Gymshark CEO Ben Francis. Photo / Ben Francis, Instagram
"My mum taught me to sew. Let me show you." The multimillionaire founder of Gymshark whips out his iPhone and brings up a video of his mother demonstrating how to use a Brother sewing machine to make the prototype fitness clothing for which his company is now famous.
Little more than 10 years ago, Ben Francis was making and selling muscle vests online from his parents' garage. Today, at 30, he is CEO of a multibillion-dollar company with state-of-the-art, sprawling headquarters in the West Midlands, offices in Denver, Hong Kong, Mauritius and London, and a presence in nearly every gym in the UK. He has 926 employees worldwide and a turnover last year of £480 million (about NZ$920m). His personal wealth is estimated at £700 million.
The brand's garments are sold in 180 countries. Its digital forcefield is impressive: more than 81 million views on YouTube, 5.8m followers on Instagram and 3.8m on TikTok.
Though exclusively an online operation until now, Gymshark will soon open a flagship store in Regents Street, London. In a business environment which appears to be moving away from brick-and-mortar shops, it seems surprising to open an 18,000-square-foot retail space in one of Europe's most expensive shopping areas. "It may seem strange but, when everyone else zigs, Gymshark zags," Francis says.
"We just love hanging out with our community. We're actually pretty bullish about the future of the high street. Bricks and mortar retail isn't dead and we're going to prove it."
I first meet Francis when he's walking briskly between Gymshark's two expansive headquarters in Solihull. He is a tall, toned young man with a sharp haircut, dressed in black Gymshark gear and gilet, with startling white socks and shoes. It's 10am and he's already been up for more than four hours. "I'm massively into my fitness goals," he says. "If I don't go to the gym enough, I'm not as good at my job. I'm miserable at home. I'm not as good a human being if I'm not regularly in the gym, on a structure, making progress."
Francis is a creature of habit. Same waking hour (5.45am), same meals, same time, same gym. If he has those predictables, he says he can cope with creative chaos. If he's working away from home and can't have breakfast at precisely 6.30am, he gets "a bit panicky". "At the moment, for breakfast I'll have four pieces of streaky bacon and a coffee and that's it."
You can see why the gym is his holy-of-holies. It not only transformed him from a skinny boy to a muscle-bound teenager, but the discipline he learned there changed his life. "For the first time," he says, "I knew that I would get out what I put in. The structure, consistency and work ethic I found in the gym could be applied to other areas of my life and it would work."
It helps to be fit just to walk around the 42,000-square-foot GSHQ in Solihull. The campus boasts a content hub, garment production centre, photography, film and podcast studios and gym, reinforced with improving slogans (or "mantras") like "Work hard, stay humble"; "Find the Gymshark way"; "Be human, give a shit"; "Put family first". A new, even bigger workspace (125,000sq ft) called GSIQ is dedicated to innovation and sits next door on the same site.
Francis has worked since he was 17, when he delivered pizza for £4.80 an hour. Two years later, he and his friend Lewis Morgan founded Gymshark with a domain name that cost £3.50 to register. "The bar was incredibly low," he says. "All I wanted to do, because my two passions were fitness and tech, was make a website that could sell things."
At first they "dropshipped" muscle supplements for a tiny profit margin, then they decided to have a go at designing clothes that body-builders would enjoy wearing. Working late into the night, Francis made some 1000 T-shirts himself, emblazoned with the shark logo.
They started sending clothes to their YouTube fitness heroes, just for feedback, without ever imagining that influencers would become a key marketing tool. Their breakthrough came in 2013 when Francis blew his bank balance on a stand at the BodyPower Expo in Birmingham. International bodybuilders including Alon Gubbay, Jeff Seid and Chris Lavado turned up wearing Gymshark. Before that expo, Gymshark was making about £300 a day; in the first half hour after the event, orders leapt to £30,000.
"I want the UK to see Gymshark as thoroughly and truly British," he says when discussing the company's future. "We want to be the hometown heroes. We don't have to topple the biggest brands in the world. We just have to make something that's special and that people are proud of. For me, there's a really cool thing about having built an international brand in the West Midlands; something special and authentic and real. I love it here.
"Coming from a typical Midlands family keeps you grounded because you don't get arrogant. You get put in your place. My mates don't care about what I do."
When Francis dropped out of a business studies course at Aston University to start Gymshark, his parents were "nervous" but wholly behind him. His younger brother Joe joined the enterprise and is now customer support director. An interviewer once asked Francis to list all the people who said his venture wasn't possible. He couldn't name one. "I can't tell this sob story: me against the world."
But he acknowledges there were blips. Black Friday, the day after US Thanksgiving, is traditionally one of the world's biggest days for online retail. On Black Friday in 2015, Gymshark's website crashed, losing the company £100,000 worth of orders and a lot of goodwill. Francis took it personally and handwrote 2500 notes of apology. It took the company 18 months to recover.
Under Theresa May's premiership, he was invited to No 10 to take part in the Business Council for Small Businesses. "It was one of the coolest days of my life," he recalls, "but I got rinsed for going in my tracksuit bottoms. People thought it was disrespectful. So I took the feedback and went out and bought a suit and next time I turned up in a suit."
The game changed for Gymshark in 2020 when General Atlantic, an American private equity firm, bought a 21 per cent stake in a deal that valued the business at £1 billion. Francis kept things real and ordered a Nando's. His former friend and co-founder Lewis Morgan was not there to share it. They'd parted ways over the company's future direction. "It was horrible. Once Lewis left I was in this thing on my own and that was upsetting. And it was horrible because I lost a friend."
His main extravagance after the General Atlantic deal was to buy a derelict dairy farm in the Cotswolds which he and his Canadian wife Robin Gallant, 31, are bringing back into production. They also have a house in Birmingham.
"She makes me 10 times better than I am," he says. "Without her, I wouldn't be half as good. We disagree on things; probably always will. Friends say we're like an old couple off Gogglebox, which is probably true. But that's nice, isn't it?"
They met at a fitness expo in Toronto and Gallant, a personal trainer with a degree in biochemistry and engineering, became a Gymshark influencer. They married a year ago. One of the non-negotiables was that they should take holidays… including from their phones. "I'm still having to work on that," Francis says.
£1.25 billion: company value
£500 million: global sales (2022)
18 million+: total social media following
10: years of operation
900: employees
70%: Francis's company stake
£900 million: Francis's estimated wealth
Is TradeMe about to be traded?; Top ad execs' new outdoor business; Big Stuff changes.