on when are those just going to end up in Under Armour you know I think of all those things like I think the shoes a good example we like I like to say we want to be opportunistic about where we can put sensors and get good economy of scale to make difference I mean Under Armour II operates in you know millions of units volumes and like we want to be able to deliver that functionality to everybody all of our customers and the shoe was a really good place to start and with that you know we also had some requirements around usability like with the shoe the the sensors in there the batteries in there the customer does nothing there's nothing to attach there's nothing to replace they just connect it to their phone and boom they can get their workouts instantly well we've got to wrap this up but I do have one more question for you what is the coolest or weirdest thing you've seen so far at CES the coolest the weirdest thing you know like I've had so little time to be out on the show floor I'm super I want to check out the VW bus because I used to have a 78 VW bus and it's always held a special place in my heart and always the wish that they would bring that product back so I hear that there's an electric prototype on the floor someplace oh cool Paul thank you so much for joining me I'm really fun talking and good luck with the rest of CES hope to catch up with you soon okay thank you write for The Verge I'm Lauren good be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube /the Virg