Gymshark has come a long way since its founder Ben Francis
started making pieces of fitnesswear in his parents’ garage nearly a decade ago.
But by 2020, the fast-growing fitnesswear brand
was valued at more than £1 billion and had been sported by a number of Hollywood stars.
After spending six years gaining experience in several senior roles in the company,
Francis returned to the CEO role in 2021, with ambitious plans for expansion.
In Canada you’ve got Lulu, and in the States you’ve got great brands
like Nike and Under Armour, and in Germany you’ve Adidas and Puma.
I really think Gymshark can be the U.K.’s answer to those brands.
The Gymshark website was created in 2011 by a then-19-year-old Francis,
while he was a student here at Aston University in Birmingham, in the U.K.
I was really lucky actually. So when I was a young kid,
I did work experience with my grandad and my grandad ran his own business
and that business was basically lining furnaces with either brick or ceramic fibre.
Now, albeit that is a million miles away from websites,
it basically made me really inspired and made me think
‘oh, do you know you know what, I want to do my own thing,
I want to be in a business that I would like to run myself, if possible.’
And when I went to school I had a IT class
and this IT class completely changed my life, I just absolutely fell in love with IT
and tech and websites and apps and everything around like that.
And I was also in love with sort of the gym and fitness.
So then those two things just sort of came together
and I started making a load of fitness websites, more for fun than anything.
In 2012, he incorporated Gymshark with his school friend Lewis Morgan.
At first, they used the Gymshark website to drop ship fitness supplements,
effectively acting as a middleman to market and sell the products,
without having to take on the additional cost and risk of buying stock themselves.
They used all the money from this venture, as well as what Francis earned working at a Pizza Hut,
to buy a sewing machine and screen printer to make the first pieces of Gymshark fitnesswear.
What inspired you to go from drop shipping to making clothes?
There was no like strategic thing, it wasn’t really like a well thought out decision,
if I’m completely honest. It was literally a case of
‘no one makes the gymwear that we want to wear, like let’s try and do it ourselves.’
I remember ordering what they call a stringer vest from the States,
and it came and it just completely like drowned me.
Like I looked like I was wearing my dad’s sort of tops sort of thing.
And it made me realise very quickly that body building clothes then were absolutely massive.
And we loved the style but they wouldn’t really fit,
so we literally just wanted to make it ourselves and so we did.
How did you go about doing that?
So my nan and my mum both knew how to sew, so I would be at university in the day
and in the gap between uni and Pizza Hut, is I would, my mum would video herself sewing
and give me like a tutorial: “Right you do this here, this here, this here.
If this happens, this is what you do.” Then I would sort of get home at 11 o’clock,
put it in front of me and I would basically learn from the videos that she took how to sew.
There was local lad that did a lot of screen printing,
so he taught us how to screen print, and just sort of experimented.
In 2014, the business really started to take off after Francis and Morgan
brought Gymshark to the Bodypower Expo, a two-day fitness event in Birmingham.
They launched Gymshark’s Luxe fitted tracksuit at the event
and brought along well-known fitness YouTubers.
What made you kind of realise that bringing along fitness YouTube stars
would help attract people to the stand?
We realised that about 10 minutes into the event to be honest.
I had no idea running up to it, because my heroes were on YouTube
so it was just a case of ‘oh it would be so cool if our heroes
would come to the UK and be with Gymshark at this event.’
I didn’t really think that much into it if I was honest.
Soon after Francis dropped out of college to focus on growing the business.
That was a massive decision for me because I was the first person in my family
to have gotten into university, which was massive.
And then as we got into the second year, Gymshark was roughly, it had been live
for about a year at that point, and we did actually have consistent revenue,
it wasn’t massive revenue, but it was consistent.
And I’ll never forget actually calling up my mum and dad,
because again they were so proud of me and so proud of the fact that I’d literally grafted
so hard to get into uni and I said “Listen I’m going to quit uni.”
And to be fair to them, they sort of said
“Listen, are you 100% sure that this is what you want to do?”
And I’m not sure if they 100% agreed, but I said “Yep, this is the decision I’m going to make.”
And then as soon as I made the decision they were 100% supportive
and completely backed me and that was, if I’m honest,
a fairly life changing moment for me.
From then on, Gymshark saw rapid growth, taking on more staff and launching its women’s activewear range.
In 2016, Morgan stepped back from working in the business
but remained a shareholder for the next four years.
Fast forward to 2020 and Gymshark had gone from operating out of a garage,
to this campus in Solihull, just outside of Birmingham,
complete with its own lifting club and gym. And while many clothing retailers
suffered during the coronavirus pandemic, Gymshark actually saw a jump in sales.
Gymshark is an exclusively online business and only sells its products through its own website.
That worked to its advantage as many brick-and-mortar shops were forced
to close during the height of lockdown. The business also benefitted from people
using exercise to stay occupied while being asked to stay at home.
More people are running, cycling and lifting than ever,
they were doing home workouts, there was so much going on.
All of a sudden they had this extra bit of time.
There was a spike in terms of activity, albeit no one was in the gym.
I think it helps that we’re online. I think a lot of e-commerce brands did incredibly well.
We trialled a store in Covent Garden which unfortunately had to be closed about two weeks early,
I would love to finish that trial. We’ll definitely be doing more tests in the future
when it comes offline and retail, I think there’s a great opportunity there.
Gymshark’s sales soared by 58% in 2020 compared to the previous year, with revenues topping half a billion dollars.
In August 2020, U.S. private equity firm General Atlantic announced it had taken a 21% stake in Gymshark.
At the time, it valued Gymshark at more than £1 billion,
seeing the brand become one of just two dozen British unicorns.
Gymshark was only the second British company to have reached
the milestone without previous backing from external investors.
The General Atlantic deal also saw Francis increase his stake in Gymshark
up to 70%, making him a near-billionaire.
Gymshark has continued to see strong performance in 2021,
with turnover of £400 million according to the company’s latest full-year results.
But despite the brand’s stratospheric growth, Francis has been determined to remain grounded.
He stepped back as CEO in 2015, handing the reins to Steve Hewitt,
who was managing director at the time. Francis spent the next six years
working in different roles in the company, including chief technology officer,
chief marketing officer and chief product officer.
CEO was not the right role for me when I was in my early twenties.
Just because I’d started a business that had grown very quickly
didn’t mean I was the most competent chief exec. So that was an interesting realisation for me
and it took a little bit of a while for that to hit home.
It was a little bit heartbreaking. However, in hindsight it gave me
an incredible opportunity to then work in different areas of the business.
I could then focus on my strengths, so brand, product marketing,
and really double down on them and improve them,
but I could also work on my weaknesses without having to worry about failing.
Francis returned as CEO in August 2021 with a clear vision
on where he wants to take Gymshark next, as it expands into the U.S. and Asia.
There’s so many brands around the world that I’m really inspired by, right.
In Canada you’ve got Lulu, and in the States you’ve got great brands like Nike and Under Armour
and in Germany you’ve Adidas and Puma. I really think Gymshark can be
the U.K.’s answer to those brands. But that’s not saying that the U.K.
is where it starts and ends for us, we also want to be a truly global brand.
And some of the most inspiring brands to me aren’t necessarily the biggest but they’re,
you know, even like Jaguar Land Rover, for example.
I know that they’re a British brand and they’re from just over the road
from where I grew up but it’s so cool like when you’re abroad
that you see that you see their vehicles being driven around.
So I’ve got this absolute ambition of Gymshark being,
yes it is the U.K.’s brand, but it’s also a truly global brand as well.
But in the fiercely competitive and fast-moving sportswear industry,
can Gymshark keep up with the incumbents which have long dominated the sector?
All consumers are looking for brands that speak to them specifically,
and I think these sportswear giants maybe don’t connect on that more
personal level with consumers the way that a smaller brand like Gymshark does,
that has partnerships with their favorite trainers, with their favorite athletes
Market researcher Euromonitor estimated that the global sportswear market
would be worth over $345 billion in 2022, up from around $315 billion in 2018,
and despite shrinking in 2020. Consultancy McKinsey identified a number of trends
expected to shape the sporting goods industry in 2021.
This included developing digital-enabled fitness communities, as working out from home becomes a longer-term trend.
That’s in addition to an even greater shift to influencer marketing.
Gymshark has been an early adopter on both these fronts.
The report also highlighted how the pandemic had accelerated the focus on sustainability,
noting that it had become more of an “urgent consumer priority.”
Sportswear products are somewhat notorious for being made through less sustainable processes
or out of less sustainable materials. And for that reason, especially considering
the growth of the market, there’s a big opportunity there to improve those materials and processes.
But Francis is committed to addressing this issue
and is convinced Gymshark can rise to the challenge.
It’s planning to use 100% recyclable packaging
and remove all hangtags on its products by the end of 2021.
The brand is also increasingly aiming to use recycled fibres in its clothing.
Sustainability is massively important to me personally
and it has been to the business for a long, long time.
Obviously we've got goals, 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030,
30% reduction in water usage by 2030.
We want be using 100% recyclable polyester by 2025,
so we do have those goals. But equally, sustainability is something that, you know,
is ingrained in the entire business and it is at the
forefront of our over-arching strategy as a business as well.