The first shoe that crossed the women’s Boston Marathon finish line last year was dreamt up in Baltimore. Under Armour is hoping for a repeat Monday.

The sportswear brand is better known for sweat-wicking shirts than pavement-pounding shoes, but it has sought to compete across all sports. About seven years ago, amid an arms race of so-called “super shoes,” the company began a quest to build a high-performance distance running shoe.

The culmination, thus far, is the Velociti Elite 3, which defending Boston women’s champion Sharon Lokedi will lace up once again.

It’s been a challenging decade for Under Armour, and when founder Kevin Plank returned to the helm two years ago, part of his mandate to the company was a focus on fewer, better products. Integral to that is innovation: devising creative ideas, testing product components ad nauseam and then tinkering with them more.

Design and testing happen on-site at the global brand’s new Baltimore Peninsula headquarters. The 170,000-square-foot Innovation Lab, as it’s known, is essentially a 21st century Santa’s workshop for sneakerheads and fitness freaks.

It’s an overwhelming space of textiles and gadgets. There’s a tiny mace ball to check how resilient materials are to rips, a shoe-dunking contraption for assessing waterproofness, and a strutting, sweating dummy valued at over $250,000. During a recent visit, a particularly tenacious golf shoe was in the middle of being flexed more than 5 million times to test its resistance to cracking.

“We take things all the way down to how many times you can tie your shoelace before it tears,” said Bradford Eagan, manager of footwear innovation.

In a climate-controlled room (21 degrees Celsius, 65% humidity), employees look for ways to decrease fiber shedding, limit snags in fabric and even quantify seemingly qualitative adjectives.

“When we have our material development team talk about ‘buttery soft,’ we can now tell you what that ‘buttery soft’ number is,” said Candace Davidow, manager of apparel innovation.

The company works on products more than two years before they hit shelves (the Elite 4 and Elite 5 are both in development). In some cases, they concoct bizarre-looking, 3D-printed prototypes, pare them down, gather feedback from athletes at local universities like the University of Maryland and Morgan State University, and tweak until they have a marketable product.

Occasionally, they speed things up. When NBA star and former Under Armour athlete Stephen Curry needed a specialty undershirt to provide injury support in the playoffs, the company put together a garment for him within 24 hours.

Under Armour analyzes textiles at a Raleigh, North Carolina, lab and does a lot of shoe design and testing in Portland, Oregon. But the majority of product innovation — from underwear to spacesuits (really) — takes place in Baltimore.

The company unveiled a ritzy headquarters in 2024. The open-concept office has a basketball court — where Adam Sandler played pickup with employees last year — a golf simulator, and a fitness center. Emblazoned adjacent to a clock is a message: “They’re still sleeping in Beaverton.”

Plank has likened his company to its hometown — a gritty underdog. In the case of footwear, that’s certainly true. Nike, the Beaverton, Oregon-based king of running shoes, brings in 25 times as much footwear revenue as the more apparel-focused Under Armour.

But the Velociti line has made a mark. As the company sought to develop the shoe, it gathered reactions from professional runners it sponsors in Flagstaff, Arizona, as well as Lokedi. She ran on a treadmill in Baltimore last March in front of cameras trained to heat-map every step.

“Sharon’s been a big muse for this,” said Kyle Blakely, senior vice president of innovation and design.

Within the Innovation Lab, a couple dozen Velociti iterations sit like a graveyard of ideas. To begin to tinker with the first model, employees used a plate (a key component in modern, top-flight running shoes) from a Curry basketball shoe.

On Monday morning, Under Armour employees will gather in communal spaces to watch Lokedi seek to repeat in Boston.

At Lokedi’s request last year, Under Armour tweaked and customized a pair of Elite 3s. She then ran the fastest course time ever by 2 minutes, 37 seconds.

“That was a pretty immediate gratification of the level of influence that athlete feedback can have,” said Eagan, who ran cross-country at Marquette University.

The Elite 3s retail for a steep $250. However, other shoes in the line cost half as much.

Like many sportswear companies, Under Armour spent the bulk of its history sequestering innovation in a fortified wing of the company, lest any sweat-wicking secret slip out. Only about 20 or 30 people had access, via a biometric hand scanner, Blakely said.

That changed several years ago, when innovation was integrated into the rest of the company. The cross-pollination between departments, Blakely said, increases efficiency.

“What good is it if we have all of this under a cloak and nobody understands what we’re doing?” he said.

It’s been a down decade for Under Armour. The company’s stock value tumbled as it cycled through executives and paid out a huge sum as part of a class action lawsuit. But some analysts still laud the brand, which revolutionized athletic apparel in the late 1990s and rocketed into relevancy.

Its most recent quarter was its most promising since Plank returned.

Plank said two years ago he wanted to cut its product lineup by 25% as a cost-cutting measure and to streamline the brand. The company is expected to continue to trim that number. Blakely called it a “journey of contraction.”

Under Armour is not trying to be the new Hoka, an ascendant running shoe brand — but the company is seeking to appeal to athletes, especially youth, across sports.

“At the very baseline, athletes run,” Blakely said.