GymShark is arguably a status symbol when it comes to fitness wear. It’s currently every gym junkie and celebrity’s favorite fitness wear. If you’re a fitness enthusiast, you must have encountered GymShark Apparel somewhere.
Headed by the 30-year-old founder and CEO Ben Francis, GymShark managed to grow into a $1.3 billion company. In this article, we’re going to tackle some interesting facts you probably haven’t heard yet about GymShark.
A 19-year-old teenager founded GymShark.
Teenagers these days are fantastic to establish a new company that can compete with long-established global brands like Nike and Adidas. GymShark was the brilliant vision of a simple teenager and his school buddies. They surely proved that no one is too young to launch a business.
GymShark didn’t start out with a gym wear apparel business.
Back in 2011, Francis launched GymShark in his parent’s garage with his colleague Lewis Morgan. The business initially sells fitness supplements. However, Francis wasn’t able to afford his own stock or secure distribution deals with supplement suppliers, so he began to drop shipping supplies from other vendors. It took him about six weeks to make his first-ever sale.
Since Francis is a gym nut himself, he struggled to find gym wear that fit him properly. Similar to the genesis of many successful entrepreneurs, this teenage gym junkie set out to find a solution to his problem, creating something that integrated European and American styles. This is how the famous GymShark that you know now began.
Francis Hand-Made GymShark Apparel for Two Years
Francis didn’t have the financial capacity to pay for the factory lease and expensive equipment to begin, but since he was so eager to push through with his idea, he started launching GymShark hand-crafted products with just a screen printer and sewing machine right in his parent’s home.
According to Francis, he learned how to screen-print from his friend, and his grandmother taught him how to sew. He was so dedicated to producing quality hand-crafted GymShark products, not just for months, but for two entire years! Not to mention all the obstacles he has faced while juggling university and a job at pizza hut.
The name GymShark wasn’t inspired by anything extraordinary.
Unlike other businesses with sentimental value to their business name, GymShark was brought to life because Francis thought it sounded cool when he first saw it on the cheap domain names available in GoDaddy.
GymShark was one of the earliest brands to use influencer marketing.
Social media played a significant role in the success of GymShark. Yet, interestingly enough, Francis wasn’t aware that he had a powerful tool within his hands until the results started showing.
When influencer marketing isn’t popular yet, Francis sent out his best-loved products to his favorite fitness content creators just to see if they would like them. By good fortune, the influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers who he gave out his products began wearing it and talking about the GymShark products, boosting its publicity tremendously in a short period of time.
It only took Francis a few products and social media to compete for head-on with globally recognized brands in the fitness square niche. Up-to-date, GymShark still doesn’t use millions of pounds for advertising with top celebrities. It still uses the exact model that worked from the sheer beginning— promoting through famous bloggers and vloggers on various social networks.
GymShark saw its first major hit after its first fitness expo.
Influencers helped him acquire moderate traction online, but the brand hit it big when Francis attended the Body Power Expo, an extremely popular fitness expo. According to Francis, he had used up all the money he had saved for the entry fee.
Without wasting his chance, he connected with anyone he could, from fitness celebrities to future fans, hawking his brand and its exceptional qualities. The brand selling was a success, to say the least.
New GymShark products sold out within 30 minutes of their launch on the website. Imagine barely earning three hundred dollars a day to earning about fifty thousand dollars in half an hour! That was GymShark’s greatest accomplishment at that point.
GymShark’s logo was not what you see today for some years.
Companies go through an evolution, and GymShark isn’t an exception to that. Throughout the years, the brand has been undergoing a metamorphosis, and one of the momentous changes it made was changing its logo.
GymShark’s previous logo resembles some sort of a quality seal, including a muscular-looking shark inside a circle, and surrounding the circle is the word “GymShark Fitness,” enveloping the shark image. As the brand became popular, Francis modified the logo to what we see today with the help of a renowned designer Martin Williams who was the founder of Pixel Freak in Great Britain.
Williams laid out a new minimalist logo by drawing inspiration from competitors like Addidas, Nike, and other popular brands.
Francis had six businesses before GymShark.
If you think that Francis was just one heck of a lucky teenager who struck gold, you’re wrong. You could say that he just had more entrepreneurial background than a typical teenager who steps into the murky waters of the online commerce world.
Many don’t know, but GymShark wasn’t Francis’ first venture in the fitness business. It was seventh. He had tried creating six fitness brands and two business apps before finally finding success. The lessons he got from these endeavors are what pushed him to commence GymShark.
Francis quit as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of GymShark in 2015.
After running this successful fitness business for three years, Francis left his seat as the CEO of his founding company after three years. His decision to step down was a bolt from the blue to many since. After all, why would someone step down in a company he created from scratch?
Francis elucidated the motivation behind his action on his personal website. He said that a big portion of it was because he did not want to micromanage and wanted to focus on where he was good at. He explained that he couldn’t do everything himself, so he just let someone with excellent business management background become the CEO.
In 2021, Francis eventually returned to his throne.
GymShark co-founder cashed out $100 million in 2020.
One of the biggest mysteries that surrounds GymShark is Lewis Morgan’s exit in 2020. Morgan, who founded the company with Francis, has decided to sell his share of the company for $100 million back in 2020.
Childhood friends Morgan and Francis decided to go separate ways after their friendship had fallen out.
Men were GymShark’s target market, but women are now its biggest market.
Francis was motivated by his own desire to find fitness wear for men, so he initially planned to cater to men, but since he learned that there’s a growing trend of athletic leisure wear among women on social media. More and more women are spending big bucks on trendy gym apparel, giving Francis an idea to attend to women’s needs.
As of 2020, about two-thirds of GymShark sales came from women.
GymShark has only one physical store.
For a billion-dollar brand, it’s pretty hard to believe that it only has one physical store where you can walk in and buy anything you want. At the time of writing, they only operate online through a website, so if you want to see their items personally before buying, you have to go to London, England. Francis built the entire brand of GymShark around the internet.
