Under Armour has opened its first store in Russia, in the Metropolis Shopping Center in Moscow. The company, which has its own Russian sales office, says it eyes a major expansion in the country through the opening of other stores and factory outlets and an online-store in the near future.
We hear that it is planning to have a network of six stores very soon in Russia, including locations in the Atrium Mall and the Vnukovo Outlet Village of Moscow, and that they will be managed by a retail franchising company called Vostokinvest.
Under Armour first entered the Russian market last December through the online store of Lamoda.ru, the local clone of Zalando. In the course of 2017, the brand started to make its appearance in some multi-brand stores like Leap and Streetbeat.
We already reported in the last issue that UA is planning to open its first flagship store in Amsterdam on Decv. 1 Meanwhile, its distribution partners in several European countries are opening new brand stores.
Oberalp, UA's distributor for the Italian market, has just opened its second Under Armour Brand House on 340 square meters in a prime location in Milan, Piazza Gae Aulenti, which also hosts the mono-brand stores of Adidas and Nike. Various sponsored athletes and a 23-year-old London rapper, Jay Prince, accompanied the opening of the store. It could become a major destination if Under Armour gets the sponsorship of the AC Milan team, as speculated (see the related news brief in this issue).
Oberalp recently opened the first Italian UA store in a mall near Bergamo's international airport and it has plan for a total of 20 stores all over the country. They are expected to give visibility to the brand while collecting useful information on the market.
UA will have a total of 20 stores in Turkey by the end of 2017, and they will all be managed by the brand's local distributor, the Dogus Retail Group, which has already opened nine stores so far this year, with another to follow shortly. Only two of the 20 stores will be factory outlets, with one of them measuring 1,000 square meters.
The brand's distributor for the Balkan countries, Kvantum Sports, is also very active on the retail front. It has opened the first UA store in Serbia, located in Belgrade's Usce Mall. It plans to open two more stores in Romania before the end of the year.
