The full merge turns a four-year sustainability side project into a live test of whether plant-based materials can win over Under Armour’s mainstream shopper.
Under Armour has folded UNLESS Collective, the plant-based apparel brand it acquired in 2024, directly into UA.com, retiring the separate collaboration page that had kept the four-year-old brand’s full assortment at arm’s length from the retailer’s main storefront. The move was announced September 24 on Under Armour’s newsroom site.
UNLESS was founded in 2020 in Portland, Oregon, by Eric Liedtke and a group of former adidas, Quiksilver and R/GA executives, on a single premise: replace plastic in apparel and footwear with plant-based materials that return to the earth at the end of a product’s life.
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Following the acquisition, UA also named Liedtke, a 26-year adidas veteran who had risen to brand president there, executive vice president of brand strategy. Since then, UNLESS has operated as a bounded experiment within Under Armour, producing capsule drops, a footwear line and a Milan Design Week appearance, while selling through its own page rather than the main ua.com catalog.
That separation is now gone. Under Armour describes the brand as a “proving ground” for testing plant-based materials in real products before deciding what might migrate into its broader lineup. Folding UNLESS into the primary storefront does not just add a sales channel. It removes the barrier between a contained sustainability pilot and Under Armour’s mainstream shopper, letting the company gauge demand for regenerative materials at a scale its own dedicated page could never generate.
For Under Armour, still working through a broader turnaround under president and chief executive Kevin Plank, the arrangement is a low-risk way to keep a foothold in regenerative materials while its flagship product lines stay focused on performance. For UNLESS, the trade is a much larger audience in exchange for the independence of a standalone site.
Tara Moss, UNLESS co-founder and now senior lead of marketing at Under Armour, described the move as reach rather than compromise, saying UA.com gives the brand “an even bigger platform to share it.”
