Ben Francis and Gymshark: The UK's Fastest Growing Company

If you are an avid gym goer, what do you do when you decide you want more gym clothes? If your answer is start your own gym apparel brand, you are probably crazy. Crazy creative. Ben Francis was a 19 year old college student in the UK when he started Gymshark, UK's fastest growing company.

This logo has become the most recognizable in the fitness community

Growing up, Francis had always had an interest in programming and the internet. As a teenager, Ben would make many different kinds of websites. Including one that sold license plates. Francis states that he and his friends would save what little money they had and buy license plates to customize and then sell. It was around this time that Ben and his friends really starting getting into working out and thanks to the technology of the smart phone, he started programming and designing fitness apps, two of which made it into the top of the UK application charts.

Ben Griffin - founder of GymShark

 It was here where Ben made the decision to combine his love for website making and his love for fitness, and the Gymshark website was created. Before its boom as a clothing brand however, the website consisted of supplements supplied by other websites. In a video on Ben's YouTube channel, he states that, "we couldn't afford stock because we had no money, so the solution I thought up was to have every single supplement you could ever imagine on the website, and ... when people would order off the website, it would automatically trigger another retailer to drop ship the supplement to them and we just added a small margin to it" Ben goes on to say that the key to starting a business is to be creative with not just the front end of your business, but also the back end, stating that without the sales from the drop shipping of supplements, Gymshark wouldn't exist today. This marked a real shift in the company. Upon stocking up on other companies' clothes, Ben and his friends realized that there was nothing out there that they wanted to wear. Brands like Nike and Adidas were more shifted towards the sporting side of fitness and not so much for the aesthetic gym goer. They wanted clothes which were, "longer, stretchier, and more fitted", so they spent all the money they had made on a sewing machine and screen printer. They would spend hours hand making every single piece of clothing. Business would continue to build, and one day, Ben and his team went to the Body Power Expo, one of the biggest fitness shows in all of the UK. Every big brand would have a booth with their supplements and apparel, along with their sponsored models and athletes. Despite its size, Ben felt like something was missing. He found it somewhat boring. As a result, they once again put in all the money they had, and secured a booth for next year's expo.

The biggest names in fitness gather at the expo

They spent any free time they had in the following year working on orders and creating new products, but Ben said never felt like work because they were doing something they loved. This is where arguably  his biggest contribution to the fitness industry occurred. There were several big YouTube fitness personalities at the time that Ben avidly watched. It was here where Ben took his brand and began mixing it with YouTube by sending all these fitness personalities GymShark apparel to try on. This became known as influencer marketing, but at the time no one in the community was just giving YouTubers free apparel. They effect was huge. Each of these personalities, such as Jeff Seid and Lex Griffin, had hundreds of thousands of subscribers, fans that would copy almost anything they would do. So what happened when they started wearing Gymshark gear in their videos? Gymshark began to run out of stock hours after a new product or line would launch. This was their big break thru. The crazy thing, according to Ben, was that he would, "just watch them all the time, and as massive fans, we decided to send them the Gymshark product". It was this genuine love for fitness and the community surrounding it which really drove Gymshark to the height it now is, along with his intertwining of the fitness apparel and social media markets, a really important trait for a creative mind according to Gardner as he states in Creating Minds, "Such individuals engage in a wide and broadly interconnected network of enterprises; exhibit a sense of purpose or will that permeates their entire network" (Gardner 23).

Lex Griffin - Half a million YouTube Subscribers

The following year at Body Power, Ben and the team brought in several of these big name YouTubers and were a smashing hit. Following this success, they began to introduce Gymshark Official Athletes, who would use their social media and YouTube presence to model the brand and spread it to all their followers. Even the female market, which started off shaky, has exploded in the last few years with Gymshark athletes like YouTube and social media star Nikki Blackketter leading the charge. Gardner notes how a successful creative mind is able to use their individual talents and mix them into the fields they are dealing with, and Ben does just that. Utilizing his knowledge of website making and programming and combining it with both the athletic and social media field. 

Nikki Blackketter - first female GymShark Athlete

The success and growth of this brand is solely based on the creativity of Ben Francis and his team. Throughout every step of the way, they took the necessary risks to grow their dream. The driving force for their dream however, was that they never stopped having fun with it. From wanting to make clothes that they themselves wanted to wear, to getting their favorites fitness stars to wear them, you can really feel the care and the desire that went into their product, and that is what sets them apart in an industry that can very often times seem bland and generic. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpftE7RwQnM

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