May 26, 2020 • 31 mins
When the Maryland medical community was short on PPE, to protect frontline workers they put out a call for help. Under Armour responded to this call by pulling in their innovation team with a goal: design masks that would help prevent the spread of COVID-19. We spoke to the ground team at Under Armour’s Lighthouse facility where it all happened. What was once a place where designers and engineers tested new apparel and footwear, now serves as a PPE manufacturing plant projected to supply nearly 5 million masks and more than 200,000 gowns.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Only Ways, through a collaboration between under
Armour and I Heart Radio episode five, where there's a Will,
There's a Way. Sports has a way of giving us
something to believe in, to help lift our spirits and
forget our troubles. But the world has changed and we
(00:24):
may have to wait a good long while until we
can see our sports heroes take the stage once more.
Now it's time for someone else to pick up the
reins and give us hope. This week's episode isn't about
elite athletes pushing themselves to do superhuman feasts. It's about
regular people doing remarkable things. In the beginning days of
(00:47):
COVID nineteen, medical professionals battling this rampant disease found themselves
overwhelmed and underwater. They were running out of mask and quickly.
The University of Maryland Medical System knew that if they
couldn't get ahead of this, they would no longer be
able to keep their staff and patient safe. They decided
to reach out to the neighbors to ask for help
(01:08):
in the development of new personal protective equipment or PPE.
They sent out a lifeline of under Armour, and under
Armour answered the call in a matter of hours. Innovators
were hard at work with a simple goal design of
mass that worked. We spoke to the ground team at
(01:29):
u A's Lighthouse Facility where it all went down. What
was once a place where designers and engineers tested new
apparel and footwear now SIRS as a ppe manufacturing plant
run by volunteers from u A based for the Lighthouse
team created a cutting program where they try to maximize
(01:51):
the efficiencies and reducing the waste of the material. And
it cuts just a single cut through all the hundred
layers automatically. Some of them are going straight to hospitals
that really have a strong need and they have their
own volunteers folding them. It's uh, it's been a huge
change from the normal daily routine, but I mean through
(02:11):
an awesome bigger cause I was just trying to keep
the hospitals running. But serial science is Randy Harwood is
the head of innovation and under Armour. He's the guy
who makes it happy. When an athlete like Stephen Curry
needs a new SUE to help and perform, Randy envisions
(02:31):
the materials needed and how they'll fit together. When the
car from the medical community came, it was up to
Randy and his team to innovate. What were you hearing
about the plight of the healthcare workers, clearly doctors, nurses,
healthcare professionals. They were getting to the point where they couldn't,
(02:53):
you know, supply every patient and every doctor with the
amount of PPE that they would normally require as part
of their normal procedures, getting increasingly concerned about trying to
reduce the spread of the virus within the hospital systems.
So you have to understand that a a single doctor
(03:16):
might change a mask every time they meet with a
suspected infected person, and they might change their gown on
the outside as well, and they sometimes wear three layers
of these gowns. You have your scrubs, you have what's
called a bunny suit, which is a sealed suit, and
then you put a quick gown on top of that.
This is a high consumption rate process. So they might
(03:38):
do this thirty or fifty times a day, and some
of these hospitals were basically running out of masks. They
needed the solution now, and you had to come up
with it immediately. Our task now has been how do
we scale this idea faster? Now? The iteration is of
a different sort. Okay, we have one cutter, how can
(04:01):
we increase the number of shifts? Can we can? We
have two shifts and now we're doing three shifts. So
the cutter is working almost twenty four hours a day, NonStop,
reaching nearly three hundred thousand mass a week, three hundred
thous in masks a week. Yes, and it's not enough.
(04:32):
Here's Dr Michelle Gordine of the University of Maryland Medical System.
She was the first from the medical community to reach
out and ask for help with creating PPE. Honestly, there
are days when I think we're all just exhausted. Truthfully,
this has been since the beginning of this crisis. There
(04:55):
are no weekends. All the day's run together. Our incident commander,
who leads our group, starts every morning huddle call at
seven am. Good morning. Today is Tuesday, April. It feels
like Groundhog Day. Every single day seems the same. You
(05:17):
don't distinguish between a weekday and a weekend. There is
no downtime. I'm not saying that to complain, because we
all are incredibly committed to the work that we're doing.
We're doing this work not only for our patients and
for our staff, and our work teams were doing it
for ourselves and our family members. To write, every single
(05:39):
person has a responsibility in preventing the spread of COVID.
I think if you talk to health care professionals, most
of them will tell you, Look, healthcare is a calling.
This is something that we have chosen to do. We
want to help people, and it requires a huge amount
of dedication and teamwork and camaraderie to be able to
(06:00):
deliver healthcare under all types of circumstances. You know, you
have long days, you have stressful times, but at the
end of the day, everybody is working together for UM
a common purpose. So then when you layer something like
COVID on top of all of this, where this is
a novel virus, a new virus that we've never seen before,
(06:22):
dedication to the job did not diminish even in the
face of that danger. So one of the responsibilities that
we have is a health system, is to ensure the
highest standards of safety for our patients and for our
health care workers. That's where the masks come in right
under Armour obviously is a very important part of UM.
(06:43):
The city of Baltimore, which is where the university mayal
and medical system is headquartered, so you know, we struck
up a conversation. I'm like, hey, look, we we don't
have enough masks for our healthcare workers, and you know,
I'm asking, is there anything you guys can do? This
is Stacy Ridge, Senior direct to Global Philanthropy under Armed,
And after that conversation, I quickly connected the team to
(07:07):
talk about the ways that our expertise and resources could
be mobilized to support the greater good and to collaborate
as we never had before. It was a really interesting
a couple of hours to understand not only what the
resources that we could mobilize, but also could we meet
(07:29):
their expectations as well as deliver justin time resources. The
team quickly said we're in this. We want to unite
together around this one purpose and started to get to work.
I get an email from Randy up twelve forty five
or something like that on a Friday that says, call
(07:50):
me right now as soon as you get this, I
need a design in one hour. Josh Heinie is the
head of Apparel of innovation that you weigh. Over the
course of a few sure days, his team designs several
versions of mask. Here's Josh I mean, I think as
a designer, you are by nature solving a problem. How
(08:14):
can you functionally build something that someone may or may
not know they needed that improves their life in a
way that you may not even get credit for, because
the reality is it it makes something that they're doing
effortless or it makes it more enjoyable. We're solely focused
on building solutions that make athletes better. This mask is
(08:38):
something that helps make those around them better because we
had to find a way to protect as many faces
as possible in the shortest period of time that was
thoughtful and intuitive. You know, if this thing doesn't fit,
if it's not comfortable and it's not intuitive, then the
people coming into these hospitals that are in these high
(08:59):
stress environments, they're not going to use these things that
are supposed to be protective and to help them and
to help the people that are around them. So we
can't just create for the sake of creating. We have
to be empathetic to the position that these people are
gonna be in. They're gonna be tired, they're gonna be
stressed out, they're going to be exhausted. Their minds aren't
going to be functioning. The way that they would in
any other environment. So how can we make sure that
(09:21):
we reduce some of that stress and we create something
that just is intuitive and works for them without having
to think about it. Did you put the under Armor
logo on the mask? No, there's no no identification on
the mask at all. How come it's just not what
(09:42):
we're trying to do. And one of the things that
we knew early on is we wanted to share it.
And any time we start to trying to take credit
forward or anything like that, you're going to stop the
adoption of your idea. We're partnering with other brands and competitors.
Almost every competitor you can think of has taken on
our designs and is iterating themselves. So this is an
(10:04):
idea that we didn't want to have any friction to growth.
What was that process like reaching out to your competitors
and saying, hey, look this is what we got, go ahead,
use it please. I have not run into any single
company when I call them that doesn't take the call
and isn't eager to share. And we've borrowed from them
(10:27):
as well. So there's a number of suppliers that have
helped us find materials and to iterate on further mass
designs with them. I've actually never experienced quite this level
of collaboration. What did that feel like? It feels like community.
It feels like we're all in this together. Everyone that
you call immediately is interested, has ideas. There's no sense
(10:52):
of competitiveness. We start sharing our capacity with each other
things we normally guard. This is in a period of
time and sales are down and companies profits are being challenged.
So for all these companies that we're working with just
willing to go ahead and spend the money and take
the risk. That's commitment to the community. I'm very proud
(11:15):
of that. It takes the community of collaborators and even
competitors to come together to share ideas and address the
global imperative. The future is unknown. It's possible that the
country will continue to operate under social distancing and the
need for mask will unfortunately persist. There are some predictions
(11:39):
that we are probably a year or more away from
a vaccine being approved, and so absent vaccination and uh
way to cure this disease. Our best approach is prevention,
and one of the central tenants of prevention um I
believe moving forward is going to be mad asking, and
(12:00):
so for the foreseeable future, we're going to need significant
numbers of masks to be produced to protect everyone. Beyond
assisting the medical community, under armers turning its attention to
the rest of us developing masks for athletic user Here's
Patrick Freez, under Armour's own president and CEO. I think
(12:21):
for us, maybe in this crisis, we've had a little
bit of an opportunity to make life just a little
bit better for some of the people that were helping
out in this in this time of need. So unfortunately
for the world, I think masks is something we're gonna
have to live with in the foreseeable future. So of
course Andrew Armer will now be making a commercial mask
as well, right based on all the experience that we
(12:43):
got through this, and I think there's also this added
opportunity for us to innovate and think about what might
be a new reality for some of our athletes out there,
people that actually have to wear a mask when they
have to do their sport. Is there an opportunity for
under arm or to use our innovative material us, our
innovative design, our innovative manufacturing capability to actually make masks
(13:06):
that make working out with masks possible, and then ultimately
making the experience, if you like, for our focused performers
and our athletes out there, a better one. You know,
it doesn't always need to be so complicated. You know,
sometimes just taking action and going forward is more important
than anything. And I think in this time of crisis,
(13:29):
the team figured out how to make a simpler mask,
figured out how to you know, turn the equipment around,
so to speak, and then you know, we had the
volunteer step up and boom, we were off to the races.
Back to call and Randy, let's get this to the beginning.
(13:49):
How do you describe the problem to everybody and how
does the solutions start to come forth. This was very
similar to the Apollo thirteen disaster. They had an explosion
in the spacecraft or looking at it, that ruined their
(14:15):
ability to have enough oxygen for the whole trip to
get home, and so they had to figure out how
to retro fit with no tools, totally new system for
scrubbing oxygen. We've had a couple of cardiacarribbs down here too,
be It's a classic scene that is actually a good
example of what we call it constraints exercise, and we
(14:37):
do this all the time as a brand and saying
I need to keep this athlete at this level of
performance using these materials. I can only have this one
thin base layer. It has to keep them this cool,
and it has to serve this function, and it has
to handle this much moisture, and I can't just use
anything with that. I'm very limited, and we as a
(14:59):
brand do that day in and day out. The interesting
thing about the way you were talking is it almost
seemed like a coach, say a defensive coordinator that's got
to stop an offense the way you now have to
stop those droplets, knowing, okay, if I put this piece
(15:22):
right here, they're not going to be able to get
by me. Very very much like a defensive team. In fact,
it's that visual. To a material developer, we see how
moisture in particular and heat and air moves through materials.
Was there one fabric that was a defensive stopper that
you had on hand that you could put in the game.
(15:43):
We didn't want to use anything that would steal or
stress the existing mass making UH industry in the world,
or especially in the community and in the us. So
one of the constraints was, we don't want to add
to the problem. We want to only add another layer
of solutions. So we cannot use any of those standard
(16:07):
materials that are being used for mass making. This is great.
You can't use your starters. You gotta bring in. You
gotta bring in fabric off the bench that hasn't been
tested to do the job exactly exactly here, Josh again,
John Hopkins would come in all time and umms and
(16:27):
the A p. L would come in all the time,
and I would tell them this is exactly how we
act with athletes like you all right now, our athletes,
because you know exactly what's necessary, you know what works
and what doesn't work. What we're trying to do is
gain those exact insights from you in real time, because
we can ideate and we can iterate as fast as
we can to make this something that you actually need
that works for you. And they were so open and
(16:50):
appreciative of the fact that we wanted to learn from
them and evolve the work that we were doing. It
wasn't this, Hey, this is our point of view and
that's what it's going to be. It was It was
a partnership. The first is on linds that we came
up with were simple and um. We took those over
to the hospitals and they went, wow, it works, good job,
but I don't think we can use it. Why it
(17:12):
was too simple and they believe that it would not
give people the confidence that they also were trying to
create within the system. Oh, the psychology of this doesn't
feel like it's gonna work is just too large. My wife,
who is a I will call her a behavior list.
She she trains dogs. She reminded me that with any
(17:37):
idea that's well entrenched, there's always something called an extinction burst.
What is an extinction burst? And that is a recommitment
to the existing way of doing things. Generally, there's somebody
and I'm sure this is the case on the field,
or at work or in your life. As soon as
(17:59):
you get feedback, there's always the other ideas that have
been either in the back of your mind or somebody
else had that they really weren't voicing because they just
couldn't overcome the current momentum of the current idea. And
as soon as that idea starts to fall off a
little bit, those other ideas leaped to the forefront immediately,
(18:19):
and so this iterative process is actually quite fruitful. It
sounds like this is something that goes on all the time.
If you're making something for Steph Curry, maybe the same thing. No,
when we show Stepha a shoe, they are driving and
drilling him with ideas and the innovation just starts to crank.
(18:42):
So this is very much in the zone what are
the ideas that come out of this hospital system saying,
you know, good job, but it just doesn't have the look.
One of our footwear designers, Maggie, had put forward a
what we would call an or Gommi folded shape through
(19:03):
a series of folds, could conform to your face really well.
If you look at it laying flat on the table,
it looks a lot like a four tentacled octopus. It's
an extraordinarily complicated design. After several versions and countless calls
with medical stat the team landed on a final design.
(19:27):
The design is simple but effective because instead of acquiring sewing,
it's made with just a few folds. Maggie Snow got
the call on Friday to start designs and entered the
Lighthouse facility on the following Monday, we were going to
be designing some masks really quick, one material, no construction,
(19:48):
just cutting. That kind is kind of excited because it
sounds impossible. So the way that it folds, it's kind
of a unique alternative to the traditional pleated mask. Do
you fold the pleat, then you have three slots in
the fold that help you line it up, and then
you can fold the whole thing in half. And it
(20:08):
sounds really complicated and it kind of ish, but it's
still just one piece, no sewing or anything. What you
end up with this first line of defense really close
to your face, and then a second line of defense
that's like a bubble around your face. So hopefully it
gives potentially better protection than the general mask. We've heard
from some nurses that it's more comfortable to wear all day,
(20:31):
and we, yeah, we keep getting feedback from them about it.
We were realizing really quickly that in order to be successful,
we needed to have people in the Lighthouse working through
these things in real time, and so the mask went
from here's an idea of what it could be too
(20:51):
a full fledged, like signed off concept. In a matter
of three days, I think we made about twenty plus
protos in that period of time, and John Fell's own
who was a massive partner and making sure that these
things get created. He was cutting these things out in
real time for us. He was able to look at
the pattern in the cuttable width and find small ways
(21:14):
to find efficiencies to go from like sixty masks in
a cutable with eight five by just nudging things and
making small tweaks, and to create something that's insanely mark
efficient conforming to the face. And that amount of time
was was pretty crazy. What was it like putting it
(21:34):
over your face for the first time, Like I said,
I'm a material expert, watching it do exactly what you
envisioned it to do, and wearing it and realizing that
there are now hundreds of thousands of doctors and nurses
and patients who are wearing that mask and experiencing the
same thing, comfort and a little bit of security that
(21:58):
they are doing their part to help out the spread
of this COVID virus. It's it's very satisfying. If you
could get this all around the world. It sounds like
there's you're not going to be in a place where
you're gonna have extra masks. Demand is going to be there.
It really seems like you just keep on playing a
(22:18):
new game and still working against the clock. Yeah. Much
of my job right now, working from my home office,
is talking to different groups around the world who we
will send this entire kit to it. It includes the patterns,
the material, suggestions, the markers, the folding instructions, videos for
how to do the job, how to fold it, all
(22:40):
of it in a kit in a dropbox, and we
give them a link to that for anyone to replicate
this idea anywhere in the world. Do you feel like
if you had been on Apollo thirteen that you would
have landed safe and it would have been mission accomplished,
or you still feeling like you're up in the air
(23:01):
and you're not exactly sure how you're gonna land. I
think for this constraints problem, the idea of of trying
to reduce the spread of the virus, we have good solutions.
Most of this has been for the medical community, though,
so aren't current challenges How do we provide similar benefit
(23:23):
to our customers which we haven't addressed yet, So now
taking these similar ideas, they're not going to be the
same solution. How do we give our customers durable, washable
versions that do the same thing, and then past that, Okay,
how do we actually begin protecting the customer? How do
(23:44):
I create that filtration rate that stops viruses. This effort
will go on, we expect all year as we get
better and better at providing really workable solutions that actually
have a huge contributing fact to the demise of COVID nineteen.
This is wild. It's just a an exercise and constraint.
(24:10):
It relates almost seems like you're walking through a maze
where every time you get somewhere, you're blocked and you've
got to figure out a new path through. Do you
feel a sense of teamwork on this project that you've
never felt before? Yes? I um, there's a I'm trying
(24:31):
to remember his name, Oh Dan Pink. He narrows down
a lot of what we do into three things that
are required. You've got to have autonomy, so people have
to be able to work independently, and you have to
an environment where people can really iterate and try things.
You have to have mastery. You have to be really
good at what you're doing, but they're not enough. You
(24:52):
need purpose. When you attach purpose to design and purpose
to development, purpose to normal every day things like manufacturing
and assembly and video conferences. They take on a completely
different feel and kind of level of effectiveness that you
can't get any other way. So having this have such
(25:14):
an extremely important purpose has driven everybody I think. I
talk a lot with the everybody in the teams who initially,
especially during the first three weeks of development, talked about
not sleeping for that three weeks. That was gonna be
my next question if people were waking up at three
in the morning with ideas, except it sounds like they
(25:34):
didn't go to sleep. Uh, they just couldn't rest until
they felt they had a workable solution because the need
was that extreme. Once more, here's Dr Michelle Gordine. One
of the concerns that we've had as healthcare workers is, yes,
we've seen a lot of individuals in our hospitals who
(25:56):
have COVID. One of the things we're not saying curiously
in our emergency for example, are the numbers of patients
who may have otherwise been coming in with chest pain
as a sign of a heart attack, or with wheezing
a shortness of breath as a side of asthma or
other medical emergencies, and people are waiting and staying away
(26:19):
from hospitals because they're afraid that hospitals aren't safe. So basically,
what we have done to fast forward to the end
is that under Armour has produced a certain type of
cloth mask that is to be utilized for any individual,
any patient, any staff member, any visitor who enters any
(26:40):
of our facilities. And again it is for the protection
of our care team and our patients and our visitors,
and it's in line with the universal masking recommendations that
have since come out nationally, So it really really worked
out well for all of us. Here's Josh again. I
(27:01):
go back to a moment earlier on in my career
when I was working at a factory and we had
to get to about fifteen different prototypes that were highly intensive,
and you could get frustrated by the fact that you're
getting pulled back and forth simultaneously, or you can realize
what's trying to happen, which is that people are trying
to make something a magical happening in a window that
(27:23):
seems impossible. And I think I kind of leaned into
that thinking when while we were creating this mask, there's
a lot of stress happening around you, how can you
be like a moment of zen or a point of
calm to help make sure that there is a path,
there's a direction, there's there's an understanding that this is
gonna get where it needs to go because there's a
(27:46):
sense of clarity. I like those moments when it seems
like you're almost in the eye of the hurricane, um
the eye of the tornado, and and everything around you
is whirling as fast as it can, but you're so
focused on the one goal that you need to get done.
It almost made the reality of what we were going
through that much more easy because you had a purpose
(28:09):
in that exact moment, and it was honestly a complete
honor to be able to work on and to be
a part of that. Well, the beauty is it sounds
like so many people. Are those people you might like
to mention their names or well, I think there are
(28:29):
two groups of volunteers that I think of selflessly poured
themselves into this project. One is that group working in
our lighthouse facilities, the design team that had to go
in and work together. They all work in a very
strange way. They were used to standing next to a
table and look at each other's work, and they were
all working six to thirteen ft apart from each other
(28:52):
and talking by video, often within the same room. Those
people definitely were putting themselves at some risk, and Eve
intentionally tried to listen to them and keep the number
of people to as few as possible to get the
work done, to try and limit the exposure that they
would have. So this was at their request. We were
early on said, oh, let's bring in more people so
(29:14):
you guys don't have to work so many hours, and
they said, no, we'd rather have fewer people and lower exposure.
They have self sequestered themselves to only do this at lunch.
If they need to go eat, they don't order food.
They get in their car and they go to their
house and they eat there, so they have no exposure.
They all believe in what they're doing and they know
(29:34):
that if somebody gets sick in that building, then we
might have to shut down that cutter, which is now
producing three mass a week, and that's just unthinkable to them.
The other team that I really have a hat's off too,
is we have a very very large empty building that
was being remodeled and so it is now full of
folding stations, where volunteers go in and fold these mass
(29:56):
every single day of the week. There's a crew in
their folding mass for the local hospitals that are all
under ARMUR employees that are volunteering, and they don't have
to do that. It's really remarkable. I wish I could.
I'm a little too old and I'm a too high
a risk group to be able to participate. So it
has been one of the hardest things I've ever done
(30:16):
to try and direct this effort and not be able
to go in and work on it personally and not
be able to volunteer. I think you've Daniel job, well,
We've tried. It's been a team effort for sure. I
could not in any way claim this. We we all
have just been a team. Thank you so much. It
was so enjoyable for me. I had no idea of
(30:38):
what your job is, and for me to now understand
it and see how you tailored it to meet the
virus is like heroic in a in a strange way,
it's only making us better at what we do. I
think what we've learned in this effort is going to
make us better at doing our task of meeting the
(31:00):
needs of athletes. So learning how to work within these
constraints and apply them in new ways has actually made
the team stronger for what we do it every day.
This has been the only way is through a podcast
collaboration between under Armour and i AL Radio. Join us
(31:22):
next time to hear more stories of athletic performance and
what it means to push yourself through
Welcome to the Only Ways, through a collaboration between under
Armour and I Heart Radio episode five, where there's a Will,
There's a Way. Sports has a way of giving us
something to believe in, to help lift our spirits and
forget our troubles. But the world has changed and we
(00:24):
may have to wait a good long while until we
can see our sports heroes take the stage once more.
Now it's time for someone else to pick up the
reins and give us hope. This week's episode isn't about
elite athletes pushing themselves to do superhuman feasts. It's about
regular people doing remarkable things. In the beginning days of
(00:47):
COVID nineteen, medical professionals battling this rampant disease found themselves
overwhelmed and underwater. They were running out of mask and quickly.
The University of Maryland Medical System knew that if they
couldn't get ahead of this, they would no longer be
able to keep their staff and patient safe. They decided
to reach out to the neighbors to ask for help
(01:08):
in the development of new personal protective equipment or PPE.
They sent out a lifeline of under Armour, and under
Armour answered the call in a matter of hours. Innovators
were hard at work with a simple goal design of
mass that worked. We spoke to the ground team at
(01:29):
u A's Lighthouse Facility where it all went down. What
was once a place where designers and engineers tested new
apparel and footwear now SIRS as a ppe manufacturing plant
run by volunteers from u A based for the Lighthouse
team created a cutting program where they try to maximize
(01:51):
the efficiencies and reducing the waste of the material. And
it cuts just a single cut through all the hundred
layers automatically. Some of them are going straight to hospitals
that really have a strong need and they have their
own volunteers folding them. It's uh, it's been a huge
change from the normal daily routine, but I mean through
(02:11):
an awesome bigger cause I was just trying to keep
the hospitals running. But serial science is Randy Harwood is
the head of innovation and under Armour. He's the guy
who makes it happy. When an athlete like Stephen Curry
needs a new SUE to help and perform, Randy envisions
(02:31):
the materials needed and how they'll fit together. When the
car from the medical community came, it was up to
Randy and his team to innovate. What were you hearing
about the plight of the healthcare workers, clearly doctors, nurses,
healthcare professionals. They were getting to the point where they couldn't,
(02:53):
you know, supply every patient and every doctor with the
amount of PPE that they would normally require as part
of their normal procedures, getting increasingly concerned about trying to
reduce the spread of the virus within the hospital systems.
So you have to understand that a a single doctor
(03:16):
might change a mask every time they meet with a
suspected infected person, and they might change their gown on
the outside as well, and they sometimes wear three layers
of these gowns. You have your scrubs, you have what's
called a bunny suit, which is a sealed suit, and
then you put a quick gown on top of that.
This is a high consumption rate process. So they might
(03:38):
do this thirty or fifty times a day, and some
of these hospitals were basically running out of masks. They
needed the solution now, and you had to come up
with it immediately. Our task now has been how do
we scale this idea faster? Now? The iteration is of
a different sort. Okay, we have one cutter, how can
(04:01):
we increase the number of shifts? Can we can? We
have two shifts and now we're doing three shifts. So
the cutter is working almost twenty four hours a day, NonStop,
reaching nearly three hundred thousand mass a week, three hundred
thous in masks a week. Yes, and it's not enough.
(04:32):
Here's Dr Michelle Gordine of the University of Maryland Medical System.
She was the first from the medical community to reach
out and ask for help with creating PPE. Honestly, there
are days when I think we're all just exhausted. Truthfully,
this has been since the beginning of this crisis. There
(04:55):
are no weekends. All the day's run together. Our incident commander,
who leads our group, starts every morning huddle call at
seven am. Good morning. Today is Tuesday, April. It feels
like Groundhog Day. Every single day seems the same. You
(05:17):
don't distinguish between a weekday and a weekend. There is
no downtime. I'm not saying that to complain, because we
all are incredibly committed to the work that we're doing.
We're doing this work not only for our patients and
for our staff, and our work teams were doing it
for ourselves and our family members. To write, every single
(05:39):
person has a responsibility in preventing the spread of COVID.
I think if you talk to health care professionals, most
of them will tell you, Look, healthcare is a calling.
This is something that we have chosen to do. We
want to help people, and it requires a huge amount
of dedication and teamwork and camaraderie to be able to
(06:00):
deliver healthcare under all types of circumstances. You know, you
have long days, you have stressful times, but at the
end of the day, everybody is working together for UM
a common purpose. So then when you layer something like
COVID on top of all of this, where this is
a novel virus, a new virus that we've never seen before,
(06:22):
dedication to the job did not diminish even in the
face of that danger. So one of the responsibilities that
we have is a health system, is to ensure the
highest standards of safety for our patients and for our
health care workers. That's where the masks come in right
under Armour obviously is a very important part of UM.
(06:43):
The city of Baltimore, which is where the university mayal
and medical system is headquartered, so you know, we struck
up a conversation. I'm like, hey, look, we we don't
have enough masks for our healthcare workers, and you know,
I'm asking, is there anything you guys can do? This
is Stacy Ridge, Senior direct to Global Philanthropy under Armed,
And after that conversation, I quickly connected the team to
(07:07):
talk about the ways that our expertise and resources could
be mobilized to support the greater good and to collaborate
as we never had before. It was a really interesting
a couple of hours to understand not only what the
resources that we could mobilize, but also could we meet
(07:29):
their expectations as well as deliver justin time resources. The
team quickly said we're in this. We want to unite
together around this one purpose and started to get to work.
I get an email from Randy up twelve forty five
or something like that on a Friday that says, call
(07:50):
me right now as soon as you get this, I
need a design in one hour. Josh Heinie is the
head of Apparel of innovation that you weigh. Over the
course of a few sure days, his team designs several
versions of mask. Here's Josh I mean, I think as
a designer, you are by nature solving a problem. How
(08:14):
can you functionally build something that someone may or may
not know they needed that improves their life in a
way that you may not even get credit for, because
the reality is it it makes something that they're doing
effortless or it makes it more enjoyable. We're solely focused
on building solutions that make athletes better. This mask is
(08:38):
something that helps make those around them better because we
had to find a way to protect as many faces
as possible in the shortest period of time that was
thoughtful and intuitive. You know, if this thing doesn't fit,
if it's not comfortable and it's not intuitive, then the
people coming into these hospitals that are in these high
(08:59):
stress environments, they're not going to use these things that
are supposed to be protective and to help them and
to help the people that are around them. So we
can't just create for the sake of creating. We have
to be empathetic to the position that these people are
gonna be in. They're gonna be tired, they're gonna be
stressed out, they're going to be exhausted. Their minds aren't
going to be functioning. The way that they would in
any other environment. So how can we make sure that
(09:21):
we reduce some of that stress and we create something
that just is intuitive and works for them without having
to think about it. Did you put the under Armor
logo on the mask? No, there's no no identification on
the mask at all. How come it's just not what
(09:42):
we're trying to do. And one of the things that
we knew early on is we wanted to share it.
And any time we start to trying to take credit
forward or anything like that, you're going to stop the
adoption of your idea. We're partnering with other brands and competitors.
Almost every competitor you can think of has taken on
our designs and is iterating themselves. So this is an
(10:04):
idea that we didn't want to have any friction to growth.
What was that process like reaching out to your competitors
and saying, hey, look this is what we got, go ahead,
use it please. I have not run into any single
company when I call them that doesn't take the call
and isn't eager to share. And we've borrowed from them
(10:27):
as well. So there's a number of suppliers that have
helped us find materials and to iterate on further mass
designs with them. I've actually never experienced quite this level
of collaboration. What did that feel like? It feels like community.
It feels like we're all in this together. Everyone that
you call immediately is interested, has ideas. There's no sense
(10:52):
of competitiveness. We start sharing our capacity with each other
things we normally guard. This is in a period of
time and sales are down and companies profits are being challenged.
So for all these companies that we're working with just
willing to go ahead and spend the money and take
the risk. That's commitment to the community. I'm very proud
(11:15):
of that. It takes the community of collaborators and even
competitors to come together to share ideas and address the
global imperative. The future is unknown. It's possible that the
country will continue to operate under social distancing and the
need for mask will unfortunately persist. There are some predictions
(11:39):
that we are probably a year or more away from
a vaccine being approved, and so absent vaccination and uh
way to cure this disease. Our best approach is prevention,
and one of the central tenants of prevention um I
believe moving forward is going to be mad asking, and
(12:00):
so for the foreseeable future, we're going to need significant
numbers of masks to be produced to protect everyone. Beyond
assisting the medical community, under armers turning its attention to
the rest of us developing masks for athletic user Here's
Patrick Freez, under Armour's own president and CEO. I think
(12:21):
for us, maybe in this crisis, we've had a little
bit of an opportunity to make life just a little
bit better for some of the people that were helping
out in this in this time of need. So unfortunately
for the world, I think masks is something we're gonna
have to live with in the foreseeable future. So of
course Andrew Armer will now be making a commercial mask
as well, right based on all the experience that we
(12:43):
got through this, and I think there's also this added
opportunity for us to innovate and think about what might
be a new reality for some of our athletes out there,
people that actually have to wear a mask when they
have to do their sport. Is there an opportunity for
under arm or to use our innovative material us, our
innovative design, our innovative manufacturing capability to actually make masks
(13:06):
that make working out with masks possible, and then ultimately
making the experience, if you like, for our focused performers
and our athletes out there, a better one. You know,
it doesn't always need to be so complicated. You know,
sometimes just taking action and going forward is more important
than anything. And I think in this time of crisis,
(13:29):
the team figured out how to make a simpler mask,
figured out how to you know, turn the equipment around,
so to speak, and then you know, we had the
volunteer step up and boom, we were off to the races.
Back to call and Randy, let's get this to the beginning.
(13:49):
How do you describe the problem to everybody and how
does the solutions start to come forth. This was very
similar to the Apollo thirteen disaster. They had an explosion
in the spacecraft or looking at it, that ruined their
(14:15):
ability to have enough oxygen for the whole trip to
get home, and so they had to figure out how
to retro fit with no tools, totally new system for
scrubbing oxygen. We've had a couple of cardiacarribbs down here too,
be It's a classic scene that is actually a good
example of what we call it constraints exercise, and we
(14:37):
do this all the time as a brand and saying
I need to keep this athlete at this level of
performance using these materials. I can only have this one
thin base layer. It has to keep them this cool,
and it has to serve this function, and it has
to handle this much moisture, and I can't just use
anything with that. I'm very limited, and we as a
(14:59):
brand do that day in and day out. The interesting
thing about the way you were talking is it almost
seemed like a coach, say a defensive coordinator that's got
to stop an offense the way you now have to
stop those droplets, knowing, okay, if I put this piece
(15:22):
right here, they're not going to be able to get
by me. Very very much like a defensive team. In fact,
it's that visual. To a material developer, we see how
moisture in particular and heat and air moves through materials.
Was there one fabric that was a defensive stopper that
you had on hand that you could put in the game.
(15:43):
We didn't want to use anything that would steal or
stress the existing mass making UH industry in the world,
or especially in the community and in the us. So
one of the constraints was, we don't want to add
to the problem. We want to only add another layer
of solutions. So we cannot use any of those standard
(16:07):
materials that are being used for mass making. This is great.
You can't use your starters. You gotta bring in. You
gotta bring in fabric off the bench that hasn't been
tested to do the job exactly exactly here, Josh again,
John Hopkins would come in all time and umms and
(16:27):
the A p. L would come in all the time,
and I would tell them this is exactly how we
act with athletes like you all right now, our athletes,
because you know exactly what's necessary, you know what works
and what doesn't work. What we're trying to do is
gain those exact insights from you in real time, because
we can ideate and we can iterate as fast as
we can to make this something that you actually need
that works for you. And they were so open and
(16:50):
appreciative of the fact that we wanted to learn from
them and evolve the work that we were doing. It
wasn't this, Hey, this is our point of view and
that's what it's going to be. It was It was
a partnership. The first is on linds that we came
up with were simple and um. We took those over
to the hospitals and they went, wow, it works, good job,
but I don't think we can use it. Why it
(17:12):
was too simple and they believe that it would not
give people the confidence that they also were trying to
create within the system. Oh, the psychology of this doesn't
feel like it's gonna work is just too large. My wife,
who is a I will call her a behavior list.
She she trains dogs. She reminded me that with any
(17:37):
idea that's well entrenched, there's always something called an extinction burst.
What is an extinction burst? And that is a recommitment
to the existing way of doing things. Generally, there's somebody
and I'm sure this is the case on the field,
or at work or in your life. As soon as
(17:59):
you get feedback, there's always the other ideas that have
been either in the back of your mind or somebody
else had that they really weren't voicing because they just
couldn't overcome the current momentum of the current idea. And
as soon as that idea starts to fall off a
little bit, those other ideas leaped to the forefront immediately,
(18:19):
and so this iterative process is actually quite fruitful. It
sounds like this is something that goes on all the time.
If you're making something for Steph Curry, maybe the same thing. No,
when we show Stepha a shoe, they are driving and
drilling him with ideas and the innovation just starts to crank.
(18:42):
So this is very much in the zone what are
the ideas that come out of this hospital system saying,
you know, good job, but it just doesn't have the look.
One of our footwear designers, Maggie, had put forward a
what we would call an or Gommi folded shape through
(19:03):
a series of folds, could conform to your face really well.
If you look at it laying flat on the table,
it looks a lot like a four tentacled octopus. It's
an extraordinarily complicated design. After several versions and countless calls
with medical stat the team landed on a final design.
(19:27):
The design is simple but effective because instead of acquiring sewing,
it's made with just a few folds. Maggie Snow got
the call on Friday to start designs and entered the
Lighthouse facility on the following Monday, we were going to
be designing some masks really quick, one material, no construction,
(19:48):
just cutting. That kind is kind of excited because it
sounds impossible. So the way that it folds, it's kind
of a unique alternative to the traditional pleated mask. Do
you fold the pleat, then you have three slots in
the fold that help you line it up, and then
you can fold the whole thing in half. And it
(20:08):
sounds really complicated and it kind of ish, but it's
still just one piece, no sewing or anything. What you
end up with this first line of defense really close
to your face, and then a second line of defense
that's like a bubble around your face. So hopefully it
gives potentially better protection than the general mask. We've heard
from some nurses that it's more comfortable to wear all day,
(20:31):
and we, yeah, we keep getting feedback from them about it.
We were realizing really quickly that in order to be successful,
we needed to have people in the Lighthouse working through
these things in real time, and so the mask went
from here's an idea of what it could be too
(20:51):
a full fledged, like signed off concept. In a matter
of three days, I think we made about twenty plus
protos in that period of time, and John Fell's own
who was a massive partner and making sure that these
things get created. He was cutting these things out in
real time for us. He was able to look at
the pattern in the cuttable width and find small ways
(21:14):
to find efficiencies to go from like sixty masks in
a cutable with eight five by just nudging things and
making small tweaks, and to create something that's insanely mark
efficient conforming to the face. And that amount of time
was was pretty crazy. What was it like putting it
(21:34):
over your face for the first time, Like I said,
I'm a material expert, watching it do exactly what you
envisioned it to do, and wearing it and realizing that
there are now hundreds of thousands of doctors and nurses
and patients who are wearing that mask and experiencing the
same thing, comfort and a little bit of security that
(21:58):
they are doing their part to help out the spread
of this COVID virus. It's it's very satisfying. If you
could get this all around the world. It sounds like
there's you're not going to be in a place where
you're gonna have extra masks. Demand is going to be there.
It really seems like you just keep on playing a
(22:18):
new game and still working against the clock. Yeah. Much
of my job right now, working from my home office,
is talking to different groups around the world who we
will send this entire kit to it. It includes the patterns,
the material, suggestions, the markers, the folding instructions, videos for
how to do the job, how to fold it, all
(22:40):
of it in a kit in a dropbox, and we
give them a link to that for anyone to replicate
this idea anywhere in the world. Do you feel like
if you had been on Apollo thirteen that you would
have landed safe and it would have been mission accomplished,
or you still feeling like you're up in the air
(23:01):
and you're not exactly sure how you're gonna land. I
think for this constraints problem, the idea of of trying
to reduce the spread of the virus, we have good solutions.
Most of this has been for the medical community, though,
so aren't current challenges How do we provide similar benefit
(23:23):
to our customers which we haven't addressed yet, So now
taking these similar ideas, they're not going to be the
same solution. How do we give our customers durable, washable
versions that do the same thing, and then past that, Okay,
how do we actually begin protecting the customer? How do
(23:44):
I create that filtration rate that stops viruses. This effort
will go on, we expect all year as we get
better and better at providing really workable solutions that actually
have a huge contributing fact to the demise of COVID nineteen.
This is wild. It's just a an exercise and constraint.
(24:10):
It relates almost seems like you're walking through a maze
where every time you get somewhere, you're blocked and you've
got to figure out a new path through. Do you
feel a sense of teamwork on this project that you've
never felt before? Yes? I um, there's a I'm trying
(24:31):
to remember his name, Oh Dan Pink. He narrows down
a lot of what we do into three things that
are required. You've got to have autonomy, so people have
to be able to work independently, and you have to
an environment where people can really iterate and try things.
You have to have mastery. You have to be really
good at what you're doing, but they're not enough. You
(24:52):
need purpose. When you attach purpose to design and purpose
to development, purpose to normal every day things like manufacturing
and assembly and video conferences. They take on a completely
different feel and kind of level of effectiveness that you
can't get any other way. So having this have such
(25:14):
an extremely important purpose has driven everybody I think. I
talk a lot with the everybody in the teams who initially,
especially during the first three weeks of development, talked about
not sleeping for that three weeks. That was gonna be
my next question if people were waking up at three
in the morning with ideas, except it sounds like they
(25:34):
didn't go to sleep. Uh, they just couldn't rest until
they felt they had a workable solution because the need
was that extreme. Once more, here's Dr Michelle Gordine. One
of the concerns that we've had as healthcare workers is, yes,
we've seen a lot of individuals in our hospitals who
(25:56):
have COVID. One of the things we're not saying curiously
in our emergency for example, are the numbers of patients
who may have otherwise been coming in with chest pain
as a sign of a heart attack, or with wheezing
a shortness of breath as a side of asthma or
other medical emergencies, and people are waiting and staying away
(26:19):
from hospitals because they're afraid that hospitals aren't safe. So basically,
what we have done to fast forward to the end
is that under Armour has produced a certain type of
cloth mask that is to be utilized for any individual,
any patient, any staff member, any visitor who enters any
(26:40):
of our facilities. And again it is for the protection
of our care team and our patients and our visitors,
and it's in line with the universal masking recommendations that
have since come out nationally, So it really really worked
out well for all of us. Here's Josh again. I
(27:01):
go back to a moment earlier on in my career
when I was working at a factory and we had
to get to about fifteen different prototypes that were highly intensive,
and you could get frustrated by the fact that you're
getting pulled back and forth simultaneously, or you can realize
what's trying to happen, which is that people are trying
to make something a magical happening in a window that
(27:23):
seems impossible. And I think I kind of leaned into
that thinking when while we were creating this mask, there's
a lot of stress happening around you, how can you
be like a moment of zen or a point of
calm to help make sure that there is a path,
there's a direction, there's there's an understanding that this is
gonna get where it needs to go because there's a
(27:46):
sense of clarity. I like those moments when it seems
like you're almost in the eye of the hurricane, um
the eye of the tornado, and and everything around you
is whirling as fast as it can, but you're so
focused on the one goal that you need to get done.
It almost made the reality of what we were going
through that much more easy because you had a purpose
(28:09):
in that exact moment, and it was honestly a complete
honor to be able to work on and to be
a part of that. Well, the beauty is it sounds
like so many people. Are those people you might like
to mention their names or well, I think there are
(28:29):
two groups of volunteers that I think of selflessly poured
themselves into this project. One is that group working in
our lighthouse facilities, the design team that had to go
in and work together. They all work in a very
strange way. They were used to standing next to a
table and look at each other's work, and they were
all working six to thirteen ft apart from each other
(28:52):
and talking by video, often within the same room. Those
people definitely were putting themselves at some risk, and Eve
intentionally tried to listen to them and keep the number
of people to as few as possible to get the
work done, to try and limit the exposure that they
would have. So this was at their request. We were
early on said, oh, let's bring in more people so
(29:14):
you guys don't have to work so many hours, and
they said, no, we'd rather have fewer people and lower exposure.
They have self sequestered themselves to only do this at lunch.
If they need to go eat, they don't order food.
They get in their car and they go to their
house and they eat there, so they have no exposure.
They all believe in what they're doing and they know
(29:34):
that if somebody gets sick in that building, then we
might have to shut down that cutter, which is now
producing three mass a week, and that's just unthinkable to them.
The other team that I really have a hat's off too,
is we have a very very large empty building that
was being remodeled and so it is now full of
folding stations, where volunteers go in and fold these mass
(29:56):
every single day of the week. There's a crew in
their folding mass for the local hospitals that are all
under ARMUR employees that are volunteering, and they don't have
to do that. It's really remarkable. I wish I could.
I'm a little too old and I'm a too high
a risk group to be able to participate. So it
has been one of the hardest things I've ever done
(30:16):
to try and direct this effort and not be able
to go in and work on it personally and not
be able to volunteer. I think you've Daniel job, well,
We've tried. It's been a team effort for sure. I
could not in any way claim this. We we all
have just been a team. Thank you so much. It
was so enjoyable for me. I had no idea of
(30:38):
what your job is, and for me to now understand
it and see how you tailored it to meet the
virus is like heroic in a in a strange way,
it's only making us better at what we do. I
think what we've learned in this effort is going to
make us better at doing our task of meeting the
(31:00):
needs of athletes. So learning how to work within these
constraints and apply them in new ways has actually made
the team stronger for what we do it every day.
This has been the only way is through a podcast
collaboration between under Armour and i AL Radio. Join us
(31:22):
next time to hear more stories of athletic performance and
what it means to push yourself through
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