The journey to build a billion-dollar brand

A burning desire to be in the fitness industry set Ben Francis on his path to creating an entrepreneurial success story that has few parallels.

It is only 10 years since the 18-year-old student got his results from South Bromsgrove High School and headed off to Aston University.

At that time he wanted to be involved in any way he could, “whether it’s supplements, whether it’s clothing, whether it’s through fitness and competing”.

It was clothing that won, and a screen printer, a sewing machine and a cartoon logo of a beefed-up shark was enough to get going.

“I did University in the day, deliver pizza between 5pm and 10pm and then do Gymshark on the evening,” said Francis. “I wish I could say it was a genius move where we worked out a business plan.

“It was nothing like that. It was literally a case of following our gut instinct and doing what we thought was cool.”

He wouldn’t finish the course and dropped out as Gymshark started to take off – although he’s almost-certainly the dropout that the university is most proud of – and he got stuck in to doing the heavy lifting of running a start-up.

Francis said: “It was only eight years ago pretty much to the day that I was hand sewing, hand making and hand printing products and hand packaging them and sticking it into a bag and carrying it down to the post office and standing there while each one was stamped and sent out across the world.

“To go from that to a billion-dollar brand – more than a billion-dollar brand – is just insane. This is a really weird moment. We’ve literally come from hand-stitching product to being a billion-dollar brand.”

The business has just taken on external investment for the first time, with General Atlantic’s $300m purchase of a 21% stake valuing Gymshark at $1.45bn (£1.1bn).

It provides a rare moment for Francis to pause and reflect on what has been achieved.

“If I go back to when I founded this business, I was very young, I didn’t really know what I was doing in this world.

“All I knew is that I had a dream of being involved in fitness and I had a vision in terms of how I believe that brands, particularly in this space, should interact with people, how communities work.”

That vision was combined with the frustrations of being a young novice in a gym to create the opportunity.

“I ultimately had all the difficulties of going to the gym, the first time feeling like everyone staring at you, not really knowing what to do,” he said.

“I felt like the clothes just weren’t right for me, and ultimately that’s when we ended up going off and making our own clothes.

“And that’s how Gymshark started.”

The business grew quickly and in three years it achieved pre-tax profits of £1.1m on sales of £8.7m.

But 2015 had also been a milestone year in the business. Black Friday mishaps and a growing sense of things becoming too big to keep control of in the way they had been led to the involvement of two industry professionals.

Paul Richardson and Steve Hewitt would become executive chairman and chief executive respectively, while co-founder Lewis Morgan stopped having operational involvement soon afterwards.

The appointments were transformational for Gymshark – Francis says the duo “completely and utterly revolutionised the business – and within another three years sales had broken £100m and pre-tax profits had soared to £17.6m.

“Looking back, that seems a very obvious decision to make,” said Francis. “And to be fair, I received a lot of credit in terms of bringing those people on, removing myself from the chief exec role and Steve coming in and really managing the day-to-day in the business.

“I remember in terms of, albeit the very small amount of people that were working at Gymshark at the time, there was a lot of people that were questioning that decision.

“Ultimately my gut instinct told me that was the right thing to do because it would help develop and grow the business and the brand.

“It would allow me to focus on what I’m really good at but also allow me to learn in the areas that I’m not good at.”

Hewitt and Richardson allowed Francis to step out of the limelight – at least externally – and when Gymshark launched its Solihull headquarters in April 2018, Francis spoke only briefly to the assembled staff.

But since then he has begun to emerge as a more public leader of the business again, and now the restructuring of the shareholdings gives him more input, not less.

“It’s been possibly the most difficult experience of my entire life, it has pushed me to my limit,” admits Francis.

But is he happy? “I genuinely think I have the best job in the world.”

>>> Read Next: North America awaits for Gymshark co-founder on global brand mission