Under Armour Plans Baltimore “Lighthouse” to Test USA-Made Shoe and Apparel Production

Plank Industries’ Sagamore Ventures said on Oct. 1, 2015, that a former city bus garage in Baltimore’s Port Covington area would house the Under Armour Lighthouse, planned for 2016. Under Armour hoped work there would let it make footwear and apparel locally for the U.S. market.

The plan

• The 133,000-square-foot City Garage at 101 W. Dickman St. was being turned into a hub for manufacturing, innovation and entrepreneurship.
• Sagamore said the Lighthouse would be “a state-of-the-art facility” for new ways to produce footwear and apparel locally.
• Kevin Haley, Under Armour’s head of innovation, told investors the Lighthouse was “the physical manifestation of Project Glory,” the company’s plan to “make the local-for-local vision come to life here in Baltimore starting in 2016.”

Why it mattered

Supply Chain Digest reported in November 2015 that Under Armour had been making about 65% of its products in China, Jordan, Vietnam or Indonesia. It said the company had already made Speedform running shoes at a Baltimore-area lingerie factory, using a process that cut the number of workers who handle each shoe from more than 150 to as few as 30.

“We want to show if we can make something as labor-intensive as a $25 T-shirt or a $100 pair of shoes in Baltimore, you can effectively make anything anywhere,” Haley said, according to Supply Chain Digest.

Auburn Bell, a marketing professor at Loyola University Maryland, told the Maryland Daily Record that making goods in the USA would cost more than in Asia. He said it could help the brand’s marketing if Under Armour found a profitable way to do it.