Inside the Gymshark fitness empire
From pizza delivery boy to fitness tycoon, how a young businessman built a billion-pound sportswear empire for the #goals generation
When he was 14, Ben Francis did work experience at his grandfather’s company, which lined industrial furnaces with ceramic and brick. Staring into a cement mixer, he saw a future he would rather avoid: 12-hour days of toil and sweat, the promise of a permanently aching back.
“Seeing the sacrifices my grandfather made for his business made me feel comfortable with the concept of financial risk at quite a young age,” says Francis. “It also taught me that I didn’t want to be putting fibre over bricks in a warehouse for the rest of my life.”
Fifteen years and a £1bn-plus valuation later, Francis is founder, majority shareholder and chief marketing officer of Birmingham-based Gymshark, one of Britain’s fastest-growing businesses, a venture capital “unicorn” and sportswear “disruptor”.
“I think we’re building one of the biggest brands in the world here,” he says in the boardroom of the firm’s Solihull office, fixing me with an unblinking Silicon Valley gaze. “By hook or by crook, I want to be one of the biggest and best.”
Gymshark was founded in 2012, when Francis was 19. A self-proclaimed “very average” student, he discovered an aptitude for IT and the gym at sixth form college. The hands-on, problemsolving nature of computers and lifting heavy weights appealed. “I made four apps and six different websites, all around fitness,” he says. “The seventh was Gymshark.”
Gymshark’s sprawling campus occupies three buildings in an industrial park, 20 minutes outside Birmingham. There is office space for 400 staff, as well as a vast gym and content studio. It’s a chicken and steamed broccoli-fuelled, branded theme park in glistening black and chrome. Afropop blares out of a speaker in reception while multiple screens show videos of Gymshark-sponsored athletes in various states of physical exertion — shark logo always in shot. On my way to the boardroom, I pass messages of affirmation painted on the walls: “Be a Pioneer”; “Don’t be a Dickhead.”
In August last year, the company secured business funding from American equity firm General Atlantic, which took a 21 per cent stake, valuing Gymshark at north of £1bn and making it a member of a club of fewer than 25 UK companies to have achieved unicorn status since 2001. Francis’s personal wealth is estimated at £700m.
When we meet, Francis is wearing a charcoal, slim-fit, long-sleeved training top and fitted tracksuit bottoms, both his own brand’s. At 28, he looks young and healthy, because he is. His hair is freshly faded. I wonder where you get your hair cut when you’re worth £700m.
Initially a website that stocked other brands’ protein supplements, Gymshark expanded when Francis saw a gap in the fitness clothing market. “It wasn’t particularly strategic,” he says. “It was just me and some friends thinking that no one else was making what we wanted to wear. At that time, in the early 2010s, the American style was a big, baggy, boxy fit, while the European brands were more ‘fashion’, instead of functional. So we morphed those two worlds together. I wanted to make nice, stretchy lifting wear that accentuated your physique and made you look good in the gym.”
A friend showed Francis how to screenprint T-shirts and his grandmother taught him how to sew. The first designs took two years to get right. Francis paid for the early operations by working as a Pizza Hut delivery driver. “We were watching fitness YouTubers at that time, so we decided to send some T-shirts, shorts, hoodies to them, not because we wanted anything, but because we thought it would be cool if they liked it.”
This was 2013, a lifetime ago in internet years, before the word “influencer” had entered the lexicon; before schoolkids wanted to be live streamers more than they did footballers. The muscle YouTubers liked the clothes and their followers began to ask where they’d got them from. The seeds of a semi-inadvertent viral marketing campaign had been sown.
Realising he might be onto something, Francis paid £3,000 for a stall at the Body Power Expo, an annual fitness industry event that takes place in Birmingham each year, where athletes and fans gather to discuss protein and personal-bests, and brands vie for their attention with new products. It turns out the viral marketing had been even more successful than anticipated.
“When I left for the expo, we were doing about £300 a day in revenue,” says Francis. “Afterwards, we went straight to £30,000 a day. I was sat in my mum and dad’s living room in disbelief. I said, ‘Right, here we go,’ and it’s never really stopped since.” This year, Gymshark is on course to sell around 20m items, averaging
‘We’ve built a communityled, purpose-driven, direct to consumer model. It’s where the future of brands will go’
50,000 a day, in 175 countries. In 2020, Gymshark announced it had turned over £260m in revenue. Nine years down the line and it has, by every available metric, become a behemoth.
“Like Lululemon is to Canada or Nike is to America, I want Gymshark to be the UK fitness brand,” says Francis. According to Allied Market Research, the global sports apparel market was valued at $167.7bn in 2018 and is estimated to reach $248.1bn by 2026. People want to buy comfortable, performance-ready polyester, lycra and nylon, and they want to buy a lot of it. A pair of Gymshark leggings is £30, T-shirts typically cost from £15 to £30.
Despite gyms being closed for most of 2020 and early 2021, millions have been working out at home, a scenario that has helped rather than hindered the brand. “Of course it’s been tough [for everyone],” says Francis, “but in terms of sales we’ve actually increased. I think with loads of people getting into exercise and us being an online-only business, we’ve been well positioned.”
“What we’ve built is a community-led, purposedriven, direct to consumer model,” says Francis. “It’s where the future of brands will go. We’ve had some massive retailers put huge orders in front of us. We could be twice the business, but we said no every time, we feel like that model is outdated.”
It appears he might be right. Nike is, according to some reports, said to be considering a purely online operation, while more and more brands are cutting out the traditional middlemen: the high street sports chains, bricks and mortar department stores and even online retail monoliths, preferring not only to communicate with consumers via lo-fi, DIY social media campaigns, but to sell to them direct, too.
While the occasional business degree aphorism creeps into his speech — even though he dropped out of Aston University to pursue Gymshark — Francis doesn’t appear to embody any of the negative traits sometimes associated with men who have enormous entrepreneurial success at a young age. Resolutely down to earth, he is an Aston Villa season ticket holder and likes M&S Pad Thai ready meals.
“I see my mum and dad every weekend,” he says. “I live 20 minutes down the road from them. I spend time with my girlfriend, I walk my dog. I think I have such a chaotic professional life that I like to keep my personal life as simple and relaxed as possible. My average weekend is gym, walk dog, watch Villa.”
What about the name, I wonder? Where did Gymshark come from? How much market research goes into naming a start-up fitness brand that will one day be worth one billion pounds?
Francis reclines in his chair, behind the table in the room where that deal was signed. “It was a totally arbitrary decision,” he says. “A £3.50 domain name from GoDaddy. I just thought it sounded quite cool.”
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