UnderArmour, Nike, Adidas, Reebok?

My first sale was to the Georgia Tech football team in 1996. I had passed out some prototypes to my friends and word was getting around, but I was still looking for that first big sale. I realized the guys I needed to go after were the equipment managers, since they're the ones deciding what a team wears. So I got a list of all the equipment managers in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and sent them letters and samples of what I had. Tom Conner at Georgia Tech was the first guy to call back. He said, "We love your stuff. We want to wear it." Within a few weeks it went from a couple guys on offense wearing it to the whole team. Slowly my gear started trickling through the ACC. When Georgia Tech played Florida State that year, the equipment guy was there. He was a Florida State alum and after the game went down to the locker room and saw that some of the guys were wearing these Under Armour shirts under their pads. A couple days later, I was in my grandma's basement when the phone rang and the guy said, "I'm the equipment manager for the Atlanta Falcons . We want to buy your shirts." That was big. I ended up doing about $17,000 in sales that year, but it was still small potatoes. I knew this thing could get much bigger. And the next year it did. In 1997 I was up to $100,000, as more and more programs started wearing the stuff.