Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Ben Francis on building a billion dollar brand

23:39Ben Francis:No, not in the early days. Now, I wouldn't call it a business plan. I would call it a broad strategy and direction. And I think that's more out of necessity than anything else, just because where we are now, we've got a really considered sort of strategy where, I think you're right, if you have a broad shareholder base, then what people will do is they'll focus on the short term. And generally in business like ours, what they'll say is, okay, make more product to serve more people, because if you've got a larger total addressable market, you must be able to make more revenue. If you can make more profit, revenue, you must be able to make more profit.

24:11Ben Francis:That's the general, that's a really generalization. Every few years, Apple is bullied into producing a lower cost product. And every few years, it fails. Yeah. And I think that's the natural, like that's the gravitational pull of a business that runs like ours, what we've said is we want to be really narrow and we don't want to expand our products. We want to make the best gym wear in the world. And the obvious thing for us is, well, why don't you make football, basketball, hunting, whatever else it is? Why don't you do a bit more like fashion? Why don't you do all these things? Whereas what we've said is no, we want to focus on building the best gym wear in the world.

24:45Ben Francis:One, because we genuinely think we could be the best in the world at it. No one else is focused solely on that in the way that we are. No one else I think has the authenticity. We were founded on these principles and I think that's really really also a growing market which really really helps and I think um so when you're linking that back to a business plan because before it was just we were just doing stuff it was just right let's do an event let's do this now because it's more complicated we do have to think about how we approach those things and how we manage our cash and inventory and opening shops and all that sort of stuff but I would say it's a strategic direction but we're always ready to pivot and adjust to what the customer wants or how the I I guess, how the market looks at that time.

25:23It's almost like it gives you a North Star and a red line, right? It's almost like the business plan is there to keep things simple and keep us almost committed to the mission at hand.

25:33Ben Francis:It's more of that feeling of, again, because most of our business is in the U.S., so there's always one of the team traveling. It's that thing of, if Noel's in New York, he's completely aligned with the direction in the same way that I am, as if Sian's in London or whatever or Carly somewhere. It's making sure that everyone knows, particularly as a leadership team, And then as a broader business, where are we going and why are we going there? Incidentally, you've probably resisted over-premiumizing, haven't you? Because there must be a lot of encouragement for you to kind of lululemonize your pricing.

26:03Ben Francis:And it's really important to me that is one of the things that the business was founded on, going back to Topline 2 for 10 pound t-shirts, was affordability for kids getting into the gym. If we walk away from that, then we're not the brand. That's one of the founding principles. Like if you think, again, five pounds an hour at Pizza Hut, you can't afford to go and spend 120 quid on a T-shirt. And it's really important to me that that 16-year-old kid that's just getting into the gym for the first time, probably doing a part-time job, can go and buy Gymshark, particularly at the entry level, because those are the kids that are into the lifting.

26:35Ben Francis:Those are the younger demographic that it's important to me that we're able to do. But also they're probably the most authentic in terms of user imagery. Yeah, yeah, and that's when people get into the gym. It's when people form a lot of their lifelong habits. And hopefully, again, the same way that we did, is just get into the gym and then it becomes a part of your life. Which is really important to us. And again, these are things that you look back at retrospectively. This wasn't a strategy at the start. We didn't sit there and go, let's make it affordable. Let's make what we could afford. And then you then look back and you go, oh, that was a founding principle.

27:09Ben Francis:That's one of the reasons that people really like our brand. So let's protect that. I think that a lot of times when people start to professionalize and think about things like values, etc., etc., they always look at what other brands' values are for inspiration. But really, your values and your pillars always existed. You just haven't taken the time to step back. He's almost uncovering them, isn't it, in a way? Yeah. And again, I still think Gymshark to me is still really a startup. It feels like a startup, and that's really important for us to protect. And I think, again, like you say, it's protecting that for as long as we can.

27:39Yeah. And what are some of the changes that you've seen in the industry today versus how it used to be back in the day?

27:45Ben Francis:In fitness or broader retail, e-commerce? Both. Well, I'll tell you what, when we first opened up our website, people still thought it was a bit weird to buy things online. I mean, we weren't so early. What year was that? The website was first built 2011, 2012. Okay, yeah, yeah. So it was early, but not so early. Not so early, yeah. But to buy clothes, and then people weren't totally sure on the returns policies, like how does all that work and all that. So that was early. I mean, I remember there wasn't an integration between Shopify and Royal Mail. So I manually created like an integration where it would drag a CSV out of Shopify and then automatically upload it into the Royal Mail system in order to then print the labels so that we could manually post the orders.

28:26Ben Francis:So if you think it was early, but you could hack your way around. So Shopify was what, a couple of years old? It must have been very, very young at that. I think that company is a sleeping giant in a way. I think it's incredible. I'm such a fan. I'm such a fan. And for many, many reasons, purely from a selfish perspective, it allows businesses like ours to invest our resources on what we can be the best in the world at, not on thousands of developers. Replicating a load of crap that everybody else is. Let them do what they're the best in the world at, and then they allow us to do what we're best in the world at.

28:59Ben Francis:And that's why I really like them. I've always wondered why they never put a front-end search engine on it. Apparently, there's some ethical dilemma that they can't choose between different customers. But if you think about it, it becomes the alternative Amazon. Yeah, you can literally all Shopify. Because they make up a massive proportion of American e-commerce retail. It's insane. That's an interesting idea. I haven't thought about that before. It's an amazing business. Yeah, like, why can't you search for brands on Amazon? Because actually, a lot... By the way, do you still deliver using Royal Mail?

29:33Yes, yeah. Yeah, very interesting thing. I'm fairly convinced that a large number of consumers prefer things delivered by Royal Mail because you have a relationship with the postman that you don't have with a standard courier, okay? But the decision as to who delivers is usually made by procurement, not by marketing. Now, procurement are purely incentivized on cost reduction. In other words, securing the biggest possible rebate by putting everything through one provider, okay? and of course procurement don't get any credit for incremental sales they only get credit for reduced cost and i've always wondered about this because like every time i speak to an e-commerce company i go at the very least offer people even if they have to pay a choice of who delivers because a lot of people have an aversion to one or other courier because they've had a bad experience or whatever and it's very interesting that because so you actually created now presumably And Shopify does have integration.

30:28Yeah, it's all completely done now.

30:29Ben Francis:But again, it was, so we were early, but not so early where people would order online. It was just a bit more uncomfortable than what it was now. Some of the integrations weren't there. If you were in America, you'd have to go on a completely different website and it wouldn't really function particularly well. Whereas now it's just, it's far more smooth. Yeah. And now the word community. So obviously when I came into the marketing world now, everybody's talking about this word community and for us it just came like natively right a lot of the times people feel like how gymshark built his community was digitally but i always tell them though gymshark was a brand in real life they went to the expos they earned their right they almost like went to the expo and earned the right to be the name that everybody remembered when they went to the expo that for me would be one of the biggest misconceptions of gymshark would be we built our online community offline and it's really interesting actually because we what we would do is we would go to events.

31:22Ben Francis:And we obviously people would come to the event, they would follow us to see where we're going to be where the stand is what product they could get. And we did the events in Birmingham, in Cologne, in Germany, Ohio, LA and Melbourne. And we would go around the world doing these events constantly. And that's where we would build the community because we would finish the event and anyone that was around, we'd say, right, we're all going to go to the local gym, who wants to come lift with us, and people come and lift. And again, you would build up that following. And it's really, really interesting, because I think it's still true, I haven't looked in a while, But I remember a few years later, I then looked across all of our socials at where the hotspots were.

31:56Ben Francis:And weirdly, all the hotspots was that Cologne-Dusseldorf area of Germany, obviously the UK, particularly in the Midlands, which is where we were founded, Ohio in the States, obviously the West Coast, LA, and then Melbourne, Australia. And I think it's that sort of, it's almost like that domino effect of that's where it started. It started through the events. Then people would go on Facebook at the time and then later Instagram and so on. and it just built out like that. You also have one lucky feature, which some clothing brands don't, which is the brand is incredibly visible on the clothing and it's completely normal.

32:29So you get that. You effectively get that sort of, effectively unspoken word of mouth, which is people see who's wearing your clothes and copy it.

32:38Ben Francis:Well, it's funny you say that as well, because when we did those first events, we gave away free T-shirts to everyone that would come to the stand. I remember that story. Every single person. I mean, we overordered them massively, but we had free t-shirts to everyone that would come to our stand. And you're right, and they would love it. And it wasn't cheap. It was a really, really well-made product. It was the perfect Gymshark fit. And it had, to your point, Gymshark completely across the chest. So people are buzzing because they get a really high quality product. It costs us a lot of money. But then they go and wear that in the gym every week for the next few years.

33:08Ben Francis:And it's literally, that's where it really helps push the brand to grow. So one thing just to double down on that, I think a lot of people over underestimate the power of turning your audience into billboards or your biggest advocates, right? And what happened during that period, because I remember I was one of the fans that actually, that's when I found out about, yeah, I got one. I have a picture somewhere on Instagram. Maybe I archived it. Uh, but, uh, uh, so, cause there was a time when like Gymshark saw the story because I remember the Hodge twins at the time were there. And then I went to go meet the Hodge twins and I see this brand called Gymshark that has like people queuing up for four hours, right?

33:44But then, everyone was walking around the whole body power with the Apollo T-shirt. So I did a bit of a, so I looked at the following before the actual event. And because everybody was wearing Gymshark and tagging over the weekend, the following went up by like 150 ,000 people because you turned the audience into billboards, right? So actually, just focusing on your 1 % and giving them a crazy experience where they advocate and tell everybody else about you is a way better marketing approach than... One of my mantras is the real world is a medium too. It's very easy in advertising to get absolutely fixated on what's appearing on a screen or on print, completely forgetting the fact that people spend a large part of their lives actually in the real world, seeing what they see, drawing inferences from it.

34:34Ben Francis:But you're right, but from a marketing perspective and from a brand perspective and a creative perspective, it feels really intuitive. that. But I remember when we really started to invest into digital advertising, and it's been really successful for us. But I remember being so amused at the race to who could create the best analytics. And obviously, these digital platforms knew that if they could create the best analytics that would show the best ROI in the best detail, the individual running those ads could show their boss, and they'd probably get more signed off to then go and spend more on the channel.

35:02Ben Francis:So you're right, they were sort of taking advantage of something that you just wouldn't get in the real world? Two things. So the first one being that aha moment for me was when I was, I kept asking myself, why is the price of billboards in Times Square so much? Because I remember once we did an exercise and they actually gave us a discount and we did something really great for that. But I was like, why is it so much when everybody is like online? Then it occurred to me that actually everyone takes a picture on Times Square and that lives online. So actually what you're paying for is not necessarily because people get to see it in Times Square.

35:36is because in the hashtag of New York, your ad is like... And actually you appear in films. Piccadilly Circus charges a premium, partly because there is a chance that you'll be featured on television coverage, films, etc. Because if anybody says London in the US, they have a shot of something like that. Now, there's also a very funny series of poster sites, which used to be probably less so. But the Cromwell Road was disproportionately expensive because if you were a Japanese brand, your CEO would fly to Heathrow and take a taxi into London. And the principal target audience of some of those ads on the Cromwell Road was the chief executive driving in.

36:19So the marketing director would know that he'd seen a couple of ads for that brand on his trip to the office and would think you were doing a good job. So there are all manner of kind of weird sort of subterfuge reasons why people sometimes choose the advertising media they do. And I remember, so there was one time, and I didn't get it at the time, which is why I always say that. I don't think that people understand how ahead of, and it wasn't necessarily because you were trying to be very tactical. It's just like you're like, well, let's test it, right? You're not scared to test. I remember there was a time when we were doing paid ads, and it was doing really, really well.

36:55And you wanted to see how strong the Gymshark brand was if we turned off all the ads, right? I have to see whether yeah yeah so he did an email to the whole company saying we're going to switch off all the ads I was the one that was brave enough to say Ben why right why are we doing this right and then one thing I realized because Noel says a thing Noel's the CBO at Gymshark he says the reason why Gymshark is big is because more people hear about Gymshark not from Gymshark itself right so Gymshark's not the one that's going around telling everybody we're great you have obviously the athlete roster you have the fans I think there's like nearly 20 million hashtags on Gymshark people are advocating for the brand because of their experience.

37:33So I always say to brands right now, don't get so caught up in the almost like the drug of certainty that comes with paid of putting one pound and getting 10 pounds. You don't actually have a brand. Because what happens is when you look at your share of voice, if you had to switch those things off, if they were to disappear overnight, what have you actually got? And I think that the gap of like revenue, day-to-day traction, once you switch that off, tells you how strong the brand is.

37:56Ben Francis:Again, this might be too much detail, but we see our brand investment purely as a fixed cost. yeah it is we so there's no obviously you can fluctuate your market independent on like you know how the business is going whereas for us brand investment is it's a cost of doing business end of it's not what happened when you turned it off by the way at the time and me well the problem is nothing happens immediately you've still got that flow there was actually a there was a reduction but it definitely wasn't as big as what you would have expected it to be and because you're living in at that point and this is going back several years you're living in the nuanced world of cookie windows and everything else where you've got double counts of revenue and google and facebook and everyone else is sort of like you know chipping into the sale but they all almost take equal credit for it so but what was happening is so so for gymshark it didn't drop off so much because a lot of the people were posting about the brand probably people ordered that week posted about that order so the brand strength and the the brand show voice was very like led towards the audience whereas there was this period in like the pandemic when a lot of people started startups, right?

38:59So a lot of the business crops of business that you see coming right now, they're so almost like reliant on paid media that actually that was the strategy from the jump, right? But now that it's becoming more and more expensive, you're seeing like that growth rate slowing down because they didn't think about the idea of investing that fixed cost into brand, right? And I always say that if you just think about it in human terms, it seems like paid media is like a salary, right? Like everybody knows that it's like consistent, they know they're going to get it, and they're almost like very scared to get out of that routine.

39:29Community is almost like your savings, right? It gets you out of jail, especially when times get hard or if a brand makes a mistake, et cetera, et cetera. But brand is almost like your pension or even a trust, right? That pays dividends all the time if you play it right and you're very intentional about it.

39:43Ben Francis:I agree. I think the other thing with this is, and for us when it comes to brand, it always comes back to the customer. and I think the really important thing for us is, to this day, I still think this is true, we've been speaking to a really underserved audience. So you've got all of the big sportswear. So Nike, to me, is one of probably the best sportswear brand of all time, right? And that was founded on the running shoe for me. And that's where, for me, if I need a running shoe, I'm going to Nike just because I have that sort of nostalgic view of that's where their brand was built and then they've built so much off it.

40:13Ben Francis:Under Armour built the best base layer that has ever been built. And I know their business is sort of stretched as well, but that was the best product ever. That was American football, was it Under Armour? Yeah, American football, yeah. Lululemon built the best ever yoga legging. And again, I think they still build the best specifically yoga legging. Gymshark was built in the gym, and that's really, really important to us. And continuing to speak to that audience is really, really important, because that's really foundational. That's where the community comes from, which is why we can then invest in brand, which is why we can then invest in that sort of more variable paid marketing.

40:45We always talk about the beauty of niches, right? And I always tell people that if your addressable market was only 1 % of the global population, that's 80 million customers.

40:55Ben Francis:That's still huge, yeah. If you can get them to spend 10 pounds, that's 800 million, right? And a lot of people don't think about that. They don't think about getting that real depth and meaning something to a direct audience. They're trying to mean something to everybody, which I think is the reason why a lot of people get caught out. Yeah. Well, I think the most, I mean, Google and Meta have tried to sell this idea that targeting is something that happens in an algorithm or in a computer. The most effective form of targeting is actually in the consumer's mind, which is they recognize themselves in the ad.

41:28So actually, it's an act of someone, instead of saying, this is for you, it's actually someone going, this is for me. That's how targeting really works. You know, I identify with this. It's probably why, by the way, your focus on one core audience, first of all, you don't have a competitor. Well, actually, there are a few. But effectively, once you start going general, you are competing with absolutely everybody. Whereas you have that moment of complete self-recognition in your target audience, which is, that's what I'm about. This is for me.

42:04Ben Francis:You just get so much more leverage as well from the investment that you're making. because what we're not doing is in round numbers. We're not spending£100 to appeal to all these people. We're spending£100 to appeal to this really, really narrow audience. And then it goes through everything. It goes through the overarching brand strategy, all the digital ads that you'd see, the product strategy. We narrowed our product range dramatically over the last couple of years because we just saw a product that we didn't necessarily need and wasn't serving that customer. So we said, let's make a narrower range that's higher quality, and it's served us really well.

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43:14Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. Now, I've got to ask this, which is, you know, along with Led Zeppelin, you're a Birmingham brand that broke the United States.

43:44And how did you do that? When did you decide to do it? Because it's an extraordinary thing to do.

43:50Ben Francis:Honestly, it was a combination of social media and events. I think because we did the events and we grew on social media, the first event we did was Birmingham. the second one was cologne and then we did birmingham cologne and then we did ohio and la and i actually remember the i remember landing into ohio it was december for the arnold expo i mean we hadn't even checked the weather forecast i literally didn't even take a jumper i landed into ohio and as we're coming down i remember looking out the window and seeing snow and then the guy on the plane thing it was in fahrenheit i can't remember what he said but i remember he was saying it is free fahrenheit yeah i was like oh my god i couldn't believe i'm like there finding out how cold it is, it was the coldest I'd ever been.

44:28Ben Francis:I had no idea. I'm used to temperate, relatively cold English winters. Anyway, and we just went and we just did the events. And I think doing the events and building the social media there, because it's all English speaking anyway, you get this natural just growth over there. And then I think over, yeah, it's been over the last few years, it's now the majority of our business. And I remember there was this crop of influencers from Houston. So Jim's always... Yeah, the first influencers. So the first influencers that we had, or the first YouTubers, there was Matt and Chris from California. They were from Sacramento.

45:00Ben Francis:There was Alon from Germany. Jeff was from Washington State. And Lex was from Manchester. So three of the five or six were in All-American as well. Yeah, and the funny thing is, so going back to that point, I seem to have this really crazy theory that especially in the UK, the brands or the B2C brands that tend to scale the furthest are those that are not from London because they almost come from as an outsider perspective. So what happens is a lot of people think first you break the UK and then you break the US. But a lot of these guys or gals realize that they can't get into London because they're not the cool kids of London.

45:35So they actually find more correlation with brands outside of the country. They build there and then they come back to London. Because I also heard from a Scandinavian that they always said that the great advantage of a Scandinavian business was that you realized that the Swedish market alone would never make you rich. So you had to think outside it. Whereas in a country like Britain, Germany, France, you can make quite a lot of money just being a local brand. So you don't have to think in quite the same way.

46:04Ben Francis:Yeah, you're sort of in Uncanny Valley, aren't you, in the UK? It's a bit of a weird one. You're halfway between the US, which is where you can become inordinately rich, just serving your home market. It's interesting because I found the UK... I still think to this day, Gymshark couldn't have been started in anywhere else. And when I say anywhere else, I include Birmingham because there was a few things that had to happen. One, I mean, more people were getting into the gym and fitness than ever, particularly women. That was a huge shift. Social media was growing and people were becoming more comfortable buying things online.

46:33Ben Francis:That was really important. But the best expo for lifting in Europe was in Birmingham. So we then were massively inspired by that. A lot of the big American bodybuilders would come over to Birmingham. That was really important. And then because of the UK's sort of digital penetration, being able to make an online website that can ship to 70 million people in 24 hours is really, really, really powerful in an English-speaking country. So you've got, and you can ship to the US in 24 hours, particularly the East Coast. You can ship to all of Europe in 24 hours. There were competitors that were started in other parts of the world that I genuinely think were at a disadvantage because of where they were located.

47:11That, by the way, I mean, Jeff Bezos, when he first came to the UK and discovered that next day delivery was a standard Royal Mail service, not a premium service, was totally

47:22Ben Francis:freaked out by that. Yeah. It's huge. I genuinely think there's something in that. A combination of the timing, the courier network, the e-commerce penetration in the UK, the expo, I think that was massive for us. And the thing is as well, so I did some research on the founder of Red Bull. And what he did is he took the company away from the noise, right? And they created their own almost like space, right? Where nobody else can kind of like infiltrate. And I kind of think that if you think about like Blythe Valley, and if you think about like Redditch. She's in Solihull, by the way. Solihull, by the way.

47:54Okay, got it. One of the lessons I've learned is no one from Birmingham actually lives in Birmingham. I'm such a coalfield, actually.

48:05Ben Francis:It's very posh up there. Yeah, yeah. So when you think about where Gymshark is, and I remember the times when I would see like the numbers go up and the numbers on Shopify and the numbers on the following, and you forget that it's real people because you don't feel it. You're literally in a, and there's nothing else. Like you don't like in London, you don't finish work and then go to the pub. I mean, we was in Reddit at the time. Yeah. If you get to like 20 million. The Golden Arches. Shout out to Pepe's. So what would happen is if you get to about 20 million, 30 million in London, everybody knows who you are because it's really sexy and everybody speaks.

48:43We'd never go to London. We'd never go to London.

48:45Ben Francis:Get the train to London. It was like a big thing, wasn't it? We'd go and do a meeting with the developer and it was like really cool. I remember the first time when we had this tool called, I think it was Simply Measured or Affinio. And we went down to London because they're trying to quote like four grand or something for the year. And we had to go and see this person. I want to see what they're charging this much money for this thing. I want to see it with my eyes. And we took them to Nando, which is hilarious. Where is that? The people from Birmingham don't leave that much. I mean, you'll meet far more Manx or whatever in London than you do people from Birmingham.

49:15It's so good.

49:15Ben Francis:I love it. It was so hardworking, so down to earth, so genuine, so helpful. It's so nice. Yeah. And then, so obviously, then we'll go into like the word self-awareness, which is what I think is your genius level skill, right? and one thing that as soon as I said that I'm going to go on the journey myself, I had to kind of like break myself down and say, what would Ben do? And he would say, what's the best team I can build? Or what ingredients do I need to win the game? Not how do I be seen to be winning the game, right? And I think that what you did very early on is you said, you recognize that steering the ship at this stage of the business was not where you need to put your focus on.

49:51And you got like other people on board. Like, was that intentional? Did you read a book? Did I just feel natural?

49:58Ben Francis:I definitely didn't read a book. not my early 20s. No, so what happened was, I can't remember how old I was, but it would have been early 20s. And it was very obvious to me that I wasn't the Gymshark CEO. But what I really loved was product and brand. I loved being involved in product and brand. So a guy called Steve came in and was CEO for five years, I think, I can't remember. Did a really good job. And it allowed me to then go in and I ran brand for a bit, product, tech, I sort of did all the jobs in the business. And you got Tim Cook in, as it were, to use the actual analogy. It was amazing because then I would travel around factories.

50:34Ben Francis:I'd literally be making product. I'd be working on brand stuff, partnerships, every single event I could go to. It completely freed me up. And what it did is it allowed me to simultaneously focus on my strengths in brand and product and be really close to the customer in the community. But then I could dabble in operations and finance and fail without consequence because I could go in, I could completely break it, knowing that Steve or the other people, again, people like Phil, would come in and tidy up after me. So it's almost like being able to do your GCSEs, you get a D, oh, that's all right, I'll just go and do the same exam again, and I'll get a C, then I'll do it again and get a B, and then I'll do it again and get an A, because I could just fail within reason, without consequence, and had a rapid expedited sort of learning, being able to do both, whereas I think a lot of people often have to choose.

51:19Ben Francis:Now, I was really lucky, because at that point, we had the resource to employ CEO, C-suite, all that sort of stuff and allow me to then go deeper into the business. And I think now it's really great for me doing the job I do now as CEO because I've, not to the degree that a lot of people now do in the business today, but I've sort of done every job. And I know enough to remember back to the days where I'd, you know, sat in the factory and walked the line and sort of been really involved in everything and, you know, original partnership contracts. That's, by the way, a very interesting thing, which is we've created sort of management as this weird separate skill.

51:51and it's assumed that you can be the marketing director or the manager of something and just go from everest double glazing to something completely different no no i i'm such a massive advocate i

52:01Ben Francis:think you have to be able you you have to know what you're talking about you have to be able to see to feel it and know i mean we literally this week we've been doing a uh like a we're doing some sort of like product work and there was someone that we were working with who's relatively new to the business who's really talented but hadn't really done it before and i was like we need to get product in the room you need your hands on the product you need to be out of factory You need to know exactly how this works because you won't really be able to do the job unless you really know it in that level of detail.

52:27Ben Francis:And that takes time, right? What you can't do is you can't have someone join the business and they basically do a six-month training camp. So it's this weird thing of sort of like building the plane whilst you're flying it. But for me, especially, again, doing what I did from making the product, making the website, and literally being in the nuts and bolts of it, it's so important for you to really understand the product, the community, the customer. I mean, come into an event, though. I always say you don't know the Gymshark brand until you've been to an event. The guy who founded Brompton Bicycles makes a really good observation here.

52:58He says, if you understand the business, you can learn a lot from a spreadsheet. If you don't understand the business and you look at a spreadsheet, basically it's worthless. You know some top-line numbers, but you don't actually know what's leading to them or what's driving them at all. You can stick a trend line through it and it might look okay.

53:15Ben Francis:But you don't know the context. You don't know the context. That context is so important. You see that with venture capital. So when you think about somebody like Warren Buffett, I seem to think that he knows something that other people in Wall Street don't. He lives in a little town, so he's away from Wall Street. The sage of Omaha. Omaha, yeah, right? He does the same thing all the time. America's Sully Hall. Yeah, he's in his little... America's Sully Hall, boring town. He does his thing. And I think that what everybody does is looks at growth projections, the Excel spreadsheet, and all that kind of stuff.

53:45I'm convinced that he has people that go into the business and understand the culture. Because if you understand the culture of the business and whether the numbers actually match up to the ambition, the connection, the almost like trust in leadership, et cetera, et cetera, that may not necessarily tell you like, or influence of the business is going to be today, but it tells you the longevity of where this is going to go. Do people have a growth atmosphere there? Do people feel inspired by the long-term journey? Because now people can cook the numbers to make it look like a business is growing.

54:16Ben Francis:How they respond to challenge. How they respond to challenge. Your first day in the office. Hey, so we're not going to talk about that. I have PTSD from that day. But going back to what you said about you don't know about Gymshark until you've seen an event. I think that what comes to that is until you see the audience in real life. My experience, so for those that don't know, 2015, we obviously had a lot of traffic going to the Gymshark website. And I ended up spending a lot of my time in customer service speaking to people. But the thing that that taught me was that this is a brand that people actually care about.

54:47Because although people were maybe complaining about the experience, then when I respond to them, say, I know that you guys are working really hard. I just want my stuff. You guys are doing the best that you can. I hope that you guys are all okay. And I never saw that before. And that's because I remember during that period when everybody was like drain of energy. And Steve said something like, we need to look after our legacy before our currency, right? And if you do something that is right for the consumer, they'll be with you forever. And that stuck by me to the point where I almost played that role as the bridge between the business and the community.

55:17Making sure that the business didn't get too much of its way, and the community didn't get too much of its way, to ensure that we really made sure that we never lost sight of why we're here in the first place. And I think that you still play that role today. You are still there meeting people, connecting with people. You're one of those people that shouldn't be accessible, but you're actually very accessible.

55:37Ben Francis:Yeah, I think you have to be for me. So you learn so much. I always tell this the same story about we did our first event in Toronto, Canada. I remember getting there and a guy said to me, it was such an odd question. He said, why don't you do any camo? And I was like, we don't do camo product because who cares about camo products? No one in England wears camo. And he went, yeah, but in Canada, in the US, people love camo. So I remember saying - You do camo, actually. Yeah, yeah. I literally called the product team and was like, guys, can we stick some camo in? Like, this bloke's convinced it's going to be a great idea.

56:05Ben Francis:Let's stick some camo into the next range. Let's come on. Yeah, and next thing, it was the top-selling... And brites do wear camo now, don't they? Yeah, and this was the thing, and that was literally a random conversation with a bloke in Toronto in minus 10, stood outside our warehouse for the event. And I know that's a really specific example, but I think it's so important to constantly be having conversations with the people that you're, again, I guess the community. Never have I been a part of a business where what people see in the comment section makes it to the board level decision making.

56:34Where we can be winning, but if the customers are not happy, we are not happy. Which is, I think, one of the things that sets Gymshark apart. And that starts from the founder and the leadership. I think Noel's really good at that as well.

56:46Ben Francis:100%. Noel is obsessed with every Gymshark Instagram page and YouTube video and everything that comes with it. Interesting question. You've got a call center, presumably. As in, like, inbound for customer service, yeah. Are they allowed to call out? No, so we don't do calls. We only do messages and stuff. You do messages. Okay, so it works by text, yeah. Now, that's interesting because one of the real really telling things with a business is how they treat their call center staff, whether they see it as a cost to be minimized or an opportunity for brand building and relationship building to be maximized.

57:18Ben Francis:That's really true. And there's a lovely story about James Dyson where he was being shown a load of call center statistics about the Dyson call center, which is the usual kind of average wait time, cost to handle, time to handle call. And he goes, I'm not interested in any of this, basically. He said, as far as I'm concerned, if one of our customers chooses to contact us, we should treat it as an honor and respond accordingly. And I've always said, that's why my dad had three Dyson vacuum cleaners, even though he's quite stingy, actually. and the reason was he bought his first Dyson there was some missing part or faulty part rings up fantastic experience they send the part out for free the next day from then on he wasn't really contemplating any other brand no and you can have those brand quakes which I think you know I'm going to spend part of my time between now and retirement creating a kind of RSPCA for call centers, because I think they're the most abused and undervalued medium.

58:17Because the potential there to create lifetime value and conversational value, it's not measured. Now, I think a really good call center person, if they could capture the value they created, could actually earn six figures. Now, salespeople can earn six figures because they can point exactly to every penny of value they've generated. Whereas with repeat custom in a call center, you know, or rescuing a defector, for example, the value is just as great, but they can't actually quantify it. So, well, one thing that's really interesting about that is that at Gymshark, a lot of the people at the early days that started off in the customer experience team ended up working in other areas of the business and brought the voice of the customer there.

59:04Interesting. So, I went to university before I actually, like, started working in marketing and everybody talks about the four Ps and they get marketing really complicated. And then I recently spoke to Ellie from Formula E, and she basically rewired my thinking of marketing. She's fabulous, by the way. She's amazing. Absolutely amazing. Ellie, we're going to get you on here. But she basically said... This is Ellie Norman, by the way, who's marketing. She was Manchester United marketing director, and now Formula E. Yeah, terrible tracing team, but we'll skip past that. So shout out to the Arsenal, 1-4-0 last night.

59:35All right, cool. So she basically says that she only asked herself three questions. How do we become famous? How do we become easy to find? And how do we become hard to leave? And if you look at those three different buckets, fame, social, storytelling, etc., easy to find is where is the customer and let's make sure that we're there. And then hard to leave is how do we make sure that when people come in there's no leaky bucket? And I think that when you start to look at it in that way, you see the balance. You can be fame and driving all this stuff, but if people are leaking, then there's a cost to that.

1:00:04And that's the thing that compounds. And I think that a lot of the times people forget that community is a moat that prevents people from leaving. And if you treat your customers, and actually, I don't know whether you remember this, during that Black Friday week, one thing that was done was not scalable was the fact that Ben wrote letters to everybody. Like, he actually wrote letters. He actually handwritten letters to the people that were the most affected. And actually, our head of commercials called people during that period, not because it was a business strategy, just because it was the right thing to do.

1:00:37And Ben actually spent a whole day doing that and actually mailed it to people.

1:00:41Ben Francis:Also, no one in the business did anything for weeks, did they? Yeah. And that was the whole joke. Elf was hired to run social. He didn't do any social for months. And that was the whole thing. We just, everyone dropped tools, didn't we? To focus on customer support. Yeah. Good grief, yeah. Yeah. And the thing is, that's the thing that compounded over time. And then when people try to figure out, okay, well, what made Gymshark different? Because I realized when I stepped out of Gymshark, and now that I'm going to have the opportunity to work with brands with bigger budgets, et cetera, et cetera.

1:01:07The difference was what they prioritized and what they cared about. And that's all. And the fact that I felt that Gymshark was an optimistic brand in a very pessimistic country sometimes when it comes to business, right? Everyone's scared of risk. Just having a different mindset of, let's try, or we're not scared of failure, or at the end of the day, as long as the customer's happy, this is the right decision. The critical thing is they're basically businesses with an opportunity mindset, and there are businesses with a risk minimization or efficiency mindset. And it's very interesting because I think the shareholder value movement, I'm not sure that many publicly limited companies can build a brand anymore.

1:01:48Because if you look at who builds brands, it's founder-led businesses, typically while the founder or the culture of the founder is still alive, and then they're family-owned businesses, which also do, because they can think of different timescales And they can fail in a different way, which is what happens if a PLC fails is it turns into a kind of, you know, either a blame game or a kind of cover-up game or a post-rational, you know. Whereas, actually, the mentality you can adopt in a, and of course, family-owned business, if you don't have shareholders, you focus on the customers or the employees, which is, by the way, almost as important, I would argue.

1:02:28Something that's really interesting is obviously Gymshark started with creators, right? Because at the time, no one actually knew who ran Gymshark. Obviously, we lived in Birmingham, so we can yell about you guys. So there was actually no face of Gymshark. And then I remember when Ben said that he was going to start doing YouTube, right?

1:02:44Ben Francis:Reluctantly. Reluctantly. He said that he was going to do YouTube and he was going to learn. I remember you sending me the first video that you shot, which is now like the one that's blown up. And Robin helped you with the editing and he made everything happen. and I remember even when you asked me for feedback and I was like, you almost had loads of cuts because you had to keep doing the scenes and the rest of the business didn't understand it, right? But now, when you think about everybody, everyone almost thinks about starting the personal brand first. But you're right, the only reason I did that video was because a bloke in Dublin asked me to.

1:03:14Ben Francis:We did, what we did is we did all of these events, right? And then we ended up doing so many events, the queues were so long that people would complain that they paid the entry price to the event to then spend all day queuing to get to the Gymshark stand. So they were like, why am I paying to stand in a line all day? So then we said, right, let's go and do a world tour. So we just did a world tour. We literally decided in a week and we just picked these random cities. It was, we picked three on the West Coast, three on the East Coast, we have world tour, three in the UK. And by the way, Ben will be like, let's post about it on social and put some ads out and we're going to be in Times Square.

1:03:46By the way. That was it. Yeah, that was it. Times Square 12.

1:03:51Ben Francis:And then, so we did this world tour and we were in Dublin and I was chatting to a lad and he went, listen, I'm doing my dissertation on Gymshark, but I can't find any accurate story. So would you be able to do just a YouTube video to explain everything that happened? I remember thinking, oh God, that's the last thing I'm looking at. I don't want to talk to a camera and I just don't want to do it. But reluctantly, again, in the moment, I just said, do you know what, I will do it. Then a few weeks later, I went home, recorded this video, and then that's when, I guess, the personal brand started.

1:04:21Ben Francis:I never had any intention when the business was being built to be posted online personally. And you'll even see now if anything that goes online, I don't really post my personal life. It is literally about my Gymshark life. So, yeah, it was reluctantly, but even that was a customer-led decision. Yeah. By the way, I mean, there's some recent IPA data on the power of influencer marketing. And I would argue, by the way, that influencer marketing is partly powerful because it's the first digital form of proper advertising as opposed to performance marketing, which is valuable and important, but it's not advertising in the full sense of the word, okay?

1:04:58There are a lot of things it doesn't do. And I think, you know, the genius of meta and alphabet is convincing marketers that the things that they sell are the most important thing in marketing. Not memorability, creativity, you know, So, you know, all those other variables have been sort of shrunk to zero. But what's really interesting is that it appears that influencer marketing works pretty well. It works like TV level well. Initially, what's astonishing is the long-term effects. Oh, yeah. And of course, it occurs to me, of course, the material's still there. You know, a banner ad is gone in an instant, and you're probably on the next page before you realize it was something that interested you.

1:05:43Yeah. Whereas, by contrast, by the way, I've got a tip for you coming up. Whereas, actually, any material you produce that's there in eternity, and sometimes you get sleeper hits, don't you?

1:05:58Ben Francis:I've never thought about it like that. There's a great company called Tickle, which really appeals to me, where it does banner advertising, but the call to action is not click here, buy now. It's save to wallet. And so if you've got an offer, you can go, well, that interests me. I'm not actually going to, I'm not going to interrupt paying my parking fine to suddenly go shopping. Okay. But I wouldn't mind X percent off or a free so-and-so. I might look at that later. And that means that, so everybody looks at impressions, but they're not measuring for what you might call the timescale in which you can act on the impression.

1:06:34And also just to add to that. So I think a lot of people are trying to use influencer marketing like paid media. And I think it's going to get even worse now that Meta have announced that they're going to allow people to pay. I think they're like£2.99 or£3.99 to be able to actually not see any ads, right? So what you're going to get is all these people that are obsessed with paid media. They're not going to say, okay, what's the best way for us to get traction online is to work with influencers. And then what you're going to do is everybody's going to start to like increase their prices, et cetera, et cetera.

1:07:01But I think that the one thing that Gymshark does better than anybody else, and I think that we'll continue to do better than anybody else because you're at the helm and you'll always make sure that you understand the quality of working with the great humans and great representations of the brand, is that Gymshark always thought about, let's work with somebody for the long term. You became an athlete. You became a part of the business. And you were part of the team. You're not an individual on your own. I think a lot of people, if the first post doesn't go viral or the first post doesn't drive this product almost like sale, they're just going to stop it and say that it doesn't work.

1:07:34But then also the value there is, yes, you're getting the traction, but you're also getting feedback. Right? So you're getting feedback. You're getting trust. And right now, as more people are investing in influencer marketing, people are very discerning of the authenticity of those partnerships. Whereas if you work with a brand like Gymshark, people believe that the partnership is very authentic because it's a long-term commitment.

1:07:55Ben Francis:Yeah, and we get that athlete feedback through the product process, which we've literally had since day one, going back to Skype calls with Chris Lovato and Matt August getting feedback on the product. But you're right, it's not just a transactional relationship. And you're right, it tends to be longer term as well. Yeah, and people fly in, they come to the office, they meet the team, they become part of it. If anything, the amount of times that everyone's like, well, how are you always camera ready? I'm like, because you'll walk into the office and this influencer with like a million followers will put a camera in your face and I don't want to like say the wrong thing.

1:08:23I don't want to be ready for that moment. But there's one thing that you always used to say, because obviously we've been talking about Gymshock from your perspective, but now obviously when you start to go into a scale-up and the brand starts to grow, you have to make sure that energy of continually learning almost like gets through to the rest of the team. And there's one thing that you said about the fact that being in a scale-up or being in a rocket ship is almost like inflation. You have to become 10 % better every single year. You can't be at the same spot.

1:08:51Ben Francis:Yeah, we always say like people in the business need to, like their individual growth needs to be at least the rate of the business, as in you need to constantly be changing and adapting and growing. Because if you're not, if the business is growing quicker than you as an individual, by definition, you're going to be left behind. You're left behind. Interesting. So that's really important to us. And again, that's one of the things I really try and hold myself accountable to is constantly trying to learn as much as possible. You interestingly said that the first few months you worked there, you didn't do anything roughly even, you know, corresponding to your job description.

1:09:22I mean, it's a very interesting question, which is, at the moment, it's considered absolutely standard that you hire for a role. There's an interesting book called Counterintelligence, actually, written by a guy who headed up GCHQ, which is all partly about the culture and the hiring practices they had going back to like Bletchley Park and British intelligence and code breaking. They didn't do that at all. They hired talent, and then they found a role for them subsequently. and it occurs to me that the very business of you know there's an american football phrase which is vince lombardi which is hire the best athletes so vince lombardi didn't go out looking i'm going to get my terminology wrong you know what is it a tight end or a quarterback am i getting that right there is something called a tight end believe it or not i think okay and he wouldn't go out looking for a specific person he'd just hire the best people and then effectively take it from there And actually, I think there's an artificial bottleneck we've created in recruitment, whereby defining what we want in advance, we're massively limiting the talent pool from which we can draw.

1:10:31So one thing that I'm starting to do right now is in testing-like phase. We're now being very visual and very almost like honest about what our long-term goal is, right? So we tell people, this is what we're looking to achieve. This is the value we're looking to add. How can you help us get there faster? And what role do you think that you can play? So you're almost like coming to us with, this is how I can support. This is what good looks like. Give me the opportunity to make that happen, right? And because what happens is you almost put yourself the pressure of expecting to be the expert of how to solve the problem by telling people what you want them to do.

1:11:09But really, if you say, we've got a people problem, we want to get people to do this. How can you help us with solving that problem? Then actually, you almost like manage the person because they kind of created the direction for them. But then obviously, you have to make sure that the brilliant basics are where they need to be, and you have to be very good at describing the problem. But effectively, if you do get to that stage, people can actually come in with a sense of ownership of a problem that they can solve for the business forever, not just during that period of time, which I think is really interesting.

1:11:37Ben Francis:Yeah, I agree. If you set the direction, then let people try and work out how you get there. I think that's absolutely spot on, rather than micromanaging everything. And the other thing that always happens with very large organizations is they create silos, and then silos have their own narrow metrics. So you end up with people pursuing something which is perfectly rational within the narrow part of their business remit, but is actually not helpful to the organization. I mean, there are literally cases. In procurement, there's a famous case I heard where the person was told, go out and negotiate them down.

1:12:10The supply's down by 3 % every year. And he comes back and goes, oh, great day today. and negotiated them down by 9%. And the boss goes, you're a total idiot. He goes, well, what's wrong with that? He said, what are we going to do next year? And so the person was deliberately maintaining their own employability by just gradually kind of salami slicing the suppliers. And it was completely wrong-headed behavior. But within their own narrow sphere, that's perfectly economically rational. So a good friend of mine, Timo, who was on the podcast, and you've met him before, right? whenever people ask him what does he wish what did he wish he did uh when he was younger or what advice he has for younger people that want to start their own business he says he wished he had worked for somebody right because there's so many mistakes that he learned first time being a founder of a business now you did that but you worked for yourself effectively you went into the business and kind of like worked in the different roles yeah before you ended up like what's your

1:13:10Ben Francis:thoughts on that i think well there's two things so the first thing i did have a the first job i ever did which you'll know this so the first job i ever did which was actually started at work experience was with my granddad and we would line furnaces in the midlands yeah which was wonderful for for many many different reasons but the top two was one teaches your work ethic when you're working in a factory you work and the second one was he and he was a one-man band he's um he would go he still does it to this day actually sent me a picture the other week of a furnace we lined 15 years ago whatever it was um but when we were there he would tell me about how we started his business and he risked everything right like he risked the house everything on his business so then for me fast forward into starting to gymshark i was risking whatever cash i learned from pizza hut the risk was zero so i felt a complete freedom which i still being honest to this day sort of feel to take a a large amount of risk and speculation in building our business because I always think I'm not risking the house like he had to with my mom, her sister, my nanny, and that sort of thing.

1:14:12Ben Francis:So even though it's not a direct operational lesson, it's more of a philosophical lesson. And there's many more I learned from him, by the way, through that first ever period of work. But you're right. Then when it came to Gymshark, being able to go into each function and know how supply chain works, how product design and development works, how branding works, sponsorship, events, everything, rather than just being a helicopter. That, I think, was really powerful. You heard my theory, which is that if you grow up, if your parents run a shop or a cafe or a restaurant, it's like a free MBA. Oh, yeah.

1:14:47Yeah. Because also, you get to see the whole business in the round. And then someone who goes to Harvard Business School is taught there's a marketing course, there's an accounting course. I remember that. And actually they're all interconnected in reality. Where were we?

1:15:01Ben Francis:We were on a trip in, I'm going to say Vietnam, and we had like a minibus going to the factory. And I remember I had to load up my laptop because I had to run payroll. I remember I was running payroll and Lois. Lois went over and was like, what are you doing? And I was like, I'm running payroll. And she went, what? Someone does that. I was like, wait, it doesn't just happen by magic. Do you know what I mean? And you're right. Because what people forget is there's So many things that happen, like all these things happen in the business constantly. And I think you're right. When you just come into a business, you just assume that it just happened.

1:15:33Ben Francis:And we actually have people that come from far bigger businesses than ours into our business. And they're used to a complete other level of infrastructure that we do not provide. And we've had people that they're looking left and right. And they're going, where's my person to do X? Where's my person to do Y? We're like, well, that's you. You have to do it. And it's a, so yeah, I think for me, working in the business was really powerful because as I could hone my craft and really understand that business in a way that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. Because when you are the CEO, or when you are running the business, there's so many other things that just come up on an average day.

1:16:07Ben Francis:I think that's why so many CEOs work so many hours. Because I think half the time, it's just things that you get dragged into. And there's this thing where... Well, you're the only person who can resolve a conflict between... Exactly. And there's an interesting philosophical question there, which is, do we need to look at how businesses are structured so there are other people who can effectively adjudicate when there's a disagreement between marketing and procurement. If you can solve that, I will pay you a lot of money because you can outsource that part of the job. Because it is a ridiculous crunch point, isn't it?

1:16:38Yeah, you're right.

1:16:38Ben Francis:All the problems will always come up because problems happen and people try and solve them, but all the worst, biggest problems tend to come in. The buck stops here, yeah. Elon always talks about the fact that when you're a CEO or a founder of an organization, you just deal with all the shit. that other people can't solve, right? So you're basically there in service of all the shit, basically. And because you're the only person that can actually solve that problem, and often they're not the new things that other people have in... I mean, this is an interesting bottleneck question, isn't it? Which is the conventional sort of military structure of business hierarchy ridiculously constantly...

1:17:15In other words, the only person with the power to effectively decide in a trade-off between two business functions is one person. And there are probably really important trade-offs which people don't take to the CEO out of sheer embarrassment. And there are people who, as I said, are engaged in behaviors they know are absurd. But again, they're bonused on a bad proxy metric or something of that kind. Yeah. And again, the only person who could change that, because it's probably enshrined in your bonus structure, is again, one person. Yeah. And actually, this is quite interesting, because I think there's a...

1:17:58if we looked at it from a cybernetic point of view, in terms of information flows, we'd say this is massively flawed.

1:18:05Ben Francis:And inefficient, because what you'd want is you'd want that top point being someone that can connect the dots and see the opportunities, rather than try and, I guess, navigate the issues. Yeah. So, so one of my, the final questions here is that one of the key core, almost like values at Gymshark at the time when we first set up what our values are going to be, right? I think I remember Noel put a couple of us in the room and we actually try to figure out like, what is Gymshark, right? And one of the key ones was all about thinking like 19 year old Ben, right? And I think that the idea behind that is that the person that's going to take us out of business is not the people that we know today.

1:18:42There's going to be a 19 year old in the mom's garage that spot the holes that we have, right, that will figure out the areas that we're missing and they will come and challenge us from that perspective. So you're better off taking yourself out of business than letting somebody else do that for you is basically what Gary Vee talks about. Now, when you think about 19-year-old Ben, you're better off taking yourself out of business than somebody else by you out innovating yourself. Got it. And it's the innovators dilemma thing, which is you eat your own children to an extent. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah.

1:19:13But going back to the question, what is it about 19-year-old Ben in terms of ideology, characteristics, behaviors that you think that it's vital to keep? But then what are the things that you have to unlearn to become who you are today?

1:19:28Ben Francis:Well, keep would be close to the customer, close to the product, proactive, risk-taking, willing to think outside the box, the typical sort of entrepreneurial things. the things that you then have to try and walk away from is you you need to work out how you can in an entrepreneurial way build leverage in a business like now we could never simultaneously like we we've got a shop in the dubai mall now we've got like one in new york one in london we've got the e-commerce business we've got all these other things going on there's loads of things that we're trying to do we're building all this different product obviously at a start at a startup the london shop if i'm right is only partly a shop the in the sense that it's as much a space Yeah, it's a flexible gym space.

1:20:08Ben Francis:It was so funny because when we first, and I was being a bit, I was pushing the envelope a little bit. When we signed the lease, I said to Noel and Mitch, who were sort of designing it, I said, right, you're now building a gym that sells a bit of stuff. Whereas obviously we sort of like mixed it. It's almost like in a negotiation, if I over-index, then we can always backtrack and bring in more products. But you're right, you walk in and you'll see there's a running track, you'll see the floors soft. When you actually look at the product that hangs there, you look up to the ceiling, there's a button where you can press that button and all the product raises up into the ceiling.

1:20:37Ben Francis:We run classes there. There is a class at the back. There's changing rooms. Everything's all there. So it is a completely flexible space. And for us, it's more a cathedral for the brand. Because interestingly, when we opened it, and it's been very successful since we opened it, but all the surrounding London postcodes increased in e-commerce revenue. And I guess if you add up all that, that probably adds up to more than the increase in the store's revenue. So the sort of halo effect of that store has been really beneficial for us. Do you work with Herdify to do that? I was wondering, there's a company called Herdify, which massively concentrates on what you might call geographical hotspots.

1:21:15It's mostly used to inform sort of media investment. But they argue effectively that there are these huge network effects. And you effectively look at the postcodes and you notice effectively the effect.

1:21:27Ben Francis:Yeah, and uplift in website sessions and revenue since the opening of that store. Yeah, that's proper measurement. That's good. Excellent. We like this. So it's basically a community-centered disguised as a store. And we were talking about the fact that actually with where the world is right now, and obviously the fact that we all live online, brands now play a different role where they're actually, and brands like Gymshawker, are taking it upon themselves to actually bring people together because nobody else is doing that. And you talk about it like it's just like a matter of fact. And obviously, I know that you're not looking at all these different articles saying, oh, we need to do more community.

1:22:02Why did you feel that that was a priority and why that was important?

1:22:05Ben Francis:I think it was just instinctive. So joining the gym at 16, I learned everything from YouTube. So, and again, it's interesting because you'll know, and I do see them occasionally and people will say, oh, the Gymshark strategy is this. And I look at it and I think you're giving us far too much credit. Like this wasn't a... The University of YouTube shits on the Ivy League, doesn't it? It's incredible. It's absolutely incredible. We learn everything from YouTube. And I think, but going back to that strategy point, It's just there's so many things that we, I think one of the consequences or the benefits of being close to the consumer and close to the product is you will notice opportunities that ordinarily you might need consultants and loads of people around the table to maybe figure out and spend a load of money.

1:22:46Ben Francis:But it's just intuitive and it just comes to me. And then if you feed that into an entrepreneurial founder-led business, then you're probably more likely to benefit from it. And I think you're right about the public business brand building. And structurally, there are so many, I guess, speed bumps for a business like that to get over from finding the idea, funding the idea, informing the market, and so on and so on. Whereas as a business like ours, we don't have to. And I think, going back to your founder question or your 19-year-old Ben question, protecting that sort of intuition in a business, I think, is vital.

1:23:21Ben, you've been incredible. Absolutely sensational. Thank you for that. Thank you, lads. That was fun. Thank you. so