 Hey 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 happened to miss Under Armour's announcements earlier this week at CES, then you might have missed the Health Box, 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 at The Verge. How are you feeling so far? How's your CES going? Well, somebody said it was day one, but it's definitely not day one. It's been a busy week or 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 Health Box. For people that maybe didn't see the Health Box, 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 is a bundle, but it's a point of view about really what it takes as an athlete to have total performance. So we very carefully curated what was going to be in the package. So it's a wrist-based wearable, a connected scale, and a heart rate monitor. The real goal here is that we move the conversation just beyond workouts, which is, I think, Under Armour has sort of traditionally operated and brought products to the workout space, but we're really looking at the total lifestyle of the athlete. So that is their sleep, their fitness level, their 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. I'm actually wearing the new UA band, which is in the box. I've been wearing it for a little while now. You've got one on too. Well, you have to be 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 maybe some other wristbands don't have, and it tracks 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, it seems like you're really trying to get people more into Under Armour's suite of apps. Yeah, I think so. There's a lot of 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 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 how much more weight I 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, and Withings has one. I like to say with the connected scale, you can truly never escape your weight. It's like you step on it and maybe you're appalled and you don't want to remember what it is. And it just gets sent to the app and it's there. And the next time I open the UA Record app, my weight's there. Yeah, I mean, I think you have to decide that that's okay. Right. For some people, that's very motivating. Yeah. I mean, I think whether you're logging food or logging your workouts or logging your weight, just the general awareness of that process forces improvement. So 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 it may encourage you to make a better decision or in any number of directions in order to get so the next time you see that number, it's the number that you want it to be. And I think we try to be a serious company about performance. And so we don't want to sugarcoat it. We don't do the good job. We want to be very transparent about the information and let you come to terms with it. But we're going to give you those actionable insights on top of that in order to 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 UA Record app, it's also going to your other apps. It's going to MyFitnessPal, stuff from that My Run goes into UA Record. So you 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 the roots of the company to some degree, it's been a very organic growth in itself. And Kevin, the CEO, he realized that community in the same way was going to help propagate some of his agenda with getting people to be more aware of their fitness. So Under Armour made some major acquisitions in this space. It bought Map My Fitness a couple of years ago. And then this year, or excuse me, in 2015, they purchased MyFitnessPal and Indomondo. And we just built an enormous community of users of around 160 million now on the platform. And we really believe that community is a central element to understanding how to be motivated and then also having the data to extract really good insights about athletes that are very much made up like you, that you can learn from. One of the products that's outside of the Health Box that you guys also announced are Under Armour's first pair of connected sneakers. They're called the SpeedForm Gemini. And they have a sensor in them, right, 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 apparel. And so if you look at the Health Box and 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? We do believe that it's all connected. That is the business that's driven the company's growth around making great apparel, making great running shoes. But we really understand that 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 increase of performance. So the company mission originally was to change the way athletes dressed and make them down to the very bottom layer of their clothing. And so now the mission's really shifting to change the way that athletes live so that they have a total awareness of everything it takes. 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. I talked about this on the Vergecast last night. I think Neil, I 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 a connected sports bra from a company called Ohm Signal. And when I first 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 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 clothes? You know, I think all of those things like, well, I think the shoes are a good example. 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 operates in millions of unit 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, like we also had some requirements around usability, like with the shoe, 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. Excellent. 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 or the weirdest thing? You know, like I've had so little time to be out on the show floor. 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 I always wished 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. It's been really fun talking and good luck with the rest of CES. Hope to catch up with you soon. Okay, thank you. All right. For The Verge, I'm Lauren Good. Welcome to our YouTube channel at YouTube.com.