Mary Zophres received the box on a Thursday in 1998. By Monday, the word had made it to the film’s director. Oliver Stone was interested in samples of the fledgling Under Armour brand but only if the production studio wouldn’t have to pay for the requested $44,000 in apparel. To Stone, it was free costuming for a film that was already over budget. That initial box was received by one of the most influential costume designers in all of Hollywood and it was packed by Kevin Plank, himself. Before brand executives spent hours calculating ROAs, the hard truth is that retail was mostly persistence and luck. On that day, Plank earned both.
It was a walk past Graydon Carter’s Greenwich restaurant that led me to rethink my opinion of the media industry. At the time, I was a discouraged Director of eCommerce at a media brand and things weren’t going as planned. I was missing something and I couldn’t quite figure out what. The thoughts that I’d later publish on the law of linear commercehadn’t yet fully formed in my mind, nor had my understanding of the sociological inputs that influenced the media industry as a whole.
