Gymshark: Ben Francis. From pizza delivery to billion-dollar fitness brand.

27:13Yeah, so the first tracksuit was made in China. And I can't remember how we found the manufacturer. It would have been on Alibaba or something like that, I think it was. I think that's where we found them. And it was all around the fit. It was very tapered at the waist. The trousers were tapered. It was very much around that tapered fit at the time. And the tapered fit, presumably, you look better in it, right? Especially because it shows off your muscles or whatever. I mean, even for sort of skinnier guys, right? If it's more fitted, it can sort of enhance the way your body looks. Yeah. And that's where it was really born.

27:50And that's what we tried to do today, right? We try and build some really physique accentuating clothing. That's where all that began through that first tracksuit and through that early product. Even before that, just buying all the inventory, how much do you estimate you had to spend just to order the inventory to hold it? It would have been less than£10 ,000, but it would have been in the thousands. And how did you have that cash? that was through a combination of pizza her building the business and just basically reinvesting every single penny that we had because we had no cost every single pound of profit would literally just go into that order all right so you get to this conference this body power conference and you have like a bunch of big guys at the booth and uh and what i mean you've got a track suit there yeah um and i'm trying to imagine like what i mean how or what happened there i mean was there were people curious like what is this gym shark thing like what how do people respond well that that was probably the most surreal weekend of my life because we we hadn't even finished setting up the stand i remember i was still running from the the van to bring the product in in the days before this the you know all the youtubers have been posted on facebook on youtube letting everyone know that they would be there and we didn't really know how i guess how big or how famous they were but they'd let everyone know that they would be in there and as soon as they opened the doors to that event it just felt like people flooded to the stand and people were there to see you know their heroes basically they because they'd never seen them before so it's interesting because most of these guys would walk down the streets of birmingham or wherever and nobody would have any idea who they were but at that conference these guys were rock stars in in the world of lifting they were huge the younger sort of late teens early 20s audience knew them but then the older people maybe at the time in their 30s or their 40s just had no idea because YouTube was very much a it was just so new at the time but then the people that visited our stand also ended up buying products and from whatever it opened on that Saturday morning all the way through to close on Sunday night I just remember spending the whole time just grabbing products selling product and In the event, we completely sold out of everything that we took.

30:08And I'm trying to figure out why. Like, again, as you described it, it's a really basic tracksuit, right? It's not, I mean, it's tapered, so it's probably differentiated. But Gymshark was an unknown brand. But there was excitement. People were, like, kind of coming to your booth and checking it out. What do you think explains it? Do you think it was the fit? Yeah, I think the fit of the tracksuit, it was definitely a fairly unique design. But to your point, it wasn't revolutionary. I think the fact that their heroes on YouTube were wearing it. So most of the people at the stand were young kids.

30:43It was us, basically. It was teenage guys. And what was the retail price of the gym suit? I think we had to do everything cash that weekend. So we literally just had bags around our waist. And we were literally just selling everything. I think it was round numbers. I think it was£30. And we were just selling it all for cash. and after the event I remember we were so tired we just we all just lay down on the floor in the stand and there was a guy who had worked a stand a different stand and he walked over to us he was a bit older and he hadn't even heard of the youtubers and he said he said how did you do that and I remember looking at him and saying I've got no idea when we come back in just a moment Jim Shark breaks into the U.S.

31:28market and Ben lands in Ohio in December without checking the weather first. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

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36:03Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2013, and with the help of some YouTube influencers, Gymshark sells a ton of tracksuits and t-shirts at the annual Body Power Expo. Prior to the event, we were selling around 200 to 250 pounds a day in revenue. Because we were at the event and we couldn't ship from the website, we turned the website off for the weekend. That's how small the business was, going back to it being a project. And the following week, when we turned the website back on and we posted online that we were back live. We did£30 ,000 in revenue in 30 minutes. Sold out of everything.

36:43And that weekend was really important because it was the weekend I both quit university and Pizza Hut to pursue Gymshark. So I tell you, I was so happy because going into it, I was so nervous because I mean, I was the first person in my family to go to university. And I remember calling my mom and dad and saying, I'm going to drop out because they were so proud of the fact that I'd worked so hard to get into university. That was not a given for me whatsoever. And I called them and I said, I'm going to leave university. And, you know, when you sort of expect, you're like a kid, you sort of expect to get told off.

37:15And they were so supportive. They just said, listen, if this is what you want to do, then go for it. So now you've got a real business. And these influencers at that time, were they getting paid or were they were just happy to get free stuff and to be? No. this is before that that era where you have to pay like a million dollars for a post or whatever yeah exactly but also the advantage back then was if you had 20 000 followers in 2013 the algorithm was different like those 20 000 followers would literally watch the videos whereas today if you have two million maybe only one percent of those people are even going to be aware that you have a new video out yeah yeah i wish i could say it was some wonderful strategy that we built.

37:56It literally wasn't. We made a website because it felt it was interesting. We made the product that we wanted to wear. We went to the event we wanted to go to and we sent clothes to the people that we love to follow. It was literally, to your point, a really natural process. And there was in no way a strategy. We didn't think too far ahead. We just did what felt right and instinctive. But you knew that once that you sold$30 ,000 in a half hour of tracksuits on your website, you knew that this was, you had something here that this could actually have legs. Yeah. I remember being sat there. It was the middle of the night in my mom and dad's house, the website, I had to literally go through every single, cause all the stock was set to like infinite inventory.

38:43So you would just, it was, so there was no stock levels, but I knew we'd sold out. So I had to go through every product and zero the inventory. So everything was sold out sort of clawing across my laptop to get it all sorted. and sat there once that was done, just thinking, wow, we've got something special here. And again, that's just where it all began. And at that point, we were signing up to the next event, the next Body Power. We were signing up to another event. We obviously just bought more inventory. And we doubled down on everything that had worked for us, particularly in that sort of couple of months.

39:13We just doubled down on it. And you were living with your mom and dad. You were 20, 21 or whatever. Yeah, I mean, you're a young guy. So and in the inventory, where are you keeping it? So at the time, it was just in my mom and dad's basically like in their house. And they were it was just too much to keep in there. But in the run up to the event, we thought we have to find a unit. So we found it was a local unit in the countryside. It was a place called Droitwich, which you won't have heard of. And it was an old shed on a canal and it was made out of asbestos. And it cost us 300 pounds a month.

39:46But it was our space. And that's where we stored everything. and but still in those first like 2013 2014 2015 it was still track suits and t-shirts tanks sweatshirts that that was it that was what you were selling yeah and it was in that period then so the following year we then started to do the events we did our first event abroad in germany that's when we brought in our first essentially the first gym chart staff so the first person that joined was actually my brother and he joined to package the orders whilst we were away at the event so that's when we sort of started to build out the team but it was literally like an order would come in he would package it up walk to the post office with a bunch of boxes and mail them out or DHL or UPS or whatever you were using yeah exactly that and then at the end of the day the last thing we would always do is sit on our laptops and we would go through all of the customer queries and we wouldn't leave until everything was sent out, every query was responded to, and then obviously we'd go to the gym.

40:49All right. So I read that in 2014, you ended that year with about 250 ,000 pounds in sales. So great, amazing, but still tiny, right? And around this time, I guess you meet two guys, two businessmen who will eventually play a pivotal role in helping Gymshark grow. One is a guy named Steve Hewitt, who I guess had some experience in the apparel industry. And the other was a guy named Paul, Paul Richardson. So how did these guys start to help you? And by the way, how did you meet them? So we'd go to the gym and there'd be local, you know business people that had run businesses and you sort of knew who they were yeah because when you go to the gym all the time you sort of end up knowing who's who and chatting to people so again we sort of befriended paul paul gave us some advice on a few i guess a few bits and paul then connected us with steve and it and i think at that point that's when we sort of arranged the meeting and i remember we sat down with steve and paul was there and we just said listen we want to make uh i think it was at the time we actually wanted to make some t-shirts and we didn't know any european suppliers and steve did know european suppliers so that was then i guess that was the the relationship was we went we worked through the business that steve worked for to to get some product made in in europe and then because steve in his previous job before that he'd actually worked for reebok and again he would just talk in a language we didn't understand like margin for us we just bought stuff and then we sold stuff and that was it we didn't know what what a margin was and I mean being honest we didn't we I mean I think they put us in touch with with an accountant because we didn't know really about how to file accounts bookkeeping tax rates all of these different things we no one teaches you any of this we were just sort of picking it up as we went so I'm sure every entrepreneur has had this but I remember the day before the close of our financial year or when the accounts were due the accountant emailed a list and And they were like, right, we need all of these things.

42:52I mean, we had none of them. So we had an old table tennis table with all of our receipts for the year. And we're trying to organize everything. Again, you're not taught these things. So for us, working with those two and their experience was incredibly helpful. I imagine that they were looking at you. How old was Paul and Steve at that time? Paul probably would have been in his late 50s. Steve would have been in his 40s. Okay, so these guys, way older than you, could be old enough to be your parents. I'm thinking they probably looked at you guys, at you and Lewis, as like, oh, these are really cool young guys.

43:29I want to help them out. Like, this is a cool little business that they're starting. I have to imagine that they never imagined it could be something huge. They probably just wanted to be helpful because you guys were young and enthusiastic. Yeah, and at the time, they were doing their own things. But there was a point where I remember Steve talking to Steve. And the thing is that Steve was really good at, that we had no experience of. He was very good with people. So he understood how to run businesses. He understood about how to structure businesses. And he came in and he did, I think he did a day a month.

44:05And again, I'd never known about this. We were paying him a day, right? Again, you don't know how these things work. You basically hired him as a consultant. We hired him as a consultant. He did one day a month for us. and I think we upped it to a day a week and then there was a point where I remember saying to him I asked him to come on as like an MD so not quite a CEO but just someone to support the day-to-day run the business. And managing director. Yeah that's when he then came on full-time and what we essentially did was he ran what we called the back end of the business so operations logistic you know the basically everything that wasn't brand or product or marketing.

44:42I'm curious I mean But from your perspective, what would make a guy in his late 40s or maybe early 50s, however old he was at the time, stop doing what he was doing and join you guys full time? I mean, that's kind of risky, right? I mean, he must have seen potential for this to be bigger, right? How did you make it interesting for him? Of course, he was going to get equity in the business. and how did you figure out how to make that work? And what did you even know about like equity splits? And by the way, I'm asking you all this not to say, oh my gosh, how, you know, you were so naive. It's more like the people listening to this episode, because a lot of them are in their 20s and early 30s, maybe even teenagers listening right now.

45:36They're asking this question like, wow, how did he know what to do at that time? Because I don't know what to do. Yeah, I think we were definitely lucky. So when Steve came on full time, we did give him equity. So I think that was important to him. And I think that probably gave him that level of comfort that you wouldn't get if you didn't have any equity whatsoever. The day rate would have been whatever it was. But then obviously he moved on to a salary. I won't share what the salary was, but I remember he was by far the most well-paid person, not only in the business, but I'd ever heard of. because growing up.

46:10Yeah. I'd never heard of people that were earning that sort of money, but he deserved it, right? The value he brought to our business was absolutely worth it. So it was funny for me to go from this perspective of, oh, wow, I didn't realize people earned that much money to, oh, wow, he can earn that much money because he's going to really help grow our business in a way that is far more valuable than the cost that he will incur. Yeah. And you were this still the CEO, basically. Yeah. So I was the CEO. But then at that point, it was very much just me and Lewis doing everything. Yeah. So I wouldn't really call it a CEO job.

46:48It was just we were just running the business, basically. But it sounds like, I mean, it sounds like by hiring Steve, you were essentially hiring a mentor. It's almost like you, I mean, you kind of hired your own body, you hired your boss. You basically said, okay, I'm, it's my business, but I want to hire, I need somebody to kind of show me the ropes here. I need you to help me figure this out. As much as he taught us, I think he showed us so much more because I found that it's one thing having someone sit down and go, Ben, you need to think about this like this. Watching someone work for me is really, even to this day, it's really valuable.

47:29I genuinely think I learn more from watching than I do from people telling because it was the way he interacted with people, the way that he thought about things. And that as a young 20-something with zero experience was huge for us. What were some of the first things that Steve did when he joined? I mean, because at this point, you still have a very limited line of products. Given that he had come from Reebok and apparel, was he saying, okay, guys, we have to hire now, we have to hire a designer and we have to think about a whole line of apparel we want to sell. Yeah, so exactly that. So the first thing that we did was we split the business straight down the middle and we had front end and back end.

48:11So it was brand and market on the one end and then call it like a very early build of a product or a supply chain team, maybe. Now, this was the period where we doubled down events even more. So we then we traveled a lot. We did events in Ohio, California, Cologne, Melbourne, the UK. At that point, we probably had at least probably like 10 employees. So there was a group of us that would go and just basically sell the product in person to in the same way that we did that first body pair event. You know, when Steve joined, I would think given his experience, I would think one of the things he would have said is, all right, guys, let's get serious now.

48:54Let's go and just go and just raise a bunch of money and just scale quickly. Because what happens is a business does very well, but they can't keep up with orders. They can't scale because they don't have the cash. And that's a huge problem. When you don't have the cash, when you've got lots of orders, you can also tank a business. So how did it happen that you didn't actually need outside cash um well i guess because we well we were well we were and we are a cash generative business we we sell products at a high margin and we have the cash come in before we distribute it and we certainly did then so we didn't need the cash and being honest again i didn't know that raising money was a thing i'd never heard or known anyone that had raised money until probably my, well into my early, if not mid-twenties.

49:46We're from a very industrial part of the West Midlands. It's not London or New York. We'd never, we just didn't know that that was a thing beyond, I don't even think we had an overdraft on the bank, maybe for many years into building the business. Now, obviously, I now know that there are many incredibly smart people that can build businesses in different ways, but that was the only way that we knew how at the time. You got to make a profit from the start, basically. Yeah, and reinvest everything. Don't take any money out and just really focus on growing the business. And again, just I guess to show our naivety, the first trip we ever did to the US with Gymshark, we flew to the Arnold event in Columbus, Ohio.

50:25I think it was December. I'd never been to Columbus, Ohio before, let alone in the winter. We didn't even check the weather. So I just went with a t-shirt and tracksuit sort of thing. I remember landing looking out the window and seeing all the snow and I remember they said on the plane that the the on the tannoy the temperature and I remember I just I had no idea what that was in celsius but I knew it was freezing we didn't have any clothes that were good enough for an ohio winter um but we just had a great time selling the product and and being with the community being with the going into the gyms um we were just having the time of our life So when you started to go to these trade shows in the US, for example, I mean, you were small potatoes, tiny compared to the brands that were probably at some of these shows.

51:15But was it – how did people respond? I mean, were people like, oh, you're from the UK? Like, what are you? Or because these YouTubers already had, let's say, a global appeal, did people know who you were when you go to the shows? That was the most surprising thing. We landed in Ohio, and again, you think no one would know. But again, I think the thing to remember is these trade shows are and were filled with real fans of the industry. So it wasn't like we were landing. It's like people who go to a Star Trek adventure. They know every character. Yeah, sorry, keep going. So we landed into Ohio, and you sort of think, would anyone know?

51:53And you're right. I think it was a combination of, because we were big on social media at that point, through the YouTubers, and the YouTubers were there with us. So then again, three of the, I think three of the five were from the States anyway. They had big America, big US following. It gave us a legitimacy very, very quickly, which I think was great. And again, because no one else at that point was doing what we were doing, albeit it wasn't massively technically advanced, but we were speaking to an audience that no one else was speaking to. I think we then had that legitimacy quite quickly in the US.

52:25So, all right, let's talk about products because, you know, one of the things, and you may be familiar with the story, but years ago we had Chip Wilson who started Lululemon on the show. And he really, he kind of was a pioneer of this fabric that they would end up using, this like stretchy fabric that, you know, worked really well. Many women felt like it made them look more flattering. at that point you know you were still it was like mainly cottons that you were using and you know just the track suits and the t-shirts when did you start to have conversations internally like hey let's think about like performance material and and let's think about you know sort of doing something a little bit more innovative i think one of the things that i really admire about what Chip did at Lulu was I think I could probably close my eyes and you could hand me a product and I could tell you that it was a product of theirs I think that's so impressive and inspiring yeah yeah um I would say the first piece of sort of performance apparel that we made would have been our first seamless product and we we were trying to work out how could we make the best physique accentuating t-shirt so it was all about making your shoulders look bigger and your waist look narrower.

53:41And seamless means it's made with synthetic, mainly synthetic materials. Yeah, yeah. And then it's knitted in a tube. So rather than having flat, I guess, flat fabric that you then sew together, it's knitted into a tube as well. So it creates a really, I guess, physique-hugging fit, but you can also knit designs into the product itself. And that was a big moment for us when we found out about that because we could knit in almost like a darker color over the chest, over the shoulders for a man. And then we've realized that it makes, essentially it makes your shoulders look wider and your waist look narrower.

54:16And that's, I think that's where some of the early product principles for Gymshark really were born about building the best gym wear that we can, but ultimately a really physique accentuating fit. And did you have, I mean, at that point and on staff in like a staff position who somebody who was a designer or not not yet were you still mainly basically working with the designers that the manufacturers had on their staff no not really the the point where we may we brought in a design team it's actually quite funny it looks bad on me but we the point that we we built a design team was it was a few it was a few years and we we we thought we wanted to sell we wanted to expand and we wanted to sell women's products as well as men's because again And the company in the early days was literally built in our image.

55:06It was lifting wear for young men to make the physique look better, basically. And we wanted to make women's wear. And I thought, I'll give it a go. How hard can it be? We did our first women's range, and it was terrible. It was absolutely terrible. No one wanted it. It looked terrible. It fitted terrible. It just didn't work. And it was at that point where we realized that if we're going to build, if we're going the design team and we need genuine designers who will, you know, think about how a women's range should look. So by the end of 2016, you guys had done almost$13 million in sales. You've got a little over 50 employees.

55:46You're a real now, you know, still a small business, right? But still, like, you're starting to get attention at that point. Like, there's media attention. There's interest like what is this uk brand that you know started in birmingham who who is this kid who started it tell me a little bit about like the attention that you started to get around this because you know all of a sudden one day you're a student at aston university and then you know a year later there's like an article on in the sunday times about you jim shark had a lot of attention because of it being a very public brand i personally didn't really get too much attention which was really helpful to me because it meant I could literally focus my all my energy on on running the business that that only really changed probably five years ago um that year a couple things happened um Lewis left your co-founder he left and went and started his own clothing company and and was that was he just burned out was there a split was there tension or friction or was he just kind of like, I did this, I'm done.

56:50I want to go do my own thing. Yeah. So, so Lewis actually left the business in terms of his active involvement in the business. It was around 2015. We were doing, it was somewhere between 10 and 20 million in revenue. So Lewis actually left the day-to-day of the business then. And yeah, I must admit that I found that really hard and I know he found it hard too, but that, that was tough because it felt like at that point we were what, four, call it four or five years in. And really taking off. Yeah. And we'd travel the world, We'd work together every minute of every day. So that was tough for me.

57:22But what was the reason he gave you? I mean, did you say, hey, why are you leaving? Oh, yeah. I mean, we had plenty of conversations around it. Essentially, I think we just had different visions for the way that we were running the business. And we had a disagreement. And again, I think it was a tough period for both of us. I was really disappointed. And I think the thing that a lot of people forget about is when things like this happen, the business still has to carry on. So you're going through this difficult period, but you still have to run the business. You still have to, at that point, we, again, probably had 20 or 30 staff.

57:56You have to look after them. You have to do what's right for the business. And that was a really tough time for, I think, for both of us. And again, at that point, the business, we were growing during that period. So we were having to, it's hard enough to run a business that's growing that quickly. But to have that going on at the same time is, again, it's really tough. When we come back in just a moment, how Ben becomes a better leader by building his own apprenticeship program, but why he still earns the nickname Hurricane Ben. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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1:00:10Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2015, and even though Gymshark is Now, a multi-million dollar business, there's trouble at the top. Ben and his partner, Lewis, are not getting along. Yeah, there's definitely tension. Absolutely. And at that point, I guess the only thing for us to do was go our separate ways. I mean, the only thing I could liken it to would probably be some sort of, it's like a business divorce, isn't it? And it went on for a while. It took a long time for us to sort of iron out all the details and work out what it looks like in this sort of new chapter.

1:00:44Yeah, and obviously Lewis is not here. This is not a documentary show. It's a one-person interview, and it's not – in no way is this meant to reflect badly on him or on you. I'm sure both of you guys have perspectives on what happened. But I'm just curious, can you kind of give me a basic outline of which direction you kind of wanted to head in and which direction he wanted to head in? Because again, probably both equally valid, right? So what was the differences, the broad differences in vision? there was there was definitely a point of i think and you're right i don't think one was necessarily right or one was necessarily wrong i think they were just different there was my perspective was very much like i was really happy to roll the dice time and time again and just keep growing and growing and growing the business and to bring in more people more management types at the time and build the business from that perspective whereas i think lewis was a lot more he really wanted it to be centered around us and the business act in a slightly different way.

1:01:40And then I think that that was the early tension. And then again, without going too much into the detail, then there was a series of disagreements between us. And there was one of us that I think had to move on in order to put the business first. And I think we then had to do that. Did your, I mean, you guys aren't, are you in touch today? Or was that sort of also the end of your personal relationship. No, no, that was the end of our personal relationship there, which I think is a shame, but it is what it is ultimately. So, all right. So now you'd mentioned earlier, like when you feel Lululemon or, you know, other brands, you could just know what they are without even opening your eyes.

1:02:23Did you start to think about, hey, I want, this is what I want Gymshark to be. I want us to be that too. uh i we didn't consciously think about it but i think it it naturally started to build and i think that again for us what we've done is we've really tried to focus on building the best gym wear in the world it's all around gym wear so we're not trying to make product for again at this point for basketball or running or yeah it was all around the gym because that that was and is our passion so and we'd always found that the the product that performed the best was that physique accentuating product both for men's and women's at this point and that's that was our real sort of bullseye and that's what we just continued to double down on right because gym i guess like if you went to the gym in the u.s right i'm thinking most guys would be wearing nike or adidas right maybe under armor but but also like people playing basketball or you know or tennis or running would also wear those and in your mind we could you're thinking like we're the brand for the gym like if people want to run and wear it great but like like lululemon became a yoga brand or aloe we want to be the gym brand exactly that we want to be the brand that people wear when they're in the gym and this is like in direct to consumer i mean you are you just like hit that wave right because direct-to-consumer was a model that all of a sudden, you know, in around 2012 just begins to explode, at least in the U.S.

1:03:57and then probably in the U.K. to some extent as well. The advantage is if you have high volume, your profit margins are much higher than if you've got a bunch of brick-and-mortar stores because you don't have those expenses. Yeah, and we could take that profit and reinvest it heavily both into the product but also into brand and marketing as well. So you go from like 12 and a half million, $13 million pounds in sales in 2016 to 100 million in 2018, which is an amazing leap. I mean, the year over year growth is just, it's meteoric. And Steve, by this point, Steve Hewitt is fully the CEO. But I'm curious, how did you were, and I think still are, the majority shareholder, majority owner.

1:04:48So all those young people who started with you, they knew that you had started the company, but there was a CEO. And so how did that work? I mean, did people come to you with questions and things that they wanted to do? Or would everybody go to Steve and say, hey, this is what we want to do. And what do you think? Yeah, well, they do both. And I think that was the point where it was really clear to me how important mine and Steve's relationship was and how aligned we were because if people didn't get the answer they wanted from Steve then they would come to me or the opposite way around so they'd sort of try and play almost like mom off dad sort of thing yeah so our relationship was really important obviously we'd speak every day and I when Steve was CEO it was a great period for me because I had that period I think he was he was there for probably about five years maybe even longer.

1:05:37And I had a period of accelerated learning in departments in our business, knowing that I could basically fail and I'd had a team around me that could help clean up after me. And it sort of felt like being able to do an exam, not get the result that you wanted, and then just do the exam again, because I could literally just try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, knowing that this team, I'd built this team around me to support me. so interesting i mean when steve becomes when you hire steve and he kind of eventually runs the business you become head of brand you do that for a while and then there's somebody who's better at it and so you bring that person on to run it and then you jump into what's what's the next thing you jump into i think i did product so it was all product design development all that sort of stuff and then it was more on the marketing side of things um all that sort of stuff so more the quantifiable side of marketing for a bit and then then after that it was uh in sort of tech development website so you really kind of built your own apprenticeship model like you would you would jump from one thing to the next and stay there for a year six months or nine months and kind of learn on the job how to do all those different jobs yeah and it was amazing because i I would, you know, I'd be in factories with the development of the product, then I'd be designing with the design or spending time with the designers.

1:07:00I'd be obviously at every event still working with developers on how to, you know, improve our website and email partners for CRM and things like that. I just had, yeah, exactly that. And like a turbocharged apprenticeship at a high level in the business. Tell me a little bit about, again, you still are super young. and now you're very experienced, which is awesome. But as you're sort of building the brand, right, and building the company, just inadvertently by accident, you have to also become a leader of people. Did you always feel like you had those qualities as a kid or is it something you had to learn how to develop as you got older?

1:07:46No, no, for me, I definitely had to learn. as a kid always very shy very introverted I learned a lot of that through watching Steve and and to be honest through through feedback through feedback through the business I've had to completely change the way I work now from 10 years ago when I was in my you know early 20s I've had to completely change I remember we did I'd never heard of it before we'd moved into our third our first proper office we built a team at this point we probably had I don't know call it 30 maybe maybe 40 people working out of the office and we did a 360 feedback which I mean I'm sure you you know what it is but for those that don't it's basically where you have feedback from a group of people that you work closely with yeah and I had this feedback and I read it and I could not believe how bad it was the the bottom line I think someone described me as hurricane Ben because it was I would come in I'd see a design I wouldn't like it and then um I basically just say that's terrible start again sort of thing and people you know it basically I could be rude to people I was very abrupt and just frankly not not very good at working in in groups that had a real big impact on me now I didn't actually I would have been about 24 25 so this is I guess a good five or six years into the business um and that was a big moment for me because I realized I really had to change if I was going to work well in Gymshark.

1:09:15How did you cope with being so young and meeting with older people? And did you ever feel intimidated or have a sense of like imposter syndrome? I don't think I ever did. That's not to say that I wasn't nervous, but I never had a feeling of imposter syndrome because, I mean, there was a point where I'd basically done every job, whether it's packing orders or customer support or product design, or I'd sort of done everything. So I think when I was working with other people, I always felt really comfortable, not necessarily because, you know, they knew more than I did. They were more experienced and smarter in many ways.

1:09:50But I am I always just saw it as an opportunity to learn. So, all right. You guys are, you know, you hit a thing like 170 million pounds in sales by, you know, 2019 and 2020, you get to the pandemic. And we'll talk about what happens during the pandemic because in virtually every case that we've studied, the apparel brands did really well, right? People were at home. They weren't wearing office clothing. They were wearing what is known as athleisure wear. That year, you also had a private equity firm acquire a 21 % stake in the brand, General Atlantic. the deal valued the brand at this point at 1.3 billion dollars and i imagine it was payday basically for shareholders people who had shares in the company could liquidate at that point and make some money significant money yeah and for me it was that closing of a chapter from bna from almost like that that startup period and then really now how do we become a true serious business at that point.

1:11:04And you retained, or I guess you even increased your shares at that point, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that was my point for really, I guess, committing to our business. You didn't take anything off the table for you at that point? No. So my, I can't remember the exact numbers, but I increased my shareholding through that event. All my focus was on how can I work, I guess, with General Atlantic as our new partner, as, you know, in terms of building Gymshark into a really globally iconic brand. And that, I think everything up until that point for me was very instinctive and opportunistic. And it was just living almost each week and each month as it came.

1:11:45That was the moment where I genuinely thought, right, I really want to build this into something big. And I mean, they're obviously, they're a huge private equity firm, massive. And they bring experience. And did you have a board at that point, by the way? No, no. So the board, we actually agreed to build a board after that deal. So before that, we hadn't had a board. It was just essentially me, Paul, Steve, running the business together. You come back to become the CEO in 2021. I say come back because you had done it when you were a much smaller business, right? A tiny business. Steve transitions to executive chair at that point.

1:12:27and 2021 now you know you are you know nine years into this business basically I mean this really kind of started in 2012 as a supplement site so you had the experience you were ready to go I mean is that how you felt like okay I can do this now no no so I didn't really feel ready so when Steve came on Steve always said to me that it wasn't it we always knew it wasn't a forever thing for Steve we were actually working in Hong Kong at the time and we'd sort of come to the end of the trip and he sort of turned to me and he said listen Ben I think I've taken this as far as I can and I'm you know I'm sort of ready to step down he then went on and he said I think we need a new CEO and I remember thinking oh god this is this is going to be hard work I don't know who I'm going to find I need to obviously find someone that I trust I don't even know how to do this and then he went on and he said and i think the next ceo should be you and to be honest i didn't say anything at that point i actually didn't really i just said well i i just said well i'll think about it and i'll you didn't you didn't want this you weren't trying to pursue this no not at that point absolutely not it wasn't important to you to be the ceo it's just it just wasn't something i was thinking about at all i i mean i thought about it the whole flight home but it wasn't immediate it certainly wasn't the second he told me, I grabbed it and thought, this is for me.

1:13:48I took a while to really get comfortable with it. Then there was, you know, a transition sort of handover period of probably the best part of six months. Something else happens, which is in the pandemic, right? Everyone was assuming that brick and mortar retail was really going to be dead. And that e-commerce was going to be the only channel. Of course, that's not what happened. And you also, So you guys also thought, hey, we actually – because you had only done direct-to-consumer at that point. You should get into retail. You should be in retail shops. You should own your own stores and then do wholesale as well.

1:14:26I mean, the biggest – your biggest sales channel was the direct-to-consumer channel. Still is today, I think, right? Yeah, absolutely. By far, yeah. But how many brick-and-mortar stores do you have today? Today, we have – we've got three in Manchester. I think we're at five. So we've got Amsterdam, three in London, and one in Manchester. And we're just in the process of opening two in New York. So we're growing at a considered rate in terms of stores. What I don't want to do is I don't just want to open thousands overnight. I want to do it in a really thoughtful way. Well, here's what's interesting to me.

1:15:01There has been a little bit of a correction in direct-to-consumer in recent years because what people assumed was the future has become much, much harder, right? Just getting people's attention is harder. Like when you started out with YouTubers in 2012, 2013, it was like shooting fish in a barrel, right? It was like all of it. You had this amazing – it was an amazing time period to capture people's attention. Today, there are tens, hundreds of thousands of influencers, micro-influencers. it's really challenging to get eyeballs right and so it's hard you've got to keep it fresh and keep it active how do you guys maintain that energy when there's so much competition so much more competition out there yeah so the the way that the certainly that we see it is what we don't want to do is we don't want to become overly broad and then essentially almost uh bland in a way it's really important to me that we retain a really narrow focus so the easiest thing for us to do would be to double or triple the size of our range and start selling basketball wear and fashion wear and soccer and everything that that's not interesting to us what we want to do is retain a really considered position in the gym.

1:16:26Like great brands are built around great products and a great product positioning. So that's what we're really focused on. So building the best gym, wearing the water. And then by doing that, it allows us to work with the best lifters, whether it's Samson, I mean, Chris Bumstead, Ryan Terry, all the best lifters wear Gymshark. And that's really, really important to me. And it's really funny. I was working in Denver about 12 months ago and I sort of finished work. I just went to a local gym. I think it was an anytime fitness. And I went to the back. I went, you know, by the dumbbells. And there was three girls that were in the squat rack and they were all like hats on, headphones on.

1:17:07They had notepads. They were writing down there. I think they were deadlifting. They were writing down their lifts. And they were the people in the gym that knew what they were doing. And every single one of them was in Gymshark. You know, I mean, it's amazing, right? You think about starting out in 2012 selling dropship supplements and then by 2015 hitting 12 million sales and today exceeding 650 million, 700 million sales. And most of your sales today still come from the UK? No, the US. The US is now the majority of the business. And also where the most growth potential is? Absolutely, yeah.

1:17:49And here you are now overseeing a multi-billion dollar brand. And I think you've got over 900 employees now. And are you 32 now? 33. 33? Although I feel a bit older given how the last 10 years have been. No, I mean, for sure. You have tons of experience, right? So you have the experience of people 20 years older than you just because you started so young and didn't know what you were doing and learned it. And so I imagine you're in this for a long time. I mean, do you imagine running this business in 10 years, in 20 years from now? I feel like I've got the best job in the world. I absolutely love what I do.

1:18:34I love the job. And all the brands I admire really stood the test of time. They're not five years old. They're 50 years old or they're 70 years old. And so for me, the focus is on essentially running the business as long as it makes sense for me to do so. When you think about everything that's happened to you, I mean, you did in the course of this conversation mention luck, but, you know, it was Steve and Paul who you met at the gym and that they actually were the right people at the right time, the right place. how much of where you got to, how much of this business, how much of everything that's happened, do you attribute to just luck and chance and fortune, you know, good fortune?

1:19:15And how much do you think had to do with the grind that you put into it? Yeah, there's definitely a lot of it's luck and a lot of it's timing. So like we said, social media, Shopify, fitness uptrend, bodybuilding uptrending, more people going to the gym than ever. So there was an element of time in there with that said as we've built the business lots of other people have recognized the same opportunities and maybe not had immediately the same outcome so I think there's also an element of we took the risk we took lots of risk to this day we still take risks and I think the the commitment to the long term of our business and the ability and appetite to make those decisions has made a big difference as well so I mean I wouldn't want to put a percentage on it but it would be definitely be a good chunk of luck and timing.

1:20:05But then with that, I think you have to take advantage of that as well. That's Ben Francis, co-founder of Gymshark. Is your grandfather still around? The grandfather who started the furnace business? Yes, he is. He is. And he's still working, funnily enough. He was literally working last week. And he sent me a picture of a furnace that we actually worked on together when I was, 20 years ago when I was 14. What does he think about this? I mean, he was an entrepreneur. He is. And here you are. He loves it. He absolutely loves it. I mean, I still see him a fair bit. We'll go out on bikes together.

1:20:44We'll go to car shows once a year and things like that. So no, he absolutely loves it. He's blown away.

1:20:54Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And please sign up for my newsletter at guyroz.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtina Ablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Alex Chung. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray and Robert Rodriguez. Our production staff also includes Catherine Seifer, Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Chris Massini, Carrie Thompson, Andrea Bruce-Romell Wood, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

1:21:28And don't stop the podcast just yet, because right now you're about to hear an amazing small business story that you don't want to miss. This segment is presented by American Express. With a business platinum membership, the best just got even better. And this week's story begins in 2015, when Lauren Dudley-Stevens and her sister joined their parents for a freezing cold adventure. Our parents had just picked up the hobby of boating, and they would go out on Long Island Sound, and it was always cold no matter what time of year out on the water. Back then, Lauren worked in fashion PR. She flew around the world and dressed celebrities in red carpet looks from luxury designers like Gucci.

1:22:13But she dreamed of going into business for herself. ideally with her mom and her sister, Khaki. They just hadn't landed on the right idea yet until that day on the boat when her mom happened to think out loud. My mom said, you know, I just wish that I could have a cute fleece that I could wear out on the boat and then go to dinner in. And that moment for all of us was, oh, wait, that is a good idea. How many women would actually love this product? They knew that young moms would. At the time, Lauren was expecting her first baby, and Khaki had just had one of her own. It bothered them how hard it was to find washable, durable clothes that fit into their full lives.

1:22:58I just want to feel put together every day, even though I also want to be comfortable in my momhood, but also going to work every day. Lauren started to take the idea seriously. She looked into sourcing material and found a company that makes fleece from plastic bottles that wash onto beaches. When we knew we could get a recycled fabric and make it stylish, we just thought, OK, this has to happen. So Lauren and her sister drew up a business plan for a direct-to-consumer fleece clothing line called Dudley Stevens, a combination of Lauren's maiden name and her married name. And they pitched it to a successful businessman, someone they knew and admired.

1:23:39Their dad. We did not go to large investors and have millions of dollars invested. It was a very small family investment at the outset. We put a number together and he agreed. And then we just dove in full steam ahead. They chose a manufacturer in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, built a website and launched the business out of Lauren's basement. It turned out to be a pretty good bet. Within six months, they made their initial investment back. Not that success came easy. In the early years, Lauren and Kaki did everything themselves, printing the shipping labels, running the website, answering emails, all while juggling child care.

1:24:17I'm not sure how we did all that. I think, as any mom listening would relate to, there's nothing like having a child that makes you efficient. The turning point came when the company brought in$100 ,000 in a single day. And it was actually on my birthday. So I met my husband for dinner and I just was on a total cloud nine, like so excited, scared because we had to figure out how to fulfill all of those orders. It was like, oh, we're a legit company now. Today, Dudley Stevens is closing in on$50 million in sales. They just celebrated 10 years in business and they're close to another milestone they're proud of, recycling their 10 millionth plastic bottle.

1:24:59It's funny that we're like nearing in on 10 million plastic water bottles and we're turning 10 years old. I was like, can we hit it by the end of the year? I don't know if we will, but we're close to it. And that's our small business spotlight presented by American Express. To build a business like no other, you need a card like no other. There's nothing like Business Platinum. If you like How I Built This, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.