Ep 588: How BrainGain Scaled Heavy Home Gym Equipment to 30 Countries (100,000+ Customers)

0:00Kareem Raslan:Hello and welcome to the D2C podcast. I'm Eric Dick. Today I'm chatting with Kareem Raslan, co-founder of BrainGain, a home fitness brand that went from selling 25 pairs of dumbbells out of a garage during peak COVID to over 100 ,000 customers across 30 countries in Europe. On the pod, we get into the 3PL strategies that dramatically cut their fulfillment costs, why they're saying no to TikTok influencers and going all in on YouTube, how a SKU-level event economics audit completely changed which products they were pushing, and their pricing strategy across Amazon and Shopify, plus Kareem's getting ready to bring brain gain to the US.

0:34Kareem Raslan:We'll talk about what that looks like. Hope you enjoy it, and on with the show. Every single line item, you've got to try and find a way to optimize it. we in e-com can get quite caught up in the sexy paid media sales but I've seen and spoken to many people who are sales fantastic but not profitable at the bottom line and I think like the reason why we do all of this is at the end of the day to have a profit at the bottom line probably shouldn't be sharing some of the trade secrets but one of the best things we did and I cannot kind of recommend or encourage this strongly enough is...

1:39Kareem Raslan:Contentful helps you create tailored omni-channel experiences without working overtime. No stress, no limits, only possibilities. Get the feels at contentful.com. Kareem, welcome to the DTC podcast. Super excited to dive in with you here on the home gym equipment trend and brain gain, this awesome brand that you've built. Why don't you start us at the beginning? Why did you build your fitness brand? Absolutely. And look, Eric, thanks for having me on the podcast. I've been a keen fan for a long time. So look, let me give you a bit of a whistle-stop tour of Brain Gain, where we started and where we are kind of now.

2:17So rewind to June 2020, COVID, lockdowns, et cetera. We got served a Facebook ad for adjustable dumbbells. And given gyms were closed, knew nothing about importing, selling, marketing, et cetera, thought, hey, why not take a punt? um so my co-founder and i both in full-time jobs uh banking for me consulting for him imported our first uh kind of batch of 25 25 pairs um listed them on facebook marketplace and within about a day or two they were gone placed the next order for 75 dumbbells um again they came uh and they were again gone within a within a couple of days um so for me like COVID was some of the best times where I'd be driving around London, dropping dumbbells off to the rich and the poor and the fat and the thin and the healthy and the not so healthy because everyone was just so desperate, desperate for home gym equipment.

3:17And yeah, I guess fast forward to today, you know, we sell in the UK and across Europe, you know, 30 different countries. We've had 100 ,000 different customers in the five years or so since. and yes, just going from strength to strength, which has just been a fantastic and an incredible journey.

3:36Kareem Raslan:I think regular listeners of the podcast will be aware that I've told the story a few times of the only time I've actually bought something from TikTok was during the heart of the pandemic. I got scammed by someone selling adjustable weights and when they were delivered to me, they were literally two baby rattles, which just felt like an extra F you. Just send me nothing. You send me this gag gift. So I'm glad you didn't do that. Is there a reason that you went directly to having physical goods and selling it? It sounds like you had no problem. It sounds like they were flying off the shelf. But so many stories I hear in the e-commerce space start with drop shipping, where things are being shipped from AliExpress or Alibaba.

4:11Kareem Raslan:Is there a reason you decided to start physically, like product in hand, shipping yourself? Yeah, look, to be honest with you, Eric, it's a great question because when I speak to a lot of other guys in the e-commerce space, it's again, it's like a big master plan and a five-year business idea. And this is what we want to do, this, that, and the other. To be completely honest with you, we completely stumbled into it. It was an opportunistic play where we just saw, look, opportunity, let's jump on it and kind of see how it goes. And I think interestingly for us, the goods would come to our houses, we'd unload the trucks, we'd put it into our garages.

4:46When someone would want to buy, we'd fill up the car, drive, drop it off. And it was just like horrifically painful. But I think kind of like gradually over time, you know, as we kind of felt that, you know, lockdowns were lifting, there was a bit of nervousness around, look, you know, is this just a point in time or is there actually kind of a business here? And I remember it was the 12th of April 2021 in the UK, lockdowns were lifted and we had three containers arriving and we were like, what on earth are we going to do with, you know, two to three thousand kind of dumbbells? And I think what we found is actually there is a steady state of demand.

5:25And I think what I often say to people is, look, whatever the business you're in, the market is big and it's broad. And if you can even capture 1 % of that market, then you've probably got a pretty decent kind of business. and I think what I found you know kind of now again with like the power of hindsight I think one of the things that's helped us is you know we deal with like big heavy stuff you know your average person kind of on the street who's thinking about selling e-com you think light you think cheap but obviously that's where the competition is so the question is just like where is part of your competitive edge and your differentiator and unfortunately for us we went for big and heavy

6:06Kareem Raslan:Yours was literally your physical ability to lift really heavy things, which was, which. Exactly. Exactly. At what point did you rebrand or at what point did you switch from the brand that you were importing to like, okay, we're going to make this brain gain. We were making a website, we're diving in. What was that around the container time or when did that happen? Yeah. So I think probably about there. So I think it got to a stage where, look, it just wasn't kind of sustainable, us hand delivering everything kind of ourselves. And we got to a point where, again, we just started to hear a bit about e-commerce.

6:38Amazon FBA was, you know, all the rage in terms of send stock there. And without really doing anything, it will kind of sell. So I think for us, it was very much a transition from the physical world to then looking at kind of the digital world. And I think what we found quite quickly by, look, using Shopify, where you can spin up a website quite quickly, low cost, you know starting to run some google ads and meta ads you know we were starting to see a pickup in in orders um coming through online and i think that's when we were like well hold on a second you know and i think the beauty of e-commerce especially when you're at the early stages when you get that shopify ping of your sale it's like the best feeling in the world and i think that's when we then went into online e-com scaling and yeah we just found a found an opportunity from there.

7:30Kareem Raslan:Talk to me about the brand. It's a little left field just in that you think of weights, you don't think about your brain always. You think about building your body. Why did you name it Brain Gain? Yeah, look, great, great question. And I think for us, you know, a big thing that both my co-founder and I are keen on is look kind of healthy mind, healthy body. There's absolutely a symbiotic kind of relationship between both. And I think particularly kind of during the pandemic, it was absolutely prevalent in terms of the importance of staying fit and healthy as part of your mental health as well.

8:03So that was very much the genesis. And I think over the last couple of years, we've all seen kind of, you know, a trend more towards longevity. And within that, the importance of kind of strength training and stuff as you get older, I think is going to be increasingly more important.

8:18Kareem Raslan:As I think about it, it actually reaches you a broader market, Because as opposed to the people that are really, you know, trying to build the biggest biceps possible and get as jacked and muscular as possible versus the trend of people realizing, OK, I've got to do some resistance training for the quality of my life, essentially, is actually a much broader argument than the people. If it was like bicep gain, it's a very small audience versus the people that want to just be healthier with resistance training. I think you're spot on, Eric. And what we found over the years is, you know, when we speak to agencies, they automatically default to your target demographic is male bodybuilders and just kind of like people that want to lift very heavy weights.

9:00but actually I think what we found is the demographic is much broader I would say we do skew towards the 20 to 35 year old male predominantly but I think what we found is actually you know whether you're a 16 year old who's picking up weights for the first time and doesn't have the confidence to go to a gym whether you're a young mother who's just given birth who again you know kind of feels more comfortable training at home whether you're living in a bigger house or you're living in a city and you don't want to go to the gym, whether you're a 50-year-old male who, again, doesn't want to be surrounded by, you know, guys at the gym as well.

9:36So I think what we've found is actually that the demographic is big and broad. And I think for us, our play is, you know, making working out, you know, more accessible for everyone, as opposed to just, you know, 20 to 35-year-old guys who are training for aesthetics and, you know, want to have a six pack or an eight pack, whatever the motivations may be.

9:58Kareem Raslan:You mentioned your careers that you and your co-founder had before, solid careers, good jobs. At what point did you decide, I got to quit this and go all in? Great question. And I think to be honest with you, we probably left it a little bit later than we should. Because I think for us, we were very much kind of operating, I like to use the phrase incognito, where, you know, we were very inward focused. And as we were kind of building and scaling a brand, you kind of take for granted what you've done and what you've built. So I think for us, we got to a stage where we had, you know, kind of 10 employees.

10:36We've got, you know, millions of dollars of sales, tens of thousands of customers. And I think for us, we probably took a little bit for granted kind of how big and the scale of kind of where it got to. And I think for both of us, the experience of being in the corporate world was brilliant in terms of taught us finance, or for me especially, finance, legal, negotiation, a bunch of skills that have helped as we kind of migrated towards the entrepreneurship route. But yeah, one of my regrets maybe is not starting sooner. But no regrets in the big scheme of things as life is long and we've got plenty of time still to go.

11:18Kareem Raslan:Talk to me about your product roster. It sounds like you started with adjustable, non-inflatable dumbbells, but you now have stands and benches, you have Olympic range, you have wellness products. Talk to me about when you decided to go away from your hero skew and then maybe how much of your business still is that hero skew? For us, if I almost like take it back one step further, when we first started, we were selling kind of almost like generic, as you say, Alibaba goods that basically every man and their dog who wanted to sell home gym equipment was in that space. And I think what we found was, look, competition was rife between, you know, everyone's just selling a homogenous product.

12:01It's a race to the bottom. And for us, we've always prioritized, you know, great customer service, good experience. You know, one of the questions you had earlier around, you know, kind of why holding stock rather than drop shipping? Again, I think consumers nowadays, like they're very, very hot on next day delivery, maximum two to three days. Like people do not want to wait kind of, you know, two to three weeks for their stuff. So a lot of that helps with kind of conversion. So I think as we've been kind of in the game for a couple of years now, we've purposely moved away from homogenous generic products that anyone can basically buy to actually look working with our suppliers to co-create unique products and where we can't co-create actually getting exclusive distribution rights for kind of certain markets.

12:56So I think for us, we've been like very, very strategic and focused to move to unique products as opposed to kind of generic mass markets. And to be honest with you, Eric, part of our own journey last year was, you know, we were like, look, our niche here is selling big, heavy home fitness stuff in general. And I think actually in 2025, we kind of almost went a bit too far. so we were selling gym equipment or dumbbells plus benches plus stands plus kettlebells but we kind of got a little bit distracted by reformer pilates is an absolutely hot market right now let's bring some machines in and sell them but i think what we found is it was actually quite a big distraction from our core and i always use the example eric of we were in china in may seeing some of our suppliers and I spent about 20 minutes on the factory floor trying to put this thing together and I couldn't figure it out let alone you know our customer service guys who haven't seen the products how on earth did they do it so I think what we've actually done is scaled back the SKU stack and just really focused on what we're good at which is dumbbells and complementary products and just going kind of deeper on that market rather than trying to sell everything to everyone in every market on every channel.

14:21And we've just really, really kind of focused in on our core.

14:24Kareem Raslan:The number one city of D2C subscribers for our newsletter is London, England, which is funny because our audience is mostly US. I think we're like almost 50 % US in our audience and the UK is number two. But I feel like everyone who's doing e-commerce in the UK is in Shoreditch or is in East London or something like that. So I want to have more conversations with UK brands because it's a totally different market when it comes to localization, when it comes to diversity of all the different places you could sell. So obviously you started in London, but then you quickly expanded. Talk to me about expanding across Europe and maybe your first attempt at it, your first pitfall maybe.

15:05Yeah, yeah. So I think for a lot of UK brands, the natural, I mean, look, there's two different schools of thought. Some people go straight into Europe because they're our neighbors. Other people go, okay, US, huge market, huge opportunity. And I guess quite an important differentiator is English language. So I think for us, we took the first path in terms of going to Europe, given kind of locality, proximity. And I think the positive of Europe is it is essentially one big market. You import into Europe, you can sell across Europe, was the hypothesis and the thinking. But I think what we found is actually there are certain nuances.

15:51So each country in Europe has its own VAT rates, sales tax for the US audience. So Germany has a 19 % VAT rate. The Nordics, for example, has a 25 % VAT rate. So you've got to be like super focused on, you know, your unit economics for different products, different channels, different markets. And I think, you know, for example, like bureaucracy in Germany, very difficult. Netherlands and Poland, very easy. And I think what we thought initially was you just set your website up, you click a couple of buttons, and then you'll just sell and the stuff will fly. But I think what we found is localization is absolutely critical.

16:36And I think what we found, for example, in Germany, which is now almost kind of 2x the size of our market in the UK, which blows my mind, ads, whether that's Meta or Google, need to be in local language. Website needs to be local language. Email marketing needs to be in local language. Influences, PR, customer service, et cetera. So when we first started, we were like, let's try and do all of Europe in one go. But I think what we've found in practice is actually you need to really get to know your markets well. And what I would say is there's some nuances and cultural differences depending on the countries.

17:16So France, for example, in the UK, Boxing Day sales is a huge thing. In France, if you actually put anything about winter sales between the 26th of December and the 1st of January, you might actually be in breach of some regulations and cause yourself quite a bit of trouble. So there's these little nuances. But what I would say is if you can get it right, there is an absolute mountain of opportunity across Europe. So what I would definitely say is there's like some small nuances to navigate. But once you've got it right, and you've got the right fulfillment setup and the right tax setup and the right regulatory setup, it's honestly a huge opportunity.

18:00Kareem Raslan:And did you just figure this all out by bumping into it? Or did you have a guide? Or was there a platform? Or was there anything that kind of helped you optimize for this without having to make the mistake first? Yeah. Honestly, Eric, because again, this was all happening. And this kind of goes back to your question about doing this all while you've got a full-time job. So we were super incognito figuring this out in the evenings and weekends, et cetera. And when I come to bureaucracy, because for us, we were just like, Germany, middle of Europe, lowest tax rate from there uses your base. Arnold, I guess he's Austrian, but like you think, you know, fit guys in Germany, right?

18:40Kareem Raslan:Exactly. Exactly. And there's a huge like fitness expo called FIBO in Cologne every year. It's definitely kind of part of the culture. But what we found was our first container came without issues. Second container came, was stuck at German customs. And we basically got told how we're set up is wrong. And at the time I was in Japan on holiday with my wife, you know, 12 hours ahead trying to get this container unblocked from German customs. And long story short, 50 % of people told us how we're set up is perfect. 50 % said how you're set up is 100 % wrong. So what we ended up doing was Germany to Netherlands, custom cleared, moved from Netherlands back to Germany and fulfilled.

19:26So I would kind of, for any German listeners, apologies to kind of say this, but Germany is a difficult market bureaucratically to navigate.

19:36Kareem Raslan:You said you had more success earlier on with Poland and Netherlands. So is that sort of the playbook in entering Europe is maybe start by entering places that have less red tape and build up towards a market like Germany? What kind of transpires is a lot of people use like the Netherlands or Poland as their base. And then from there, set up a 3PL. And, you know, I think we've, again, been very fortunate with some very good kind of 3PL relationships that I'd recommend to anyone and everyone who's looking at kind of Europe. So Netherlands, Poland, and then from there, full filter the rest of Europe, you will make your lives much easier, much simpler than kind of gunning for the logical choice, which is Germany.

20:20Kareem Raslan:So how many languages now and funnels and landing pages are you maintaining for your ad campaigns? What is slightly helpful for us, because again, we've like super narrowed down the SKU count in Europe, especially. So we've probably got about 10 SKUs at the moment that we're pushing kind of across Europe. So for us, what we've done is really focused on Germany, France, Spain, Italy as our four big markets. and what we're doing is once we feel like we've built critical mass we'll then move on to the next one and i think interestingly we're hearing a lot about poland as a growing growing market with with great affluence as well so that's kind of number five that we're thinking about targeting but to be honest with you eric where we are as a business is actually you know looking back kind of stateside because i think for us you know back to that kind of crossroads decision we made about two years ago, I think we're now in the position which is, well, hey, look, you know, we figured out a playbook for the product in Europe.

21:26Actually, why not set up the operation in the States as well? And I think there's a lot about the demographics there that helps. So yeah, I think for us as a business, even though we're five years in, there is still some of those strategic questions, which is keep going deep into new, maybe fringe markets in Europe, or actually go and try and crack America. And I think that's kind of where we are at the moment in terms of back end of 2026. Where do we want to kind of place our next chips?

21:56Kareem Raslan:So from a marketing standpoint, what's driving the business today? Mainly meta ads? Yeah. So I think for us, Eric, we're actually kind of 50 % Amazon, 50 % Shopify. And I think what we've been doing is being very, very strategic with our product portfolio, product mix, and being very intentional with which products on which channels and how do you kind of get the ecosystem to kind of flow. So on the Shopify side, like Google for us is our big driver. 70, 80 % of our paid spend is on Google. And then the other 20 % is being invested kind of meta, predominantly kind of trying to hoover up the warm audiences from Google.

22:41so I think what we've been doing is kind of investing very very heavily into look pure play bottom of funnel people already in in markets and gradually we're just going slightly further up the funnel in our core markets and I think one aspect that we're seeing quite good results is because again we're quite a considered purchase people are unlikely to spend you know seven eight a hundred euros just kind of off the bat. So for us, YouTube is a really, really strong channel. So, you know, it's affiliate strategy on YouTube that helps to build that social proof that we've found like has a huge impact in terms of conversion and part of our strategy when we go into different markets.

23:28So for us, Amazon is more of the volume play, the more mass market cheaper products. And then Shopify is typically our kind of more premium, higher value product as well.

23:41Kareem Raslan:And it makes sense on YouTube being the awareness piece of the Google funnel in a way, right? Bringing new people into that, which you can then kind of harvest on the keyword advertising or the Google advertising a little bit more. Talk to me about the affiliate strategy. Is that just about going to find fitness influencers in the markets that you're trying to enter and making good deals with them? Yeah, so I think this is still a relatively like nascent strategy that we're kind of employing at the moment, which is like finding people within the space on YouTube with 5000 plus followers who are working out and training at home.

24:18Because I think what we found is like, you know, sending our products to guys who work out in the gym, it's absolutely not our kind of target demographic. and I think what we've found and again like one of the highest impact things we've done this year which we've never done before and it sounds super outdated but it's sending your customers a survey based on their user journey and what we found of those that responded you know 40-50 % said YouTube was a key part of their strategy and I think what we found you know we do do stuff on organic social but I think again for us you know We're not striving for virality.

24:56We're not striving for vanity metrics of likes and shares and comments and whatever. For us, it's a shock front in terms of validation of, are we going to send you an inflatable pair of dumbbells or are we actually going to send you a proper pair of dumbbells here? And I think for us, that's what organic is. So for us, YouTube is evergreen. Views build up over time. There's social proof. You see comments. whereas I think TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever is a better channel for lower AOV, slightly more impulsive kind of purchases. So I think again, whilst the world is all talking about virality and TikTok shop and all this stuff, we've made a very conscious decision to say where we are working with affiliates, it's very specifically people with a YouTube presence as opposed to Instagram or TikTok.

25:55And I think we've had people with, you know, 500 ,000 followers on TikTok who are like, you know, absolutely want to promote your product. So we've taken a conscious decision to say, look, no, that's not where we're focused on, which has been quite difficult. And I think some of these influencers have probably found it quite odd that we're declining their requests as well.