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Podcast Episode Notes: Uncensored CMO - A Challenger Brand Workout with Gymbox Brand Director Rory McEntee
Episode Overview
- Podcast Title: Uncensored CMO
- Episode Title: A Challenger Brand Workout with Gymbox Brand Director Rory McEntee
- Description: This episode explores the success of Gymbox as a challenger brand in the fitness industry, showcasing innovative marketing strategies and the unique culture that drives its creative campaigns.
Key Themes
- Challenger brands and their disruptive potential
- The importance of creativity in marketing with limited budgets
- How Gymbox reframes the perception of fitness and gyms
- The significance of a strong brand culture
Timestamps and Key Discussions
00:00 - Intro
- Host introduces the episode's focus on challenger brands with Gymbox as a prime example.
00:45 - Rory’s Marketing Background
- Rory shares his meandering journey into marketing, starting from his education in Dublin, to agency work with brands like Heineken and McDonald’s.
02:27 - Rory’s Time at Paddy Power
- Discusses working at Paddy Power, known for its controversial and creative marketing tactics.
08:18 - Why Rory Joined Gymbox
- Rory joined Gymbox to align with his personal interests in fitness and creative marketing.
10:11 - The Gymbox Founding Story
- Overview of Richard, the founder's vision for Gymbox as an antidote to boring gyms by incorporating fun elements from the nightlife scene.
14:01 - Reframing Gym Culture
- Discussion on making workouts as enjoyable as going out, with creative classes that appeal to diverse audiences.
16:05 - Using Constraints to Your Advantage
- Rory talks about leveraging limited budgets to drive innovation in marketing strategies.
25:15 - Utilizing Every Touch Point as Media
- Emphasizes the importance of branding and messaging at every customer interaction, from signage to social media.
35:11 - Obsession with Execution
- The significance of detail-oriented execution in marketing campaigns.
39:27 - Forgiveness, Not Permission
- Rory’s mantra of taking risks without waiting for approval, fostering a culture of creativity.
46:43 - Dealing with Risks
- Managing the consequences of marketing decisions and learning from failures.
48:56 - Importance of Gymbox Culture
- The collective mindset of Gymbox employees and how it fosters creativity and innovation.
53:44 - Business Model of a Challenger Gym
- Insights into Gymbox's pricing strategy, corporate memberships, and the financial structure that supports its operations.
Key Takeaways
- Challenger Brand Identity: Gymbox is positioned as a lifestyle brand, disrupting the traditional gym model with innovative concepts that make fitness fun and engaging.
- Marketing on a Budget: Rory McEntee emphasizes creativity over budget, using guerrilla marketing tactics and social media to create buzz.
- Community and Culture: The company’s culture encourages collaboration and creative freedom, allowing employees to experiment and push boundaries.
- Risk Management: The ethos of 'forgiveness, not permission' fosters a dynamic work environment where new ideas can flourish without the fear of failure.
- Strategic Growth: The Gymbox business model focuses on premium pricing and corporate partnerships, with aspirations for expansion into major cities globally.
Final Thoughts
- Rory McEntee's approach to marketing within a challenger brand framework exemplifies how creativity and a strong company culture can lead to disruptive success in a competitive industry. The episode illustrates the importance of adapting to constraints and nurturing a flexible organizational mindset to thrive in challenging environments.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now we're talking challenger brands again, and one of my favorite brands at the moment is Gymbox, a brand that is really changing how the gym is seen. Now they are marketing on a very limited budget and they're using those constraints to their advantage to really disrupt the market and get people talking about them. I'm joined in this episode by their brand and marketing director, Rory McKinty, and he's telling us all about how they become so disruptive and how they get their message across in very challenging ways. This is a great episode.
0:36There's so much in it. You'll enjoy it. Rory, welcome to the show. Rory Gould Great to be here. Thank you. Rory Gould We're looking forward to this. I absolutely love challenger brands and I think Jimbox is on the standout challenger brands in the market at the moment. Can't wait to get into that but before we do just give people a bit of a sense of how you got into marketing and how you ended up where you are today. Rory Gould Yeah, so my journey in marketing is quite a meandering kind of river into the brand of marketing kind of role I'm in now. I graduated from university in Dublin. Went away to Boston for a year and worked in bars, which was great.
1:08Selling tickets to clubs and stuff. And then I went back to Ireland and did my master's. And while everybody then finished their master's, went into kind of graduate programs for Unilever and Glambia and Reckabekheiser, I actually went agency side. So I wanted to kind of challenge myself in terms of actually working for interesting brands. And I wanted to do stuff that was, you know, So Heineken, McDonald's, Gatorade. I was working for really interesting brands where I had a personal interest. And that was the whole idea kind of when I was young. And then from there, I kind of realized I wanted to be the owner of the brand.
1:44So I made the jump client side. And from that agency experience, I was used to that fast pace, quick turnaround work and wanted to work in brands or for brands that I was interested in. I wouldn't want to work for, no disrespect to a butter brand or a dog food brand. And working for challenger brands like Everyman Cinema, who back in the day were really new and innovative, onto Paddy Power, and then a couple of interesting kind of Pizza Express and Papa John's in the food and beverage industry before landing back into kind of my challenger mindset of Gym Box. Yeah. Now talking about challenge brands, I mean, Irish boy working on Paddy Power, I mean, it doesn't get better than that in terms of Challenger brand, does it?
2:28They're probably one of my all-time favourite kind of examples of Challenger brand, where they're proper underdog, taking on big, dominant players in the betting market. And I think some of the most creative executions I've ever seen in my life come from Paddy Power. But what would be, and they're famously controversial and famous for pushing the limits of what you can get away with. What were some of the most kind of controversial, newsworthy campaigns that you saw coming out of Paddy Power? Yeah, you know, working for Paddy Power was, it was like being in, I don't want to say a boys club because it was male and female, but it was a real kind of, you know, fun kind of uni sort of style culture.
3:03And you'd come up with ideas, we'd go down to the pub, we'd come up with a couple of ideas. And you'd say, well, that will never land. And actually, somebody would say, well, why wouldn't we try it? Now, I was there back in 2012, where some of the biggest ideas, which you probably couldn't get away with now, happened. So I remember, again, I was quite junior in my informative years. There were some great people at the time. But things like, I don't know if you remember the blind football team, the five-a-side blind football team, where they kicked the cat into a tree. So the cat had a bell, it was running around, they told it was a football and they kicked it into the tree.
3:36And, you know, ASA complaints and that ad was banned. That evolved into, you know, taking over, you know, Paddy Power were the original kind of guerrilla marketing. So going to Cheltenham and having the Paddy Parris sign, like the Hollywood sign, that had never been done before. And again, it was one of those brands where you could just try something, see what happens. The ASA were on speed dial, it was like the bat phone. You'd have kind of the calls coming in on a daily basis. And it became almost a point where you wouldn't try to get banned, but it was kind of part of the fun to see how far you could actually push the boundaries.
4:12and I think the biggest one that I remember and being part of was the Euro 2012 where we had this idea about lucky pants. So we were like, oh, let's create these Paddy Power lucky pants and we managed to get Nicholas Bentner who was playing for Denmark at the time to actually wear these pants and if he scored a goal, he was going to show them. Now, what's really interesting is two things. A, Denmark were sponsored by Ladbrokes. They had an association with Ladbrokes. So again, it was us trying to find of a really kind of disruptive way in to to kind of talk to to our audience but b we knew we'd get a fine from uefa if we did it so we actually built into our budget planning like i call it we have a fine pot so when we do these campaigns we know we're going to get fined so in the end so nicholas benton scored a goal actually scored two goals lifts up his top to reveal the paddy power pants and the internet went into meltdown and we we were fined from memory a thousand euros for that, which is great.
5:09Again, it helped us ride the PR story. And actually what happened, I remember a couple of weeks afterwards, Serbia were fined 80 ,000 euros for some racism chanting in the crowd. And we were still able to turn that into a PR story saying, is racism not seen from UEFA as bad as advertising? So really fun, interesting place to kind of, you know, you get an idea and you could just get it to market. It was fantastic. I remember meeting Stuart Kenney, actually, one of the founders of Paddy Power, years and years ago. And he tells the story that the way they used to operate was that whenever they come up with an idea, the legal team had two hours to talk them out of it.
5:45And if they didn't, it was going ahead. Is that how it was? Literally, we'll do this unless you can talk us out of it. Yeah, it was a real, the culture was very much, whereas now I think what happens is, you know, you come to, you know, your team, your CEO, your legal team with an idea, you debate it, you try and kind of understand, will we get in trouble? What will happen if we get this wrong? What will be the repercussions? Paddy Power was the opposite. We would go in and we'd say, we're doing this unless someone tells us and can really prove to us why we shouldn't. And that's why nine out of 10 ideas actually saw the light of day, which is why Paddy Power for that kind of decade were untouchable in terms of the marketing that they did.
6:23And again, it was something that you've got to be a brave brand to do that because actually what happened was Paddy Power were a Marmite, a bit like Jimbox now. Some people absolutely hated what they were doing. You know, we had a, I'll never forget one of my favorite adverts. We had a zebra crossing and it said, let's make things more interesting. and we had two old people trying to cross and we put odds two to one, three to one if they're going to make it across. And they're the type of things that people got angry about and we would just say, we'll just do it. Let's see what happens. I remember too, I thought Stuart was a master of reframing as well because I remember when he talked about Paddy Pay, it wasn't about betting, it was about entertainment.
7:01And he would say, I can't remember exactly the odds, but he'd say, if you spend£20 consistently on watching a match over a large course of time, you'll probably get on average 17 of those£20 back. and the margin will be, you know, Paddy Power margin, whatever. And he said the heightened enjoyment of every game, because you've got to stake in the game's outcomes. If you're betting on, I mean, this is a while ago, but Rooney scoring the last goal, you'll pay attention and actually your pleasure of the game will be heightened for£2.50. I mean, I don't know if those are the margins, but the way he framed it as being about entertainment, not about being betting was, I thought, quite clever.
7:37Yeah, and it was very much one of my learnings going in there. So Paddy, it's very interesting, actually. I look at all these brands who are repositioning themselves as something they're not. So, you know, Gymshark recently, we do gym. They're a clothing brand who, you know, reposition themselves as a gym brand. Gymbox are a gym brand repositioning themselves as a lifestyle brand. Paddy Power is a betting company. And the positioning we had back then was an entertainment brand. We didn't see ourselves as, you know, a betting company. We wanted to entertain people. And absolutely, if you can get people coming back and constantly top of mind, they'll go and bet with Paddy Power and they'll have more enjoyment.
8:11And it is that kind of brand association that you were trying to have as an entertainment rather than a betting company. So bring us up to six and a half years ago, how did the opportunity come up for joining Gymbox and why did you join? I've always, as I said earlier, worked for brands where I've got an interest. So I feel like it's gone through my whole life cycle. I kind of worked for, you know, cinema. Then I was at Paddy Power, kind of sport. that Pizza Express got really fat for a while, free pizza. And I was like, all right, I need to kind of work all this off. So I ended up joining Gymbox as kind of my fitness life took over.
8:46And it was a really interesting story, actually. So they reached out to me a couple of times, which was all in the back of Paddy Power, because I think Gymbox wants to almost be the Paddy Power of the fitness world. And they never had a marketing hire, funnily enough. So the founder, Richard, came from a marketing background. He was Wieden & Kennedy, and he worked for Nike in New York at the time, and I'm sure we'll come on to it, but he took the idea back to the UK. But it was a very much marketing first brand. He knew marketing, but as times were evolving and social and digital was coming, he wanted somebody who could bottle up that gym box energy and kind of explode that across kind of all the different marketing channels.
9:23And I met the CEO, Mark, and we kind of had an interview over a beer. And straight away, you know, you think kind of fitness brand, having a beer. We had a couple of beers. We just got chatting. It was the most kind of unusual interview ever. And funnily enough, it was opposite the gym box in Old Street in a WeWork. And we just had a couple of beers and we got chatting. And before you know it, it was just handshake over the table. You've got the job. And I think it was a natural progression for all the kind of mischief making and stuff that we had at Paddy Power that I hadn't done in quite a while.
9:51It was building up. How do we then kind of take this into gym box? Now, the challenge you had, Paddy Power had huge budgets, really big budgets. And you could do things like Paddy Parasigns and Sheltman and TV adverts. Now, Jimbox is a very different brand. It hasn't got massive budgets. You have to be a little smarter. But that challenge was something that I was like, right, here we go. Let's do something really crazy and shake up this industry. And you mentioned Richard, the founder. Just for anyone who doesn't know the Jimbox story, give us a bit of background to why he created Jimbox, how it's different and the journey to here.
10:21Yeah. So Jimbox is 20 years old, actually, last year. So 21 years old. And Richard was over in New York and he was seeing all these kind of exciting gym concepts coming where, you know, they had, you know, wrestlers in rings where you could kind of go in and do boxing. They had spin classes with drag artists. And it was like something that just wasn't in the UK. The gyms in the UK were kind of boring, wooden floors, kind of white walls. So he kind of took this idea, brought it back to the UK, opened it up in a disused car park in Holborn. And it was almost this kind of mantra of like the antidote to boring gyms.
10:58The idea was we're going to go and stick a finger up to this boring gym culture that exists in the UK. And the vision then was all about trying to make working out as fun as going out. So we're going to take all the things you enjoy in your life, put it in the gym. So the idea was he didn't build the gyms with traditional gym architects. He got nightclub designers in, neon lights, put DJs in the club. They're all in, you're here now. It's this kind of, you come in the front door, it looks small. You walk down, it's a 40 ,000 square foot of just kind of madness. It's a dungeon, neon lights, DJs in the corner, boxing ring, not tucked away.
11:36It's in the middle of the gym. And we do all these kind of crazy bits. Like it's almost a surprise and delight moment. So you could walk in here on a Wednesday night and there'd be a band playing in the ring. Classes are kind of the big kind of USP of what he wanted to do so taking from new york scene and what we say is we have like classes from holistic to sadistic and everything in between so it's everything under one roof so however you want to train and we have combat classes aerial classes spin strength dance you can come and do pole dance on friday night you can do my thai classes so the gym he almost kind of wanted to spin and put gym on its head, but in a way that was very much brand and marketing-led first rather than product.
12:21Actually, as not a particularly big gym-goer myself, although I probably need to, I'll be making use of this a bit more in future. But it absolutely strikes me as that. Because you look at your website, it feels like a pop video almost, doesn't it? And the people aren't wearing gym gear, they're wearing kind of more like what they wear to a nightclub. You walk in and it feels like a nuclear bunker you're walking into, kind of like hazards hazard warnings or something and then the thing i love is that it's just it's kind of like vast but it's also quite intimate in that you could you could probably get hidden anywhere here i mean it took us about 10 minutes to find you this morning i got a bit lost on the way down but um it doesn't feel like that everybody's on show feeling that you get you when you walk into a normal gym where the lights are high and you know you're looking at all the muscly guys working out feeling a bit second right you know none of that it's just like huge vast like lots of options you can find your own corner, do your own thing as well.
13:13Yeah. And you know what? That is something we've worked really hard on. So the whole mantra of Gym Box is anything goes. So you can come into Gym Box and work out how you want to work out in any of those disciplines I mentioned. So you might want to be a CrossFitter or you might want to be a Yogi. We don't judge you when you come into Gym Box. Anything goes. And you can train for whatever goal you have. So you might want to train to have a six pack or compete in a competition, or you might want to just train so you can have a couple of beers every Friday night. However you want to train, Gym Box is that place where you can kind of come in.
13:45And it's not a cliche community thing, which gets thrown around quite a bit. There's actually this real kind of vibe where you can just come in and be that person you want to be and not worry about what anyone else thinks, which is a great feeling. You can leave all that at the door, come in and just enjoy yourself for an hour, hour and a half when you're in Gym Box. Now, as I was thinking about Gym Box, I wanted to kind of break it down into some of the principles, I guess the challenge around principles because I mean probably the most influential person in my career is Adam Morgan who wrote Eat Big Fish and absolutely love it and he'd been studying challenges for a long time and we had Greg Hahn from Mischief on the podcast in fact just as we were recording this it's going live and one of the phrases he used which I absolutely love is use your opponent's weight against them sort of thing and reframe the category which I absolutely love I mean one of my favourite examples is like Vinted and Backmarket where what they've done is they're promoting secondhand clothes and making secondhand clothes cooler than the new clothes because you save the environment, you save a lot of money, you do good, the whole thing sort of thing.
14:42So how are you guys kind of reframing how people see the gym? I mean, I think you've touched a lot on it already, but how are you kind of reframing how the gym is viewed? So I think the big thing we do, we've got a great class studio team. So I think, you know, you mentioned earlier on, you need to come to the gym and it can feel like a chore. And I think that perception people have around, oh, I've got to get up and go to the gym. And what we're trying to do is reframe that by, I mentioned it earlier on, making working out as fun as going out. So the classes we put on, we look at societal and topical bits happening.
15:12So where, you know, Beyonce and the country scene is, you know, risen in the last kind of six months. So we have a dance class called the Hoedown Showdown and you come in and you get boots and hats and it becomes this really fun dance class and we've kind of put on these really entertaining classes that you know make you want to come enjoy it meet people you know gyms are the new kind of dating apps as well you know people are coming in and meeting kind of partners and they're kind of elongating their their days and going out for drinks afterwards so what we're trying to do through really creative and unique classes is reframing what people's perceptions of the gym is and i think that does really work because our classes are really renowned for just being, you know, some of them kind of push the boundaries a little bit, you know, where we've got human weights and different things.
16:00But actually, for the most part, there's a real sweaty class behind there, but it's done in a fun way. Yeah, yeah, no, that comes across a lot, actually. Another kind of mindset thing, actually, in a conversation with Mischief last week was about how you use your constraints, your advantage. And you kind of touched on this. Paddy Power's got kind of big budgets, right? But you at Gymbox, you don't have big kind of paid media budgets, do you? So you've had to think differently about how you kind of create, you know, create noise, create content and reach people. So how are you using your constraint to kind of, you know, to your advantage?
16:34Do you know what? I love having no budget. It's great. It's great, isn't it? Do you know what? It really makes you think about how do you get it to market? So look, there's a few things we do. First thing is, look, we have this attitude. We're Jimbox. We're a little bit Marmite. We know that actually we're going to piss off quite a lot of people through our marketing and that's okay. Because not everybody is a Gym Box member. So that's the first thing. So we do that. But, you know, I think you mentioned we were talking before around the first time you saw Gym Box, you had yellow paint all around the Farringdon area.
17:02And that's what we do. We get our teams out. Now we have chalk graffiti, I like to call it. This is an important point, isn't it, ladies and gentlemen? This is, yes. The chalk graffiti. Because all jokes aside, I have the council contacting me, the police contacting me occasionally. We go around and actually spray paint Gym Box around the corner and directional signage for that sort of local marketing piece. But actually, after two days of rain, it comes off. So actually, it's kind of a nice little piece. And it's just a smarter way of kind of, you know, we don't have out-of-home budget to do stuff.
17:31And that's just kind of one little example of how we've got to be smart with budget. But actually, we're a really talked about brand. And a lot of that comes from kind of creative classes. And I don't even know if I want to get into it anymore, but sometimes we don't even make the adverts real. Kind of our fake kind of out-of-home bus adverts. So that got a bit of coverage, didn't it? That got a lot of coverage. That got a lot of coverage. Well, I'll tell you a funny story about that one. I don't know if a lot of people know this. Yeah, just describe it. It's a great execution. Yeah, so we have aerial classes.
17:59And for anyone who hasn't seen it, we had this idea of advertising. You wanted to look down. Aerial, you're hung up on a harness, a trapeze, for example. And we wanted people to be able to look down and see this advert. So we had this idea about, oh, what have you advertised on top of a bus? As if you were looking down at it from a building. Now, The Economist did it, you know, 1990s, but let's forget about that for a moment. So we had the idea and the line read, if you're reading this, you're a natural. Gym box aerial class is now available. And we looked into it, we mocked it up just to see if we thought the idea looked good.
18:34CEO gave the thumbs up, love that, let's get it done. And at the same time, we actually approached a media agency to see if it was an option. And it turned out you can't advertise on top of buses. So in typical Jimbox fashion, we said, well, that's not going to stop us. So we just pushed it out as if it was live on social media. And it seemed to just cause, it was around the time Maybelline had done the CGI tube eyelash one. And that was getting a lot of controversy. Quite positive talk. But I think our one just seemed to, people didn't know if it was real or not. I think with the CGI Maybelline, you knew it wasn't real.
19:09With the Jimbox advert, people weren't sure if it was real or not. And I think that was the piece that caused a little bit of a debate in Adaland in particular, with a lot of people calling us out for being untrustworthy with our adverts. Now, we got so much PR on the back of that, and it cost me about 250 quid. It was probably the most impactful, and I say this, campaign we've done in about two years. and you know the view from the business was people are talking about our aerial classes and that's and that's what we we want as our objective and so kind of the outside noise we had to block out a little bit because there was a lot a lot a lot of controversy around it well we'll come on some of the kind of like beliefs you have about that because i think it's when any when any of you work on a challenge brand you're going to be at the bleeding edge a lot of the time and it's how comfortable that feels and where does a risk become a dangerous risk or where is a risk a good risk you know yeah yeah yeah and look we always try and push boundaries and i think to that point around as well how do we we're not a lot of budgets make noise we're quite good at it we're quite good and we're quite happy to to be a bit of a marmite brand and to kind of shake the cage a little bit it's a bit of fun it's a good point about no budget i remember um when i used to work in britain years ago we had reasonable budgets people would often say what would you do if you had no budget right but inside you knew you had budget so you're kind of like well you know we we do actually have five million quid or whatever to spend so people entertain that as a thought process for about five minutes then carried on and did their out of home campaign and the new tv and the on-pack promotion or whatever um and then i moved to a private equity-backed uh soft drink business where i actually had no budget so all i all i had was um i had a i had a packaging budget to redesign the the juice burst was the name of the name of the brand but i had zero paid media or activation budget, nothing.
21:01Not even trade budget or anything like that. So all they gave me was 100 grand to redesign and relaunch the actual packaging itself. And I looked at the brand, it's called Juice Burst. And I thought, well, let's go really simple with this. Like what if rather than have a picture of exploding fruit on the pack, I actually explode fruit and I film it in super high res on a Hollywood grade camera. And I use augmented reality. So when you put your phone in front of the bottle, the fruit actually bursts out of the pack now this is it this is 2003 right augmented reality as a whole thing was about six months old right and i i tracked down like one of the one of kind of startups in the area a company called blipper and i went to them and said um could you actually do this and they said well almost and i said when are you launching and i kind of gave them a day they said all right we'll try our best to make it work by then but so rather than get a photographer I actually got this kind of like, you know, proper film studio, high grade camera.
21:57And I had to employ randomly the world's, I had to, sorry, I had to make the world's smallest electrical charge. Love that. Because it turns out, right, when you blow up a blueberry, right, it's like an electrical charge will just literally blow it to smithereens so quickly that you will miss it on film. So we actually had to cut a charge 32 times. So I set a record for the world's smallest. That's impressive. I love that. And you wouldn't come up with that idea otherwise. Exactly, exactly. And the cool thing with it, they were literally finishing the tech as I was going to print with the labels.
22:30I mean, it was like so close, it's unbelievable. But the beautiful thing about it was I went to every UK retailer of soft drinks and I didn't have a presentation. I just went, get your phone out. Here's a bottle, put your phone in front of it and tell what you think. And they were blown away by it. They'd never seen anything like it. And in fact, my business card, right, I filmed myself giving a 30 second pitch for why you should drink juice burst. sort of thing and i did it like princess lair you know princess lair comes out like in that kind of dodgy black and white yeah summon princess lair so out of this business card i come out of this business card black and white fuzzy kind of like doing this you know bat earth you know you need to be like getting behind juice but whatever talk and um my business card was blipped was the kind of phrase used to use it was blipped 30 000 times even though i'd only printed a thousand wow and And it's just like, because my business card just got handed round and got put online and people were filming the business card and doing it sort of thing.
23:23But I'd never, ever, ever have come up with that idea had I had money to spend. No, you don't. And I think that it pushes the boundaries to make you come up with new ideas. But I think the other interesting thing, when people talk to me about budget and maybe we'll get onto it, but we have a small team. So we have a really small team who can come up with these ideas and the ideas can come from anywhere. So we've got ideas that come from the top and we execute them. But actually, most of the ideas come from our sales team or our reception teams who are people who are out in London and they see these ideas and they come to me and say, oh, I've had this idea.
23:54And we go, that sounds great. Let's do it. But actually, we've got a really, I've got two direct reports at Gymbox. And what I've got to do with small budgets is I almost need to have this. I talk about having kind of the best army of freelancers or consultant people that I can dip in and dip out of when I need to come up with a pure story or a Google ad campaign. It's almost like the analogy of an NFL team to the American football team where you've got an offensive team, a defensive team. I can bring on my field goal kicker, my punter. And actually, you just pull the different levers when you haven't got a lot of budget.
24:30The ideas can sit centrally, but actually then you need people who will be able to kind of deliver and execute them really, really well. And it's almost like, you know, I can pull on my field goal person who's my PR guy and he'll go and make sure that fake bus advert went everywhere. Or I've got my Google ad guy who'll make sure everybody sees that paid ad. And it's almost kind of dipping in when you haven't got a lot of budget and making sure you can kind of just push that advert out everywhere so everyone sees it. Yeah, that's great. I mean, one of my favourite examples of brand using a constraint is Lucky Saint Beer as well.
25:00Like, you know, what if your beer can't contain alcohol? What would you do? You know, how would you kind of, you know, create it? How would you market it? So sometimes identifying what you won't do is often quite a powerful kind of way to define what you should do. Yeah, I love that. In a way, yeah. Something else you guys do very well. Another principle, I think, of challenger brands that I've seen is they use every single thing as media. A bit like my Blipper example of using like, what if your packaging has to be your adverts? Or what if your delivery boxes have to be your advert and that sort of thing?
25:31And one thing that strikes me about you, like you're saying about the paint outside, even the way, even the cookie like thing on your website, it's like no ordinary cookie cutter gym. But how have you used your kind of in-house media to, you know, to build the brand as well? Every single touch point is important for us. So, you know, you see the at-home stuff that we occasionally do. You see the graffiti we do. We've done kind of some really interesting kind of Google ad stunts as well, where we've targeted our competitors and done some fun bits. But actually, that journey in the club is really important because signage, you know, we have to have quite a lot of signs in Gymbox.
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26:03And actually, we want to make sure our tone of voice is done in a really interesting way. So even our wet kit bags, when you've got all your sweaty gear, you chuck them in. But it's like we have our little tone of voice on there. We like our reps clean and our plastic bags green because you can recycle them. It's all these little touch points that build up to a bigger kind of brand truth. And I look at every single bit and go, right, is that on brand? We don't let, you know, I'm really, controlling seems like a strong word, but we don't want anyone to do their own kind of in-club signage or kind of marketing or Instagram or TikTok.
26:37It's all kind of controlled centrally because the brand and our tone of voice is our USP. And even to the point where we, you know, we have our, we have a fantastic product. You go out to that gym and we have, you know, the best equipment, the best classes, the best instructors. But a couple of years ago, we looked at our shower facilities and we thought, actually, maybe our shampoo and conditioners aren't gym box. Now, I must admit, they were these kind of big fairy liquid, you know, cover your hair and your body in these ones. So we actually looked at shampoo and conditioner. And again, I wanted to make sure that touch point felt gym box.
27:14So, you know, we looked at, we've got this fantastic copywriter who I pull in every now and again. And, you know, we came up with this name, which was Sweaty & Fucht, which, you know, Scandinavian or, you've got to Google it. It's hilarious, but it's so Jimbox. And it's just another example of every single touchpoint building up to that kind of bigger brand piece. There's a bit more to this story, isn't there, that you haven't yet revealed? Because you sailed very close to the wind on the IP, didn't you? We did, we did. So look, we're a gym brand, we're not a toiletry brand. But look, as a challenger brand, we had to do it in our own way.
27:49Now, it's funny, you know, legally, I'm not sure I'm allowed to talk about this, but look, here we are, we are where we are. So we came up with the name Sweaty & Fucht. And again, with the copy, we wanted to talk, you know, a long copy on each of the products. We have a shampoo, a conditioner and a body wash. And we developed these bottles. They're on sale in the gym, as well as in the changing facilities. and they look very similar to another brand who I can't name. Anyway, we launched this brand. We went live with it. It was a really big launch. And look, let's be honest, it was done to create a little bit of noise, a bit of PR.
28:25Everybody was happy. And then the cease and desist letter came in to my CEO and it was forwarded on with a bit of a, we need to talk. Now, look, as a challenger brand, And, you know, you have to always kind of walk that line. Where is the wrong side of the line? That particular one, we had to pivot pretty quickly. I would love to have leaned into it and taken them on. And there was enough similarities and enough differences that, you know, it was a 50-50 call. We spoke to our lawyers. Lawyers are expensive. I'm in the wrong industry. When I looked at the lawyer's fees, I went, oh my God. Now, I would have taken them on and created a shitload of PR on the back of it.
29:10Problem is, I couldn't afford the lawyer fees. So we pivoted. But it's amazing what changing a plus sign to an ampi-sand can do. And actually, best of friends now. Best of friends. Well, if anyone looks it up, actually, you'll see the evolution from where it started to where it finishes. And it's not that different, is it? But you're right, a plus to an and and branding on the side rather than the front. It was a few small changes. Small little changes. And I think, look, again, a lot of the people who work for that particular brand are members of Jimbox, actually. Oh, are they? Yeah, yeah. That's who saw it.
29:44And the guys are based over in New York and the letter came from there and they've obviously got a London division, which I wasn't aware of, but I am now. But look, again, as a challenger brand, my view is you've got to push the boundaries, try these bits. You know, if you don't do them, you know, we could have created this sweaty and fuck brand and just had a black bottle and white copy on there, but it wouldn't have been Jimbox. It wouldn't have been fun. So I've got no regrets on that one. I don't know if you ever, did you come across Brewdog doing Elvis juice? I don't know if you know this story.
30:10I don't know. Tell me. Well, I think the third most popular beer in the Brewdog lineup is Elvis juice. It's a really, really, really popular one of their beers. And the Elvis Foundation sued them over use of the Elvis name. They didn't. Yeah. So what James and Martin did is they changed their names to Elvis. Love that. Because in Scotland, the rules for changing your name are slightly different compared to England. so you can change your name more easily. So they got a certificate showing that they changed their name to Elvis and wrote back to the Elvis Foundation. But they wrote the letter using lyrics from Elvis songs.
30:45So it's a time for a little less conversation and a bit more action. And basically the whole letter is using Elvis' own kind of words back at the Elvis Foundation and saying, we've changed our name to Elvis and this was inspired by our own names. And that's an example like BrewDog. as, you know, I think there are only a few real, what I call true challenger brands left. And BrewDog were certainly one of them for four, five, six years where, and that just shows, to your point around using every little kind of media bit you have to drive PR. Like it's how you do it. And as a challenger brand, you know, people would have looked at that and gone, come on guys, but it's brilliant.
31:21It's brilliant. And what, so did they won the case or did they? They did, they did, yeah. It's still there, right? They did, yeah, they won. Yeah, absolutely. Love that, really big fan of that. Fantastic example. I know that I worked for James for three months, didn't last very long. But one thing I noticed is that every single thing, everything they do is seen through the lens of a PR story. Everything, right? So if he's opening a new bar in Melbourne or whatever, he will find some weird story or some planning permission quirk or something to create a battle, basically, or create a news story out of it.
31:53I mean, the cute one that I thought got surprising amount of coverage was they came up with this idea that, you know, in addition to a maternity cover, you'd have a paternity cover where if you had a new dog in the house, you'd get time off to help the dog settle in sort of thing. Now, a relatively inane kind of like change to the company policy, but it got incredible traction where they had photos of, you know, people that work for BrewDog with new dogs going off on paternity leave. So, you know, they thought about everything as a headline. And I think that's another really good way of thinking about it.
32:27When you don't have any budget, how do you take your HR policy, your finance system or your store opening or whatever? How do you turn that into a headline? Yeah, and you know, it's so true. And I love them for doing that. And I think it's something that I try and do a little bit more and probably push the boundaries too much sometimes. I don't know if you saw back in January when we launched our new campaign, there was a bit of a mix up with the media. So we had a poster up in December which said, get the rest of the year free. And the agreement was with the media agency that that would be gone by the end of the year and the new campaign would be up.
33:01And I said, look, even go a little bit early because I can't have the rest of the year free live on January 1st because that's a pretty big promotion, right? And anyway, it was a little bit of a mix up and I was able to turn that into a PR story where I kind of, you know, call them out and we said, oh God, rest of the year free, the second of January is live and people come back to work. And again, we had the T's and C's on it and stuff, but you were able to just quickly take that idea, run with it, get a little bit of coverage in some kind of press pieces. And a little mistake, you can turn a mistake into a positive PR spin as well to get the brand talked about.
33:33In a time of the year, January, when people wanted to join a gym, we were getting talked about by this kind of fuck up that happened in the media, which is great. We loved it. Yeah. Own your failures. Own your failures. Yeah, yeah, do it. Just lead into them. actually give me a bit of blow back to reminding of uh the the biggest sort of like failure i suppose marketing wise in my career advertising wise was a i this is 20 2002 i did a campaign in the london underground it was free as well so again it was limited constraint you're playing with constraints i was working on a brand called di serrano amaretto that smells like almonds oh i know i love it yeah it's yeah yeah brilliant christmas drink and i was pumping the smell of almonds through the underground.
34:11And at the same time, there was a big headline on the Sun newspaper because this was before we went to war with Iraq. And it said, Home Office warns underground passengers to be vigilant and look out for the cyanide attacks on the underground, which back then were the most likely terrorist acts on the UK soil. And then it had in big letters, Cyanide smells like almonds. No. I was like assistant junior brand manager at the time, kind of like 23. This is my first big campaign I'd done in my entire life. They're the ones you remember, right? They're the ones you remember. At the time, horrendous.
34:50But now you look back and laugh. It's brilliant. At the time, I was just thinking my career is over. It's embarrassing. Yeah, what have I done? I was in the main newspaper in Italy. I was in every newspaper in the UK. I was on Have I Got News For You. But it's lovely. Sales went up 15 % that Christmas. And Christmas is by far the biggest trading period. So we had a bumper year. Which shows failures can drive sales, right? Yeah, exactly. It's a good way to think about it. We'll come on to that in terms of personal kind of approach to it as well. Another key principle, I think, with challenger brands is that they're always really obsessed with execution.
35:22And I mean, I was talking to Kofi, he's the CMO at DoorDash, and one of their principles is we operate at the lowest level of detail, which for a 40 billion valued company, you think, how's that possible? But actually, I think something that marks our challenges is they really are in the detail and close to their customer in a way that, you know, bigger, bigger brands aren't, you know. So how does that work at Jimbo? Well, you know, so we've got five brand values and one of them is sweat the details. So we're all about getting in. You've got to sweat those little details. And that works across the business from the CEO all the way down to kind of the sales and reception teams.
35:55And from my perspective, I am, yes, I'm the brand, the marketing director, but I'm a gym goer. so I am in doing classes with our members I'm on the gym floor with our members and I'm kind of getting in and we don't do again small budget so when we do our campaign we don't do a lot of research necessarily where you know proper research what we do is we actually get a few ads after classes and we kind of run them past our members and go because they're our target audience they're the people we want to attract lookalikes and we're in with those members talking to them all the time about our brand, what they like, what they don't like, to the point where actually we, some of them are now friends to me personally and we kind of go out for drinks and stuff because we are in this brand and we're on the gym shop floor every single day.
36:44So much so I actually went up about a year ago now and the toilet was blocked in one of the changing rooms and the CEO was there with the plunger. The plunger, so the CEO went up But you never walk by and leave a towel on the floor. We have this kind of mindset here around the gym. We're all equal. It doesn't matter. One day I'm doing strategy for 2025. Next day I'm answering DMs about, you know, do you do guest passes? And that's the kind of mindset we have at Gymbox, which as a challenger brand, you have to. We're not this huge brand where that's not my job. Everybody mucks in. Yeah, you reminded me of another good example in BrewDog actually is James had an online forum of 2 ,000 beer investors.
37:24Basically, it was called Equity for Punks. One of their constraints is when they wanted to raise£30 ,000 back when they first opened, and no bank would give them a loan because they were uninvestable, basically. So this is before, well, the very, very early stages of crowdfunding. And basically, they went to their drinkers and said, well, can you back us? And they got incredible response from basically kind of craft beer fans who invested in the business and got a tiny, tiny share of the company. and Equity for Punks, as it was called, I think back, I mean, this was three or four years ago when I worked there, but had raised more money in crowdfunding than any other brands on the planet.
38:00And they'd done that through, you know, the constraint of not having it. But what James also did, but I thought was really clever, is he created an online forum of those investors and he ran decisions past them. So it was a bit weird, me being the CMO, because he would go, go and design a new beer. I would design a new beer. Before I told him my opinion, he would have posted like the design options on this forum and all these 2 000 you know uh craft beer punks as he used to call them would come back with a point of view run a poll and get their point of view on it sort of thing it's really interesting you know like but an ability to stay close to your customer is essential it's key and i've heard a lot of time before about reducing that kind of you know c-suite to the customer a few times and it's it's so true and actually it helps you a nail your work but b get workout quicker and get real live feedback before it kind of gets out there which is kind of why my view on the whole piece is we don't care what other people think because we know that our community buy into our campaign or our class the 15 % of the UK go to a gym right it's such a small figure which surprises a lot of people so straight away I'm alienating 85 % of people who I'm not talking to off those 15 % not all of those are going to like Jimbox.
39:13They're going to like other brands. So we're okay as long as we're talking to our customers and sweating the details of them and actually like-minded people coming to London will gravitate towards that. So yeah, I think you have, like what James did, have those former people and trust those people and run with those decisions. It's key. It is, isn't it? Now, I thought you did one of the best presentations at MadFest this year. I absolutely loved it. It almost felt like MadFest was made for you, really, in your story. But I'd love you to talk through some of the principles that you talked about at MadFest because I thought they were brilliant.
39:41But your idea of forgiveness, not permission, I think is really good. And linking back to the kind of Greg Hahn episode as well, one of the most striking things, the conversation I had with him, the bit that really hit me was when he said, what would you do if you weren't afraid? And I mean, I love challenger brands. I've always enjoyed that sort of feeling of like, you know, taking on and disrupting the big competition. But it can feel uncomfortable, can't it? And it can feel like, you know, you're always on the edge a little bit in terms of your ideas. but I love the way you framed kind of forgiveness not permission so yeah chat me through some of those points because I thought they were brilliant yeah I was telling you it was really fun I love Madfest it's great the guys are great there look I think yeah so the whole premise that I have it's my mantra which is excuse me ask for forgiveness not permission and funnily enough it's a true story that was given to me by because people say it must be your Paddy Power days or your you know time at gym box it's funny enough I've got this great uncle who's a priest, Father Johnny.
40:42And he's married all my family over the years. He's about 85 now. I think he's still alive. And he said to me when he was, you know, we were all young, he was like, look, and he studied business as well as kind of a priesthood. And he said, look, when you go into business, the one tip I'll give you, forget about the four Ps. It's all BS. You need the five Cs of confession. That will stand you through the test of time. And I won't bore anyone who's not into all this, but it was all about kind of admit to your sins, you know, beg for forgiveness and then say you'll never do it again. Anyway, so that stayed with me through my kind of career.
41:17And I don't know if it's my personality. I'm a bit reckless, but I'm almost like, don't really care what people think. And that is something that doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. And there are times it's easy to do that on my own personal level. When you're doing it for work and people are criticizing a campaign or challenging what you're doing, It can be quite a challenging thing to deal with as a person, but you've got to get a bit tick-skinned over the years. So that fake media we did with the bus was a perfect example. Again, we didn't ask anybody for permission. We just did it. We got a bit of backlash.
41:54And actually, I just thought, fucking hell, you just have to kind of block this outside noise and just try and do what you feel is right for your business, your objectives. But that also kind of works internally. So I'll do some campaigns that my CEO might kind of go, well, we did that. And you go, why did we do that? I'm going, well, it felt right, you know. But it removes all that red tape. It removes that thing that I think a lot of brands who aren't challenger brands will have an idea. You go back to what Stuart said at Paddy Power. They would have asked for forgiveness and permission all the time.
42:25The legal team have to prove to us why we shouldn't do it. What most brands do now is they'll go through so much red tape that by the time they get that campaign out there, It's been diluted so much. It's lost the essence of that campaign. So the whole idea around ask for forgiveness and that permission works both in terms of internally, how I work and how I'll just kind of push through, get some ideas out. There's times where I might get my hands slapped and that's okay. And I try and give that to my team as well. I say, look, guys, if I'm not around and you have an idea and you really back your idea and it's a quick social reactive piece, do it.
42:57I'd rather you do it and then we get it wrong and we learn and we fail forward then we don't do it. And I think that's where the whole mantra kind of comes from. Let's just try things. And they're the bits that make you, like your example earlier on on the tube, they're the ones you look back on. And I know that wasn't asking for permission, but they're the ones you look back on in years to come and go, that was great. When we did that particular campaign, that was brilliant. And one of my favorite ones actually with that idea was we, I've been very vocal actually about using competitors in your marketing.
43:28So a lot of brands have been doing it recently where you reference your competitor to kind of position yourself. And I hate brands who do it. Now, I'm a bit of a hypocrite because I did it about a year ago. But how I did it was slightly different. So it was on Google when you search for our competitors, we then served you up in a Gymbox ad. So, for example, Turd Space near me, we'd serve up an ad that said, don't settle for turd, be number one at Gymbox. And again, there was an element of, should we do it? I just do it. And we did it for ClassPass. for a lot of other brands. And we got a lot of great PR on the back of it.
44:04But if we had asked for permission from anybody, we would have, well, again, we wouldn't have asked for permission for a competitor, but even internally, people would say, you're mad, don't do it. And I got so much coverage. That's really clever, actually. I'd never thought about using search in that way. But it's a really good point, isn't it? Because rather than just buy your way into the sponsored post, you might as well say something funny about whoever owns that category. Have a little bit of further expense. Yeah, it's good. And look, you know what? I've made a little bit of a name myself doing this.
44:29We did it with Joe Wicks as well. I don't know if anyone remembers that. But when we reopened that, look, Joe Wicks is brilliant. He was the poster boy off kind of keeping everybody active during COVID. And when the gyms reopened, we wanted to kind of come up with a really fun line. And the idea was, we said, look, thanks, Joe Wicks, but we're back and we'll take it from here. And again, Legal went, well, you're going to have to check with Joe Wicks if he's happy to have his name plastered on billboards all over London. We went, nah, fuck it. So we just did it. We plastered his names on billboards and we spent a bit of money behind it.
44:59And Joe Wick thankfully saw the advert and thought it was brilliant. And he messaged us and he put it all over his social going, I love this Jimbox campaign. And funnily enough, I used to work for Jimbox back in 2003 as a PT or sales and he was terrible. No, really? Yeah, so we never knew. And did you know that? He had no idea he used to work? We didn't know it. And then you go back to that piece you talked about earlier on and using every angle for PR. What we then did was we actually reached out to Joe and we offered him a lifetime membership for Jimbox as a thank you. So we kind of created a little bit of PR on the back of that as well.
45:29So these are the type of things that if you had asked him, maybe he would have wanted payment or he would have said no. But we just did it. Yeah, that's really cool. I mean, you remind me, one of the best bosses I think I ever worked for, he was an Irish guy too, but I remember when I left, he said to him, have you ever felt like I've overridden a decision? And I was like, do you know what? In three years working for him, he had backed every single idea. And then he said, I would never give you enough rope that you could take the entire company down sort of thing. And I thought, that's really interesting.
45:59He kind of like, it was really smart because he kind of gave me the feeling that I had permission, but in a kind of way that I was never, ever going to sort of have enough that I could actually kind of properly do any damage to the company, which I thought was a great way of thinking about it. Yeah, I like that. And you have to empower people, right? And I think that's my bit with my team. And I talk about controlling, you've got to relinquish a little bit of control, but within reason, because, you know, it can go very wrong very quickly if you give too much power. And I think in the world of social media, things can get screenshot and sent, you know, very quickly and it can kind of damage your damage your brand in the long term.
46:32So you're right. You've got to give a little bit of rope, but not too much. But then ultimately it all comes back to me. I always say, like, it's my team, my decisions. And even if they go crack on and do something that's a bit wrong, I'll never kind of slap their wrist. Like, let's crack on, move forward together. I love your mindset here, because also I think in the moment when things go wrong, like my underground example, it can feel terrible, right? But you need someone that and just take you out of it and go, do you know what? This news cycle will pass. 24 hours time, you know, we'll be talking about something else kind of thing.
47:01But it can feel hard, isn't it? So is it just innate in you that you've just got this kind of inner, kind of, I don't care what people think or have you trained yourself to kind of be able to take risks and cope with the backlash? I think there's probably two parts to that. I think one, I've been brought up, I say brought up, through the brands like the Paddy Powers and then the Gym Boxes, where that culture has been, well, don't worry if people do give us crap because you're right it'll it'll pass but people not all people are like that so one of my team members is a very sensitive girl and she doesn't like any sort of outside noise and you've got to kind of almost coach those people because my view you get a bit older you get a bit thick skin but actually people do take offense to comments on social media about the brand or whatever it might be and there's an element where you have to just kind of think look we aren't trying to you know cure cancer here we're selling gym memberships like if things go crazy you know No one's going to die.
47:53And I think there's an element of, if you don't take yourself too seriously and your work too seriously and you enjoy it, I actually think that kind of mindset thing kind of spirals from there, which is a positive piece. It's all about have fun with the marketing you're doing as well. And everyone's going to have an opinion. If you're not getting a few hateful comments, then maybe we're not doing challenger stuff enough. That's a really good point. It's almost back to, Daniel Kahneman had this loss aversion idea that the pain of a loss is felt much more than the excitement of a get or the happiness that comes from a gain sort of thing.
48:29And weirdly, I find on the podcast, I'll get 99 absolutely lovely comments and then there'll be one kind of really aggressive, negative comment. And that'll be the one that I'll be sending to James and Kerry going, oh no, you know, sort of thing. But it's human nature, isn't it? You remember the difficult, you know, you remember the nasty comments. You don't tend to remember the nice ones. You do. But I think my view on that, they're the ones that fuel me a little bit. I think they're the ones that you kind of go, I'm going to prove you wrong. Or actually, I want more of them because now I know I'm really rattling in the cage.
48:58And that's what a challenger brand should do. Yeah. You mentioned that you touched on culture a bit earlier and some of the things about sweating the details. Can you talk a bit more about the kind of culture you've created in Gymbox that helps you enable this kind of disruptive behavior? Yeah. So look, I think I go back to you've got to, the first thing you've got to do is hire the right people. I guess the number one, if you get that wrong, you ain't going to kind of achieve those goals that you need. I think for us and for me, you can train anybody to do any job. So for me, it's hiring people who are, you know, interesting characters who are living the London life, who have traveled the world, who've seen interesting things because we're a people led business.
49:37where an ideas-led business. And actually, I don't want the best project manager in the world who's delivering a great media plan. I want somebody who's going to come to me and challenge me and give me ideas. So I think that's the first piece is, and it goes back to my CEO, Mark, hiring me. You're having a few beers and go, is this actually an interview or what's happening? And I think that's the culture that he's created, which is then filtered down. So when I'm now looking at bringing in either full-time staff Or as I said earlier on, mostly my army of kind of consultants and freelancers, my expert in PR, my expert in PPC, expert copywriter, expert graphic designer.
50:14It's having those like-minded people who buy into the business, buy into the kind of the ethos and the mantra of Jimbox and kind of, you know, wanting to kind of shake the apple cart a little bit. And they're the people that you want behind you when you push through with an idea who aren't going to get offended when, you know, you get that cease and desist letter from somebody or, you know, you get challenged for a crazy class you've come up with, which people think is offensive. So that's the first thing. If you can create and bring in those people, the rest will just fall into place because the culture then is, you know, the culture comes from the bottom up as well.
50:50It doesn't, it comes from the top down, but actually all these people that we're bringing in are interesting people who will challenge each other. And I think then my role within all that is then just kind of backing them, backing them to come up with a new idea, which could kind of get the best PR in the world. It could fail. And it's almost kind of helping them in that journey when they do fail, that actually it wasn't a failure. We're just kind of moving on to some bigger bits. So when you meet people that are applying for a job or want to join here, at what point do you know they're the right kind of person?
51:20What's the kind of giveaway that this person's got it takes? You know what, you know pretty quickly. I think you know within a couple of seconds, that person comes in and it's an attitude. Gym box is an attitude. So you can kind of come in straight away. It's that eye contact. It's confidence or it's somebody, again, there's no age factor at gym box. We've got people in this gym who train, who are 17, got people who are 80. It isn't about age. It isn't about that sort of profile. It's all about attitude. And I think for Gym Box, if somebody comes in and they tell you a story of, you know, I'm so hung over.
51:53I was out last night. I've had this crazy kind of, you know, horse bar. And they tell you a story straight away. That's hard. We'll teach you. We'll teach you digital marketing. We'll teach you copyright. We'll teach you everything else. We want those type of people. And you just know, you know. And actually, I tend to find those people not on LinkedIn, not through our job adverts. It's actually just where I'm out being out in London, meeting people, talking to people. getting in somebody you know a friend of a friend who knows this band who knows this guy who's looking for some work and it's it's those creative people that are just out living life and not in the boardroom as in another principle actually going back to adam's eat big fish is the idea of a lighthouse identity which i always thought was really good as in you stand for something and you attract your your your audience rather than try and win them do you know i mean it's a different thing and in a way what you described there same for employees isn't it if you stand for something you're already clear on your positioning that's going to attract people right people are going to want to work here because they really believe in what you're doing they do and i think you know we're very lucky because of what we do and you know the crazy classes we put on the slightly disruptive but not offensive marketing that we try and do is people gravitate towards wanting to work for gym box and not just people who are into fitness people who are into um as i say lifestyle brands and you know the applications i get from some amazing brands people who are working for some amazing bigger brands in Jimbox who want to work for Jimbox because of what we do, is obviously a credit to my team and what they're doing and the work that they're getting out.
53:24And it just attracts people. And, you know, we have people who are creating adverts for us free of charge who are sending them, we want to work with you, here's some adverts I've done. And it's amazing to see people want to do that. Now, of course, they're trying to get a job, so I'll get that. But it's a testament to a small challenger brand like us that we have people who would give anything to work for Jimbox just for their creativity to get out there. It's fantastic. I want to touch on the business side if I can, because we're sat here. We're in central London, just near Chancery Lane. This is a vast studio.
53:55I mean, it's very impressive. So, you know, unfortunately, people listening won't get a sense of it, but we've got classes everywhere, loads of rooms. You've got a boxing ring. It's a square footage of this. This is 40 ,000 square foot. 40 ,000 square foot. It doesn't look like from the outside, by the way. It looks like you've just gone down a back alley. And then it opens out Tardis style, right? And the kit is all impressive. It's not that far. I know we were recording this early in the day, so I'm sure it's going to be a bit later. But financially, how have you made it work in terms of the model?
54:24Because it's a pretty plush. I wouldn't say plush is the wrong word, but it's a pretty impressive setup you've got. You're in a very kind of expensive area of town, and there's others like this. How does it work financially? Well, a lot of gyms will do 20, 20, 40 pounds to kind of come in. Because look, if I don't use the gym, I don't want to spend too much money, I'll pay. We've gone, again, as a challenger brand, we flipped it. We are pretty expensive, right? We are, you know,£120 a month. So in that, you know, model, we're quite expensive. But I think what we do is you try and offer, I like it to kind of go out and eat a steak, right?
55:01Someone's going to go out and you can go out and eat a steak for£5 or you can buy a steak for£45. It might taste the same, but actually it's all the different benefits you get. When you go out and buy that£45 steak, you're paying for the service, you're paying for the ambience, you're paying for that whole experience. That£5 steak you're probably going to be sitting in a diner, it could taste great, it's going to have the same protein. Gym Box has kind of done that whole experience piece with the DJs and iClub. The business, you know, the model is you don't want to oversubscribe the gym, you want to keep it to that level where actually people feel like this is an exclusive place.
55:35So it's almost that. I like it a little bit to kind of like a Soho membership where it's kind of one in, one out. um you know look there's kind of different cycles throughout the kind of calendar year where we you know we lose people london's this kind of transient place however the the private hires that this also then attracts what people wanting to do you know hire out the space to do a corporate event so the corporate is huge part of the business so 80 of our business actually comes from corporate so you've got you know media com down the road and people who have 500 employees who come to gym box But then the model is, you know, as we get bigger and we grow, I think COVID's been, we've probably just regrown after COVID, re-looking at our membership type, re-looking at our clubs.
56:17Fortunately, we had to close one club. But we're now at that point where we're ready to kick on again. And the idea will be, again, taking that Soho House kind of model. We don't necessarily see ourselves going into some regional places in the UK. It's going to be attitudes. So Berlin, Stockholm, New York is kind of the idea. So that's how we're going to make the brand grow as well with the commercial model. Yeah, well, it makes it a house model, doesn't it? Like, you know, go in the high footfall metropolitan areas where people can afford to pay it, get corporate membership. That makes a lot of sense.
56:50Well, this is it. Again, we are this kind of London city brand where people have money. And I think we've done research into these big cities. And I think that's where the growth will come from. Because actually, again, gym box is an attitude. It's not about an age. It's not about, you know, people, what's your average age? 18 to 25, 30. It's like, it doesn't matter. Well, you know, if you've got the right attitude, you go to the gym box, which is why going to some of these big cities makes sense. Kind of going to the Berlins, the Stockholms, the New Yorks as a brand is kind of where we want to be.
57:17I thought a fun question to finish up in actually was, so you talked through your career, right? You've done pizza. Okay. You've done better. You're almost working through your lifestyle. I've been doing my life cycle, yeah. I'll be working for a funeral home next. I was going to say, you've reached an age where you think, I need to get my fitness sorted out. So like, what comes next for you? Or maybe flip it a different question. What would you invent next if you were to invent a new brand? Do you know, that's a great one. I think, look, for me, again, it comes back to passion. I think the bit I've seen in the gym world, it's great that we're all here enjoying fitness and we're getting healthier.
57:52I think actually linking that into that kind of community bit around, I've got a huge kind of passion on bringing basically food, drink, gym together. and actually having a pizza bar in a gym is kind of what you want to be doing because I want to spend my time here all day. So I think for me, look, it'll be about, it's that whole holistic kind of lifestyle piece. How do you try to combine community and kind of gym and fitness co-working together? You know, how great could it be that your working desk is here and you've got a spin bike next to it? I think that will be the future of where it will go.
58:23Will that be something that I'll push from a marketing point of view? Who knows? But I think there's a huge, huge future for it. Yeah, I love the idea of like taking what if the gym was entertainment? You know, what if work was fun? What if, you know, like the cycle was, you know, you could kind of turn everything on its head. It's a really clever way of thinking through as a challenger brand if you turn everything on its head. Yeah, I love that idea of kind of walking into the gym and you've got one sign for the gym and one sign for the bar and then deciding which way you're going to go that day and you can kind of mix and match it all the time.
58:49But it's, no, there's some exciting times ahead for the brand, so it's fun. Amazing. Look forward to seeing what's happening next. Rory, thanks for coming on the show. It's been amazing to talk to you and lots of inspiration from what you're doing and long may it continue. Yeah, thanks. Great to be here. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show.
59:18So please do leave a review wherever you get your podcast. If you want to contact me, you can do. I'm over on x at Uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name, John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching. I'll see you next time.
From the publisher
Regular listeners of the podcast will know how much I love challenger brands, and Gymbox are one of the best examples of a challenger brand really shaping up their industry. Rory McEntee is the Brand and Marketing Director for the challenger Gym brand, and is responsible for some of the most creative campaigns (which have often come along with a side helping of legal letters) that have really put Gymbox on the map.
Timestamps
00:00 - Intro
00:45 - Rory’s marketing background
02:27 - Rory’s time at Paddy Power
08:18 - Why Rory joined Gymbox
10:11 - The Gymbox founding story
14:01 - Reframing how people see the gym
16:05 - Using your constraints to your advantage
25:15 - Using every touch point as media
35:11 - Being obsessed with execution
39:27 - Forgiveness not permission with your marketing
46:43 - Dealing with taking risks
48:56 - Why the Gymbox culture is so important
53:44 - How does the business of a challenger gym work