Gymshark: Ben Francis. From pizza delivery to billion-dollar fitness brand.

Summary

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Episode: Gymshark: Ben Francis — From Pizza Delivery to Billion-Dollar Fitness Brand
Date: November 17, 2025
Guest: Ben Francis, Founder & CEO of Gymshark

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Guy Raz interviews Ben Francis, the founder of UK-based fitness apparel juggernaut Gymshark. The conversation traces Ben's journey from a tech-savvy, fitness-obsessed college student and Pizza Hut delivery driver to building one of the world’s fastest-growing fitness brands. Ben shares candid stories about humble beginnings, struggles with self-doubt and leadership, the power of influencer marketing, explosive growth, and why relentless learning—not just luck—set Gymshark apart.
The episode is an honest look at startup grind, the risks and rewards of entrepreneurship, and the cultural and digital dynamics that shaped an iconic brand.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Ben's Early Life and Entrepreneurial Roots

• Raised near Birmingham, Ben juggled school, early internet ventures, and a serious commitment to the gym.
• Developed foundational tech skills at school (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator):

  “Being 18, knowing how to use that software, it was like ... knowing how to use magic.”
  (06:22, Ben Francis)

• Dabbled in ventures (personalized license plates, fitness apps) with little financial payoff, but lots of education:

  “None of them made any money. Most of the apps were free... but it never felt like a failure.”
  (10:48, Ben Francis)

• Early work experience with his grandfather taught him about the very real risks of entrepreneurship:

  “He told me about all the risks he had to take ... so when I was 17, 18, and trying to start my own business, I genuinely felt like I had no risk.”
  (11:20, Ben Francis)

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2. Gymshark’s Humble Beginnings & The Supplement Experiment

• Ben and friend Lewis Morgan first set up a Shopify store aiming to sell supplements—called Gymshark because the domain was available and cheap.
• Couldn’t afford minimum orders from suppliers, so pivoted to drop-shipping.
• Early profits were dismal (“a profit of a pound a month”), but the thrill of their first online sale was transformative:

  “That feeling of selling something online was just absolutely brilliant. I was dancing around my bedroom.”
  (17:08, Ben Francis)

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3. Transition to Apparel & DIY Hustle

• Sparked by seeing his grandmother’s sewing machine, Ben shifted focus to apparel and began screen-printing T-shirts and hoodies targeting lifters—filling a gap in the market.
• Operations were entirely DIY: order comes in, print it, take it to the post office.
• Apparel had much higher margins, enabling reinvestment and growth:

  “We could sell £50 worth of supplements, make £2... or sell £30 of clothing and make £15. That completely changed the game.”
  (21:08, Ben Francis)

• Early growth was incremental, just trying to get “a sale a week, then a sale a month.”
  (21:59, Ben Francis)

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4. Breakthrough at Body Power Expo & The Power of YouTube Influencers

• The pivotal decision: sinking all profits into a stand at the 2013 Body Power Expo in Birmingham.
• Ben formed connections with emerging YouTube fitness creators (like Matt Ogus & Chris Lavado) and flew them in for the event. Their presence was transformative:

  “As soon as they opened the doors... people flooded to the stand. They were there to see their heroes.”
  (28:18, Ben Francis)

• The event was a sell-out, and Gymshark capitalized on influencer-driven demand before most brands realized its potency.

  “Their heroes on YouTube were wearing it... That was a game changer for us.”
  (29:56, Ben Francis)

• After the event, £30,000 in revenue was generated in 30 minutes online, prompting Ben to quit school and his Pizza Hut job.

  “That weekend was really important because it was the weekend I both quit university and Pizza Hut to pursue Gymshark.”
  (35:38, Ben Francis)

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5. Learning Leadership, Scaling, and Hiring Experience

• Met seasoned businesspeople Paul Richardson and Steve Hewitt through the gym; Steve, in particular, became a mentor, eventually joining as CEO.
• Ben intentionally split responsibilities (“front end” for brand & product, “back end” for logistics, finance, and operations).

  “You basically hired your own boss... I need somebody to show me the ropes."
  (46:22, Guy Raz)

• Ben embedded himself in every department for “a turbocharged apprenticeship,” learning supply chain, marketing, tech, etc.

  “It sort of felt like being able to do an exam, not get the result you wanted, and then just do the exam again.”
  (65:01, Ben Francis)

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6. The Gymshark Brand, Product Innovation, and Staying Focused

• Focus remained on “physique-accentuating” gym wear, resisting temptation to broaden incoherently.
• Innovation with seamless knit technology, designed to flatter lifters’ bodies, was a key differentiator.

  “Building the best gym wear in the world... not just about performing in the gym, but how it makes you look.”
  (53:01, Ben Francis)

• Women’s lines initially flopped (“it was terrible... it just didn’t work”), so Ben hired experienced designers, learning from failure:
  (54:03, Ben Francis)

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7. Navigating Rapid Growth, Tension, and Learning from Mistakes

• The company leapt from £13m in 2016 to £100m two years later.
• Co-founder Lewis Morgan departed after philosophical and strategic disagreements, which Ben describes as a "business divorce."

  “It was tough because … we were what, four, call it four or five years in and really taking off. That was tough for me.”
  (56:37, Ben Francis)

• Leadership missteps (“Hurricane Ben”) and painful 360° feedback prompted new self-awareness and improved management style:

  “I remember we did…360 feedback... I read it, and I could not believe how bad it was... I could be rude to people, very abrupt. That was a big moment.”
  (67:31, Ben Francis)

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8. Direct-to-Consumer Disruption, Internationalization, and Raising Capital

• Gymshark thrived as a bootstrapped, high-margin, digital-native brand:

  “We were... a cash generative business. We sell products at a high margin... We didn’t need the cash.”
  (48:43, Ben Francis)

• U.S. expansion fueled massive growth, now the company's major market.
• In 2020, private equity firm General Atlantic acquired a 21% stake, valuing the brand at over $1.3 billion. Ben didn’t cash out—instead increasing his share and focus.

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9. Brick-and-Mortar, the Modern Landscape, and Staying Niche

• Despite the DTC wave, Gymshark is opening carefully selected stores (London, Manchester, Amsterdam, New York).

  “What I don't want to do is just open thousands overnight. I want to do it in a really thoughtful way.”
  (73:32, Ben Francis)

• In a saturated influencer marketplace, brand focus and authenticity remain central:

  “What we don't want to do is become overly broad and almost bland. We're focused on building the best gym wear in the world.”
  (74:53, Ben Francis)

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10. Luck, Risk, and the Long Game

• Ben credits both timing and hard work, but emphasizes commitment:

  “There's definitely a lot of it's luck and a lot of it's timing... but I think you have to take advantage of that as well.”
  (78:19, Ben Francis)

• Gymshark aims for longevity, and Ben is committed for the long term:

  “All the brands I admire really stood the test of time. They're not five years old, they're 50. The focus is essentially running the business as long as it makes sense.”
  (77:30, Ben Francis)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On learning tech early:

  “Being 18, knowing how to use [design software], it was like, you know, knowing how to use magic.”
  (06:22, Ben Francis)

• On selling the first item:

  “That feeling of selling something online was just absolutely brilliant... dancing around my bedroom.”
  (17:08, Ben Francis)

• On finding product-market fit:

  “No one made clothing specific to bodybuilders and lifters... We were building for a group we were very much a part of.”
  (19:40, Ben Francis)

• On influencer marketing before it was a buzzword:

  “We just did what felt right and instinctive.”
  (37:11, Ben Francis)

• On hiring experience:

  “You basically hired your own boss... I need somebody to show me the ropes."
  (46:22, Guy Raz)

• On feedback and personal growth:

  “I could not believe how bad it was... I could be rude to people, very abrupt...That was a big moment.”
  (67:31, Ben Francis)

• On luck vs. hard work:

  “There's definitely a lot of it's luck and a lot of it's timing... but you have to take advantage of that as well.”
  (78:19, Ben Francis)

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Major Timestamps

• 02:38 — First discussion of Body Power Expo and selling out at event
• 06:12 — Early tech skills and entrepreneurial forays
• 14:38 — Launching Gymshark as a drop-shipping supplement store
• 19:09 — Transition to making apparel with grandmother’s sewing machine
• 24:22 — Connecting with YouTube influencers
• 28:18 — Body Power Expo breakthrough; influencer strategy explodes
• 35:38 — Quitting university and Pizza Hut for Gymshark
• 39:21 — Bringing on first employees and scaling operations
• 43:29 — Bringing in mentors (Steve Hewitt, Paul Richardson)
• 46:22 — Ben on hiring his own “boss”
• 53:01 — Product innovation: from cotton to “seamless” fit
• 56:11 — Loss of co-founder Lewis Morgan
• 65:01 — Ben's management apprenticeship across departments
• 67:31 — Harsh feedback and adapting as a leader
• 73:32 — Opening physical stores; balancing DTC and retail
• 74:53 — Commitment to staying focused and not becoming bland
• 78:19 — The interplay of luck, risk, and purposeful action

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Episode Tone & Takeaways

The conversation is forthright, energetic, and self-effacing. Ben frequently credits good fortune, mentors, and being “in the right place at the right time,” but pairs that humility with dogged perseverance, a willingness to learn (and fail) in public, and making long-term bets on people and product.
Gymshark’s story serves as both inspiration and caution for aspiring entrepreneurs: success is rarely formulaic or “strategic” in the early days—it’s built on hustle, openness, and learning from every person and mistake along the way.

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For Listeners Short on Time:

If you want to understand how an authentic "built by the community, for the community" ethos, paired with nimble digital marketing and constant learning, can upend a traditional industry—this is a must-listen.
Ben’s journey from Pizza Hut delivery boy to CEO of a billion-dollar brand is marked by relatable missteps, gradual mastery, and a laser focus on solving the real needs of a passionate subculture.

Transcript

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

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[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Conference, this Body Power conference.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

How or what happened there?

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I mean was there were people curious? Like what is this gymshark thing? Like what? How do people respond?

[Ben Francis]

Well, that was probably the most surreal weekend of my life because prior to the event we were selling around 200 to 250 pounds a day in revenue. But I just remembered spending the whole time just grabbing products, selling product and in the event we completely sold out of everything that we took.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Wow.

[Ben Francis]

And after the event I remember we were so tired. We just. We all just lay down on the floor in the stand, and there was a guy who had worked at a different stand, and he walked over to us and he said, how did you do that? And I remember looking at him and saying, I've got no idea.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I'm Guy Raz.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And on the show today, how an online shop selling T shirts took Ben Francis from college dropout to being the youngest billionaire in the UK. There's a moment in the early 2000s when something subtle starts to shift in fitness. People start filming their workouts and posting their progress and crafting a bodybuilding identity. Online workouts effectively become public. And right in the middle of that shift was a teenager named Ben Francis. Now, at the time, Ben wasn't a founder. He was still in college. He was delivering pizzas at night, going to the gym in the afternoon, and tinkering on websites in his bedroom. But Ben saw what was changing. He saw that gym culture was becoming a community you could join from anywhere, and he wanted to build a uniform for that community. So he and a few friends started making clothing specifically for weightlifters. And they didn't know apparel, but they knew how the clothes should feel, how they should move, how they should make you look when you loaded the bar and stepped up to lift. And then there was the second insight, maybe the bigger one. If you want to build a brand, don't buy ads. Build relationships. Ben reached out directly to the powerlifters and bodybuilders who were shaping this new online culture on YouTube. Not celebrities, not athletes with agents, real people with small audiences who trusted them. And when those lifters started wearing Ben's new brand, Gymshark, it didn't grow. It exploded. But here's what's unusual. As the company scaled, Ben didn't pretend to know everything. He learned leadership from the more experienced people he hired. He effectively built an apprenticeship inside his own company. He studied logistics, design, marketing, the supply chain, tech until he could eventually step into the role of CEO with total confidence. Today, Gymshark is one of the most influential fitness brands in the world, with nearly a billion dollars in revenue and a global community of fans, lifters and creators. But to understand how Ben built all of this, you have to go back to where it started. He grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s near Birmingham in England's Midlands. As a teenager, there were two things.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

He going to the Gym and at school studying changed my life, to be.

[Ben Francis]

Frank, because it's where I learned how to learn. We were so fortunate. It was the school that I went to was, for whatever reason, they'd obviously accelerated tech because I had access to the Creative Suite. So I had. I remember Dreamweaver, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop. I can't remember what else was in there. But then being 18, knowing how to use that software, it was like. It was like, you know, knowing how to use magic. It was absolutely brilliant.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah, it's like a language and.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And when you're that young, like your.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Brain is just absorbing all this stuff and if you love it, you can figure it out. So you were being trained to do this. Meantime, getting ready for university. And by the time you got to university, you went to a school called Aston University. You learned these skills at school. And I read that, okay, building a website I can, you know, I can understand. And you started to build sort of small businesses. Right, Like I read, for example, that you tried building a website that like sold personalized car license plates.

[Ben Francis]

Yes, yeah. So that was the first thing. That was actually when I was at school. So I would have been, I don't know, 17, maybe the oldest.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

By the way, how did you. Because personalized license plates in the UK are, I think, are very expensive. It's not like in the US where you just go to the DMV and register. Like it's some. Sometimes people pay like hundreds of thousands of dollars for personalized license. How are you able to sell those on a website at 17?

[Ben Francis]

Oh, well, we just sold cheap ones, but.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Oh, that was the way you would buy existing.

[Ben Francis]

So we would buy them so it wasn't particularly sufficient sophisticated. We would literally, they would come through and you could buy them for £300 or something, but you could sell them for two or three thousand. So what we do is we'd sort of see what was coming up for release, buy the ones that look like they could be valuable, put them on the website and then. And then sell them. So you'd have to sort of hold stock or inventory, I guess there's like a few.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Flip them, basically.

[Ben Francis]

Basically, yeah, yeah. And it's just sort of that early days sort of thing. And so that was the first thing. And then my first iPhone, I think I got when I was about. It must have been 18, because I remember I was at school when I first got it, university sort of time. And it was having that, or seeing that first iPhone that then made me really interested in the idea of not just Web development, but app development. I remember having that first iPhone and thinking, I would love to learn how to do this.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So the leap from building websites to developing apps, like it wasn't an insurmountable leap. You could basically buy the off the shelf software you needed to start building the apps and you could figure out how to build an app on your own.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, yeah, just through YouTube. And for me, those apps were, were, were in fitness. So it was, I don't know how to get in shape. And you know, it was like different areas where you'd look at different exercises, learn how to do them. It would all just be text, imagery and video.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Okay, right. And they were fitness apps. So let's, let's dive into that for a moment. I mean, you got in to, to going to the gym at what age?

[Ben Francis]

About 16, 17. And yeah. And that the gym was really important to me because it was that first time in my life where I realized that I'll get out of it what I put in.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah.

[Ben Francis]

So if I go to the gym five days a week for a year, I will be in a better position at the end of that year than I was at the start of it. And that, that was a fundamental and really important lesson for me.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You could literally see the changes.

[Ben Francis]

Exactly.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah. And so how did you, when you started to go to the gym, I mean, going at 16, you know, you're younger than most people in there and can be intimidating and, you know, like, did you, how did you just like get into the habit of going?

[Ben Francis]

Every day you find the local gym, you sort of go with friends. I think at that age, when you're a teenager, go off to school, you sort of travel in a pack of, of of lads. Basically, we all do the same workout. Chest Monday, back Tuesday, shoulders Wednesday, legs Thursday, arms Friday. Sort of thing. But you're right, it was because I would go into the gym and you'd see all these big dudes, right? Yeah, yeah. Especially when you're a young teenager and you're really thin, you'd assume that they all. You think that they're all looking at you. You think you're doing everything wrong. In, in reality, they're probably more interested in themselves than they are you. And you know, no one really cares that much about what other people are doing, but it was intimidating. So I'd just go with friends and we'd lift weights and we'd have fun and we'd go after school.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so that's a, that's becoming a, an increasingly important part of Your life, but also on the side, like you're trying out these businesses and websites and did you ever make any money doing these businesses, like personalized car license plates or.

[Ben Francis]

No, no, they all failed miserably. They all failed. None of them made any money. Most of the apps were free. The ones that weren't, you know, the downloads were so tiny, it was like a few quid. So it was nothing made any money at that point.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But it seems like already you, you were. I mean, you were generating these ideas in your head about businesses, like things you could do and ways you could make money digitally. Is that right? I mean, was your sort of head moving in that direction already at that age?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. The thing for me was when things, quote, failed, it never felt like a failure. So when I was about 14, everyone here does work experience, so you go away, you do work experience for a little bit and you find out what it's like to actually go into an office or a factory or something like that. So When I was 14, I went into work experience with. With my granddad. He basically had his own business or he has his own business line. So he'd line furnaces. So we'd go into factories around the Midlands and we'd literally go into the furnaces and the job would be you either line them with brick or ceramic fibre. So it's basically like an insulation around the inside. And there's a lot of things I learned there. So one, I learned hard work. But the thing that really stuck with me was he told me about all the risks he had to take when he started his business. He had two kids, he had a mortgage, he had a wife, and when he was building his business, he had to take massive financial risks that risked the house and the roof over the head of his kids. So fast forward four years later, I'm 17, 18, and I'm trying to start my own business. I genuinely felt like I had no risk. I was, at the time I was working at Pizza Hut, I was earning four pound, five pound an hour. You know, I could buy domain names for three pound fifty at the time. Yeah, my risk was zero. And I'd always been brought up to know that there was genuine risk in starting a business. And then that allowed me to recognize at the time, I didn't really have any risk compared to what he had.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So, all right, so you get to university and you're working at Pizza Hut, as you mentioned, and when you got to university, had you already started to think about a new business idea?

[Ben Francis]

So it wasn't Actually an idea necessarily for a business. Going back to the whole idea, the whole thing was I loved doing new things and I loved learning new things. At that point, the aim was simply to sell one thing online. And I remember we sort of opened up Shopify website. It was all there, you know, we bought the domain name and then it was a bit like, okay, now we haven't got anything to sell. Now. At this point, we hadn't thought to sell apparel. At this point, we really wanted to sell supplements because we'd, you know, get into the gym, taking your protein shakes and all that sort of stuff. And there was a friend of mine who worked at a local supplement shop and I remember calling him up, his name was Dan. And I said, listen, Dan, I've got this website. I want to sell supplements online. Can you do me a deal? I want to buy some supplements off you and I'll sell them. And he went, yeah, I can do you a deal, I'll do you a deal. And he came back to me the next day and he said, right, I've, you know, I've got rid of all of our minimum order quantities, but the lowest I can go is, I think it was £10,000. Now, at this point, I'd never heard of £10,000, let alone seen £10,000. That would have been years worth of income for me at Pizza Hut. Right. So that was obviously a door closed.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You wouldn't be able to. To buy stock.

[Ben Francis]

No.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You wouldn't be able to buy a bunch of supplements and hold them.

[Ben Francis]

No, exactly. So at that point, it was almost like a good problem because then we started thinking, well, how can we. Because, remember, the aim was literally to sell something. And that's when we found out about drop shipping, where we could literally load up the website with hundreds of supplements, have them slightly more expensive than what the dropshipper would obviously sell them to us for. And then when people order them, it would then ship through the dropshipper to the customer.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And you called it, you called it Gymshark from the beginning.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, it was run on gymshark.co.uk and.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Gymshark was a name that you came up with. I mean, you got the domain, but it was. Tell me about that name. Yeah.

[Ben Francis]

To be honest, it. Because I'd never thought it would be anything big. It was a real arbitrary decision to the point where I can. I can hardly remember why we called it Gymshark. I know the domain was cheap. I know it was about 3 pound 50. I know it was available. So, no, I Don't.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It was just, it just was just.

[Ben Francis]

Like, I guess an instinctive decision at the time.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Got it. Can I, can I rewind for a sec? Just because I want to go slightly back a little bit, which is, first of all, you're, you're talking about we. And I want to, I want to kind of dig into this because I guess at university you met a guy named Lewis Morgan.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And he would eventually work with you on Gymshark. Who is Lewis? How'd you meet him? What, what's the story?

[Ben Francis]

I knew Lewis from school. We weren't friends, but we knew of each other. We became friends through the gym. So. And it was a case of like, I think we were racing who could have the biggest arms the quickest or something like that. And then it was through the gym that we would then be bouncing all these ideas off each other. So that's obviously where then we found Shopify and drop shipping and built from there.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, there's one other bit of context that I want to, I'm curious about, which is Birmingham, I think, and maybe I'm wrong about this is sort of like the center of bodybuilding culture in the UK a little bit. Like, I guess there are like bodybuilding conferences and conventions in Birmingham, is that right?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. So there's a couple of things. So one, Dorian Yates, one of the best bodybuilders of all time, is from Birmingham. But you're right, the biggest and the best bodybuilding and lifting event, as far as I was aware, certainly in the uk, possibly Europe, was actually run out of Birmingham and it was called the Body Power event. And we'd all go there just as, as fans and it was, it was really cool because all of the biggest and the best bodybuilders were always from the us so to be able to go and see them, see the brands, see the big bodybuilders in Birmingham was just an amazing thing as a 16, 17, 18 year old.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And when you, when you first decided.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

To start this sort of dropship Shopify website, it was you and Louis, or.

[Ben Francis]

It was literally just me and Lewis for at least 18 months, probably even the first two years. Right, okay.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you launch a site and how did it do?

[Ben Francis]

Well, we had the Shopify website. It looked amazing. It was full of supplements, it looked incredibly professional. We sent it live and absolutely nothing happened for weeks. Nothing. I, I, I sort of didn't realize that because the website was like, I assumed that people would just come across it and find it. No one found the website. We completely had to try and work out how to get traffic there. And it was actually Facebook. We started Facebook pages. Obviously there was a gym sharp Facebook page and lifting pages and this is.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Just pages that you were starting. You didn't have cash to, to, to put ads out?

[Ben Francis]

No, we had, we had no money, no ads, no nothing. It was literally just organic Facebook pages with pictures of lifters and bodybuilding news and things like that. And I think it probably, it probably took a couple of months and eventually we had our first sale. It was £52. The cost to us was 50 to the dropshipper. So we had a two pound profit. It took us about, I don't know, call it two months. So we were earning a profit of a pound a month. But it didn't matter because if you think about that two months prior, the whole ambition was to sell something online. And that feeling of selling something online was just absolutely brilliant. And I was, I honestly, I was just absolutely blown away. I was dancing around my bedroom at like 19 years old, whatever it was. 18, 19 years old, just so pleased that we'd sold something.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So, I mean, getting an order is exciting, but I mean, you mentioned your margins were, were like incredibly low. One to two pounds per, you know, order. Yeah. So how long did you keep it as a supplement business before you start to think, you know, maybe, maybe we should look around for a different product?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, it would be somewhere between six to 12 months, maybe, something like that. And we did sell and we managed to build up. Maybe we're getting a sale or two a week, but because the margin was so low, there was a point where we were genuinely debating as to whether or not this is even worth carrying on. And then my. So my nan had done a curtain making course.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

This is your grandma?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, yeah. And she had a sewing machine on the dining table in her house. And it sort of made me think, well, I wonder if we could actually make our own clothing at this point. And now at that point we then bought a sewing machine, we brought a screen printer, we'd saved the money for it and we started to basically to try to hand make, hand print our own clothing, basically. And that was where it all really started to kick off.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But again, this was like, let's just try selling clothing on this site.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, exactly that. And it was. There was definitely a thing of. No one made clothing specific to bodybuilders and lifters. And it's less even, it was more around the branding. No one sold product that was dedicated to that sort of, that group that we were Very much a part of. So we ended up, at that point, we sort of bought a load of blanks. And again, it's a fairly standard thing that I guess a lot of people do today. We started screen printing and in some areas as well, sewing our own product.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so let's kind of break this down. You buy a sewing machine and a screen printer.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And what.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And how much does that stuff cost?

[Ben Francis]

The screen printer was about a thousand pounds. Sewing machine would have been a few hundred quid. So at that point it would have been all in just over £1,000. But we could make lots of different product, different logos, all on the same blanks.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And blanks are just blank T shirts.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, blank T shirts, blank tanks, hoodies. And you get them in white, black, gray. Almost like a similar sort of thing to like a Fruit of the Loom standard T shirt with logos.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And it was all made to order. Like, if somebody ordered a shirt, then you would. You would screen print it? Basically, yeah.

[Ben Francis]

Literally, we'd wake up, we'd see if there was an order, screen print it, take it to the post office, send it, and. And then that was it.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And this, I'm. Presumably this didn't really cost you that much money because you could just go to like a. I mean, were you literally like just going to. We would call it like Ross or, you know, or TJ Maxx type stores and just buying bulk T shirts.

[Ben Francis]

Like we bought them from a UK wholesaler so you could buy. Again, the minimums were low. Like the minimums might have been 10 per size or something. So. And then going back to the. Versus the supplements, because we still had supplements on the website at this point as well. We could sell £50 worth of supplements, make £2 in margin, or we could sell £30 worth of clothing and make £15. So it was that. That to us, completely changed the game because all of a sudden we were sort of starting to build a model where we could reinvest in our own business and that's when we could really start to grow it.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But initially it was just T shirts, tanks and hoodies. And hoodies. Okay. And I mean, was there in your mind at least, like a big vision at that point, or was it just, let's just do this and see what happens?

[Ben Francis]

No, it was really gradual. So the first moment was, let's make a website that sells something online. Then it was, we got the first sale. Then it was almost, let's get our second sale. Then it was, let's try and get a sale a week and then a sale a month, and then the. The bar was always incredibly low. There wasn't. It wasn't for many, many years until we really started to think ahead. You almost just think about the next thing and dedicate. We found ourselves dedicating ourselves wholeheartedly to just what thing was.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So, again, like, with the supplements, you were thinking maybe people would. Would stumble on it and order supplements. Like, I can't imagine. All of a sudden the floodgates open and people are like, oh, they have.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

T shirts and hoodies now.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I mean, was it still like crickets?

[Ben Francis]

No, it was exactly, exactly that. And we. It was all done through Facebook pages. But the big moment for us was then the next year when we went to that Body Power event and we. We visited as customers, as we always did, and we went up to the show office where you can book for the next year. They would generally book a year in advance. And we went up there and I remember saying to them, please, can we have a stand? We want to book a stand for next year. And I think it was a minimum of £3,000. So again, it was a lot of money to us. But at that point we'd sort of started to sell enough to give us the confidence that between the sales on the website plus the jobs that we had, we could probably, within 12 months we could get the money together.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You can make £3,000? Yeah. And you decide that you're gonna go to this conference and what were you gonna do there? I mean, how were just T shirts and hoodies and tank tops gonna be enough to generate excitement?

[Ben Francis]

So we booked the space the year before, and then that whole year, it sort of gave us something really big to work towards. We were then like, right, let's build our business to this event. So the event was in May and we at the time, all of our fitness information going back to sort of that web development era, all of the information that we Learned was through YouTube. So it was just through watching YouTubers and all our favorite fitness people were on YouTube. So we ended up just sort of building relationships with a handful of YouTubers. And I actually remember Matt Ogus and Chris Lovardo, they lived in California at the time. Remember jumping on Skype to them and just talking about the products that we were making. They gave us feedback, we'd send them the product, they would put them in their YouTub videos.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And what was the product?

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It was.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

It was something beyond T shirts.

[Ben Francis]

No, no, it was just the T shirts and tanks.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And because this is kind of early, ish YouTube. It wasn't that hard to just connect.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

With them and say, hey, I watch your YouTube videos.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Can I send you some stuff?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. And they were really just excited. I don't think they'd probably spoke to anyone from the UK before. And we, through that year, we then not only built enough sales to cover the 3,000 pound for the standard, I think we actually upgraded the size of the stand. I think it probably cost us another 3,000, but we even had enough money by the following May before the event to fly those YouTubers out to the UK to come to the event. And we, I remember we called them when we asked them if they wanted to come and they were just over the moon. They obviously, they just immediately said yes. So they flew out to the event and that, that was a. We didn't even realize it at the time. That was a game changer for us.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And the idea was like, what did you propose to them? Just wear gymshark stuff and be at our booth.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. Literally come to the event. We'll fly you out, obviously put you up in a hotel. Come to the booth, we'll go to the gym. We'll just, I guess, chill together and have a good time at the event.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so you're getting close to this conference and tell me a little bit about how you started to think about what you were going to feature there.

[Ben Francis]

Honestly, we didn't. Beyond having the YouTube, like being there with the YouTubers and having the product, we didn't think too much about it. We. The. The big thing for us, it was the launch of our first ever tracksuit. So we had the event, our first ever tracksuit, which we built up to. On. On our Facebook page at the time. And obviously the YouTube youtubers were there as well. That was everything. And we, we were just sort of going, excited to be there.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, let's talk about the tracksuit. How did you design it? I mean, you obviously knew how to design a website and. But did you know how to design clothing?

[Ben Francis]

Oh, no, no. We, we just had to learn as we went, really. We, we were just searching around online. We found manufacturers. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated process, but it was just us trying to build the tracksuit that at the time, no one else was making and that we really wanted.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And I'm assuming you went to like to China, right? Because that's where all the manufacturing happened and still happens to some extent.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, yeah. So the first tracksuit was made in China and I can't remember how we found the manufacturer. It Would have been on, you know, on Alibaba or something like that. I think it was. I think that's where we found them. But it was all around the fit. It was very tapered at the waist. The trousers were tapered. It was very much around that tapered fit at the time.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And the tapered fit, presumably, you know, you look better in it, right. Especially if you're. Because it shows off your muscles or whatever. I mean, even. Even for sort of skinnier guys, right. If it's more fitted, it. You can, it can sort of enhance your. The way your body looks.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. And that's where it was really born. And that's what we tried to do today, right. We try and build some really physique accentuating clothing. That's where that all that began through that first tracksuit and through that early.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Product, even before that, just buying all the inventory. How much do you estimate you had to spend just to, just to order.

[Ben Francis]

The inventory to hold would have been less than £10,000, but it would have been in the thousands.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And how did you have that, that cash?

[Ben Francis]

That was through a combination of Pizza Hut, building the business and just basically reinvesting every single penny that we had because we had no cost, every single pound of profit would literally just go into that order.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so you get to this conference, this Body Power conference, and you have like a bunch of big guys at the booth and I mean, you've got a tracksuit there.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And I'm trying to imagine, like what, I mean, how or what happened there, I mean, was there were people curious, like, what is this gymshark thing? Like, how do people respond?

[Ben Francis]

Well, that was probably the most surreal weekend of my life because we hadn't even finished setting up the stand. I remember I was still running from the van to bring the product in. In the days before this, all the YouTubers had been posted on Facebook, on YouTube, letting everyone know that they would be there. And we didn't really know how, I guess how big or how famous they were, but they'd let everyone know that they were being there. And as soon as they opened the doors to that event, it just felt like people flooded to the stand and people were there to see their heroes, basically because they'd never seen them before.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So it's interesting because most of these guys would walk down the streets of Birmingham or wherever and nobody would have any idea who they were. But at that conference, these guys were.

[Ben Francis]

Rock stars in the world of lifting. They were huge. The younger sort of late teens, early twenties, audience knew them. But then the older people, maybe at the time in their 30s or their 40s, just had no idea, because YouTube was very much a. It was just so new at the time. But then the people that visited our stand also ended up buying products. And from whenever it opened on that Saturday morning all the way through to close on Sunday night, I just remember spending the whole time just grabbing products, selling product, and in the event, we completely sold out of everything that we took.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And I'm trying to figure out why.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Like, again, as you describe it, it's a really basic tracksuit, right?

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

It's not.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I mean, it's tapered, so it's probably differentiated, but gymshark was an unknown brand.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

But there was excitement.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

People were like, kind of coming to.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Your booth and checking it out. What do you think explains it?

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Do you think it was the fit?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, I think the fit of the tracksuit, it was definitely a fairly unique design, but to your point, it wasn't revolutionary. I think the fact that their heroes on YouTube were wearing it. So this was. Most of the people at the stand were young kids. It was us, basically. It was teenage guys.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And what was the retail price of the gym suit?

[Ben Francis]

I think we had to do everything cash that weekend. So we literally just had sort of bags around our waist, and we were literally just. Just selling everything. I think it was round numbers. I think it was £30. And we were just selling it all for cash. And after the event, I remember we were so tired. We just. We all just lay down on the floor in the stand, and there was a guy who had worked at a stand, a different stand. And he walked over to us. He was a bit older, and he hadn't even heard of the YouTubers. And he said. He said, how did you do that? And I remember looking at him and saying, I've got no idea.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

When we come back in just a moment, gymshark breaks into the US Market, and Ben lands in Ohio in December without checking the weather first.

[Ben Francis]

Stay with us.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

How I built this.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

One of the coolest things I did last summer was take my family to Athens, where we saw the Parthenon and the Agora and all those amazing neighborhoods and ancient historical sites. And one of the things that made it so awesome was the home. We booked on Airbnb. We literally had a view of the Parthenon from our bedroom window. There was a hot tub on the top floor. We could sit in it, overlooking the entire city. And we had a kitchen and access to markets, and we were in walking distance from all of the things you would want to see. It made the trip so, so amazing. And when you take your own vacation, that's actually a great time to host your home on Airbnb. Your place with your cool art collection and your handy kitchen gadgets. It might just be what someone else needs to feel right at home on their next trip. Plus, your earnings from hosting provide you with another income stream and could even help offset the cost of your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how [e-mail] host you know as someone who's built an entire career around curiosity, I find myself asking questions even in the quietest moments of my day. Whether I'm walking my dog in the morning or just reading a good book, my mind is always wondering about the why behind things. Which is exactly how Claude has become such an incredible collaborator in my daily life, Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough, the thinking partner that works with you to explore the things that fascinate you. Take last night while making dinner, I found myself wondering about the science behind making the perfect crispy roast chicken. And this all led to an enlightening conversation with Claude that went far beyond basic cooking science. We explored the Maillard reaction, moisture management, salting and brining, and even the history of how humans discovered the cooking process. It was really cool stuff, and I love how Claude matches my natural curiosity rather than trying to shut it down with quick answers. Like when I recently noticed all the different layers in a cliff face during a hike, Claude transported me back in time. It helped me explore how these rocks formed under ancient seas and all the forces that transformed them over millions of years. Whether you're researching outdoor curiosity spirals or working through complex creative challenges, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems together. And it helps me see connections I never would have made on my own, turning casual observations into moments of genuine discovery. Ready to explore what's possible? Try Claude for free at Claude AI hibt that's Claude AI hibt to start thinking deeper today, this show is presented to you by American Express. Building a business is never a straight line. It's full of unexpected turns, and the right tools can make all the difference along the way. That's why when I talk to entrepreneurs about how they keep growing, American Express often comes up the new enhancements to the Amex Business Platinum Card are designed for how business owners actually work today, offering them more value, flexibility, and rewards than ever before with two times membership rewards points on select business purchases, those everyday choices can fuel even more growth. And when it's time to hit the road or the skies, Business Platinum card members have access to the largest global airport lounge network of any credit card. It's a way to stay productive, even while traveling. Plus, the flexible spending limit changes as your business does, adapting to where you are and where you're headed next. Because when it comes to growing your business, there's truly nothing like Business Platinum. Not all purchases will be approved. Terms and points cap apply. Learn more at Go Amex bplat.

[Ben Francis]

Hey.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Welcome back to How I Built this.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I'm Guy raz.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

So it's 2013, and with the help of some YouTube influencers, Gymshark sells a ton of tracksuits and T shirts at the annual Body Power Expo.

[Ben Francis]

Prior to the event, we were selling around 200 to 250 pounds a day in revenue because we couldn't. Because we were at the event and we couldn't ship from the website. We turned the website off the weekend. That's how small the business was. Going back to it being a project. And we, the following week, when we turned the website back on and we posted online that we were back live, we did £30,000 in revenue in 30 minutes, sold out of everything. And that weekend was really important because it was the weekend I both quit university and Pizza Hut to pursue gymshark. So I'll tell you, I was so happy because going into it, I was so nervous because, I mean, I was the first person in my family to go to university. And I remember calling my mom and dad and saying, I'm gonna drop out. Because they were so proud of the fact that I worked so hard to get into university. That was not a given for me whatsoever. And I called them and I said, I'm gonna leave university. And you know when you sort of expect you like a kid, you sort of expect to get told off. And they were so supportive. They just said, listen, if this is what you want to do, then go for it.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So now you've got a real business. And these influencers at that time, were they getting paid or were they were just happy to get free stuff and to be. But no, this is before that. That era where you have to pay like a million dollars for a post or whatever.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, exactly.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But also the advantage back then was if you had 20,000 followers in 2013, the algorithm was different. Like those 20,000 followers would literally watch the videos. Whereas today, if you have 2 million, maybe only 1% of those people are even going to be aware that you have a new video out.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, yeah. I wish I could say it was some wonderful strategy that we built. It literally wasn't. We made a website because it felt it was interesting. We made the product that we wanted to wear, we went to the event we wanted to go to and we sent clothes to the people that we love to follow. It was literally, to your point, a really natural process and there was in no way a strategy. We didn't think too far ahead. We just did what felt right and instinctive.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But you knew that once that you sold $30,000 in a half hour of tracksuits on your website. You knew that this was. You had something here, that this could actually have legs.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. I remember being sat there, it was the middle of the night in my mom and dad's house. The website, I had to literally go through every single. Because all the stock was set to like infinite inventory. So you would just almost. There was no stock levels, but I knew we'd sold out, so I had to go through every product and zero the inventory. So everything was sold out. Sort of clawing across my laptop to get it all sorted and sat there when, once that was done, just thinking, wow, we. We've got something special here. And that's again, that's just where it all began. And at that point, we were signing up to the next event, the next Body Power, we were signing up to another event. We obviously just bought more inventory and we doubled down on everything that had worked for us, particularly in that sort of couple of months, we. We just doubled down on it.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And you were living with your mom and dad, you were 20, 21 or whatever. Yeah. I mean, you're a young guy, so. And in the inventory, where were you keeping it?

[Ben Francis]

So at the time, it was just in my mum and dad's, basically, like in their house, and they were. It was just too much to keep in there. But in the run up to the event, we thought, we have to find a unit. So we found it was a local unit in the. In the countryside. It was a place called Droitwich, which you won't have heard of, and it was an old shed on a canal and it was made out of asbestos and it cost us £300amonth, but it was our space and that's where we stored everything.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And, and, but still in Those first.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Like, 2013, 2014, 2015, it was still tracksuits and T shirts, tanks, sweatshirts, that. That was it. That was what you were selling?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. And it was in that period then. So the following year, we then started to do the events. We did our first event abroad in Germany. That's when we brought in our first, essentially the first gymshark staff. So the. The first person that joined was actually my brother, and he joined to package the orders whilst we were away at the event. So that's when we sort of started to build out the team.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But it was literally like an order would come in, he would package it up, walk to the post office with a bunch of boxes and mail them out. Or DHL or UPS or whatever you were using.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, exactly that. And then at the end of the day, the last thing we would always do is sit on our laptops and we would go through all of the customer queries and we wouldn't leave until everything was sent out. Every query was responded to, and then obviously, we go to the gym.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, So I read that in 2014, you ended that year with about £250,000 in sales. So great. Amazing, but still tiny. Right.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And around this time, I guess, you.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Meet two guys, two businessmen who will eventually play a pivotal role in helping Gymshark grow. One is a guy named Steve Hewitt.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Who I. I guess had some experience in the apparel industry. And the other was a guy named Paul, Paul Richardson.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So how did these guys start to help you?

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And by the way, how did you meet them?

[Ben Francis]

So we'd go to the gym and there'd be local business people that had run businesses and you sort of knew who they were, because when you go to the gym all the time, you sort of end up knowing who's who and chatting to people. So again, we sort of befriended Paul. Paul gave us some advice on a few, I guess, a few bits. And Paul then connected us with Steve and it. And I think at that point, that's when we sort of arranged the meeting. And I remember we sat down with Steve and Paul was there and we just said, listen, we want to make. I think it was at the time we actually wanted to make some T shirts, and we didn't know any European suppliers and Steve did know European suppliers. So that was then. I guess that was the relationship was we went, we worked through the business that Steve worked for to get some product made in Europe. And then because Steve, in his previous job before that, he'd actually worked for Reebok, and again, he would just talk in a language we didn't understand, like margin. For us, we just bought stuff and then we sold stuff and that was it. We didn't know what a margin was. And I mean, being honest, I think they put us in touch with an accountant because we didn't know really about how to file accounts, bookkeeping, tax rates, all of these different things. No one teaches you any of this. We were just sort of picking it up as we went. So I'm sure every entrepreneur has had this. But I remember the day before the close of our financial year, or when the accounts were due, the accountant emailed a list and they were like, right, we need all of these things. I mean, we had none of them. So we had an old table tennis table with all of our receipts for the year and we're trying to organize everything. It was. Every again, you just don't. You're not taught these things. So for us, working with those two and their experience was incredibly helpful.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I imagine that they were looking at you like, how old was Paul and.

[Ben Francis]

Steve at that time? How old were those guys? Paul probably would have been in his late 50s. Steve would have been in his 40s.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Okay. So these guys, way older than you could be old enough to be your parents, that I'm thinking they probably looked at you guys, at you and Lewis.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

As like, oh, these are really cool young guys.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I want to help them out. Like, this is a cool little business that they're starting. I have to imagine that they never imagined it could be something huge. They were probably just wanting to be helpful because you guys were young and enthusiastic.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. And at the time they were doing their own things. But there was a point where I remember Steve talking to Steve. And the thing is that Steve was really good at that. We had no experience of. He was very good with people. So he understood how to run businesses. He. He understood about how to structure businesses. And he came in and he did. I think he did a day, a month. And again, I'd never known about this. We were paying him a day. Right. You know, again, you don't know how these things work.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You basically hired him as a consultant.

[Ben Francis]

We hired him as a consultant. He did one day a month for us and I think we upped it to a day a week. And then there was a point where I remember saying to him, I asked him to come on as like an md, so not quite a CEO, but just someone that could support the day to day running of the business and managing director. Yeah, that's when he then came on full time. And what we essentially did was he ran what we called the back end of the business. So operations, logistics, you know, basically everything that wasn't brand or product or marketing?

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

I'm curious. I mean, I have to ask Steve.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

This question, I guess, but from your perspective, what would make a guy in his late 40s or maybe early 50s. I don't. However old he was at the time, stopped doing what he was doing and join you guys full time? I mean, that's kind of risky, right? I mean, he must have seen potential for this to be bigger, right? How did you make it interesting for him? Like he, he, of course he was going to get equity in the business. And how did you figure out how to make that work? And what did you even know about like equity splits? And by the way, I'm asking you.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

All of this not to say, oh.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

My gosh, how you know, you were so naive. It's more like the people listening to.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

This episode because a lot of them.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Are in their 20s and early 30s, maybe even teenagers listening right now. They're asking this question. They're like, wow, how did he know what to do at that time? Because I don't know what to do.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, I think we were, we were definitely lucky. So at that point, when Steve came on full time, we did, we did give him equity. So I think that that was important to him and I think that probably gave him that, that level of comfort that you wouldn't get if you didn't have any equity whatsoever. The day rate would have been whatever, whatever it was. But then obviously he moved on to a salary. I remember this, I won't share what the salary was, but I remember he was by far the most well paid person not only in the business, but I'd ever heard of. Because growing up, yeah, like we'd never, I'd never heard of people that were earning that sort of money. But he, you know, he deserved it. Right. The value he brought to our business was absolutely worth it. So it was funny for me to go from this perspective of, oh, wow, I didn't realize people earned that much money to oh, wow, he can earn that much money. Because he's going to really help grow our business in a way that is far more valuable than the cost that he will incur.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And you were still the CEO, basically.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, so I was the CEO, but then at that point it was very much just me and Lewis doing everything. Yeah. So I wouldn't really call it a CEO job. It was just, we were just running the business, basically.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But it sounds like, I mean, it sounds like by hiring Steve, you were essentially hiring a mentor. It's almost like you kind of hired your own boss.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

You Hired your boss.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You basically said, okay, it's my business, but I want to hire. I need somebody to kind of show me the ropes here. I need you to help me figure this out.

[Ben Francis]

As much as he taught us, I think he showed us so much more because I found that it's one thing having someone sit down and go, ben, you need to think about this like this. Watching someone work for me is really, even to this day, it's really valuable. I genuinely think I learn more from watching than I do from people telling. Because it was the way he interacted with people, the way that he thought about things. And that as a young 20 something with zero experience was huge for us.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

What were some of the first things.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

That Steve did when he joined? Because at this point you still have a very limited line of products. Given that he had come from Reebok in apparel, was he saying, okay, guys, we have to hire now, we have to hire a designer and we have to think about a whole line of apparel we want to sell?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, so exactly that. So the first thing that we did was we split the business straight down the middle and we had front end and back end. So it was brand and marketing on the one end. And then call it like a very early build of a product or a supply chain team maybe now this was the period where we doubled down on events even more. So then we traveled a lot. We did events in Ohio, California, Cologne, Melbourne, the uk. At that point we probably had at least, probably like 10 employees. So there was a group of us that would go and just basically sell the product in person to. In the same way that we did that first Body Power event.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

You know, when Steve joined, I would.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Think given his experience, I would think one of the things he would have said is, all right guys, let's get serious now. Let's go and just go and just raise a bunch of money and just scale quickly. Because what happens is a business does very well, but they can't keep up with orders and they can't scale because they don't have the cash. And that's a huge problem when you don't have the cash and you've got lots of orders. It can also tank a business. So how did it happen that you didn't actually need outside cash?

[Ben Francis]

Well, I guess because we. Well, we were. Well, we were. And we are a cash generative business. We sell products at a high margin and we have the cash come in before we distribute it. And we certainly did then, so we didn't need the cash. And being honest Again, I didn't know that raising money was a thing. I'd never heard of known anyone that had raised money until probably my well into my early, if not mid-20s. We're from very industrial part of the West Midlands. It's not London or New York. We'd never, we just didn't know that that was a thing beyond. I don't even think we had an overdraft on the bank maybe in for many years into building the business now obviously. No, I now know that there are many incredibly smart people that can build businesses in different ways but that that was the only way that we knew how at the time.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You got to make a profit from.

[Ben Francis]

The start basically and reinvest everything. Don't take any money out and just really focus on growing the business. And yeah, again, just I guess to show our naivety we'd the first trip we ever did to the US with gymshark, we flew to the Arnold event in Columbus, Ohio. I think it was December. We, I'd never been to, you know, Columbus, Ohio before, let alone in the winter. We didn't even check the weather. So I just went with a T shirt and tracksuit sort of thing. I remember landing, looking out the window and seeing all the snow. And I remember they said on the plane that the, the, on the tannoy, the temperature and I remember I just, I had no idea what that was in Celsius, but I knew it was freezing. We didn't have any clothes that were good enough for an Ohio winter, but we just had a great time selling the product and, and being with the community, being with the going into the gyms. We were just having the time of our life.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

So when you started to go to.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

These trade shows in the US for example, I mean you were small potatoes, tiny compared to, to the brands that were probably at some of these shows. But was it. How did people respond? I mean, were people like, oh, you're from the UK like what are you? Or because these YouTubers already had, let's say, a global appeal. Did people know who you were when you go to the shows?

[Ben Francis]

That was the most surprising thing. We landed in Ohio and again you think no one would know. But I think the thing to remember is these trade shows where are and were filled with real fans of the industry. So it wasn't like we landed.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It's like people who go to a Star Trek convention like they know every character. Yeah, sorry.

[Ben Francis]

So we landed into Ohio and you sort of think would anyone know? And you're right, I think it Was the. It was a combination of. Because we were big on social media at that point, through the YouTubers, and the YouTubers were there with us. And then again, three of the. I think three of the five were from the States anyway. They had big America, a bigger US following. It gave us a legitimacy very, very quickly, which I think was great. And again, because no one else at that point was doing what we were doing, albeit it wasn't massively technically advanced, but we were speaking to an audience that no one else was speaking to, I think we then had that legitimacy quite quickly in the U.S. so, all.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Right, let's talk about products, because one of the things. And you may be familiar with this story, but years ago, we had Chip Wilson, who starred Lululemon on the show, and he really. He kind of was a pioneer of this fabric that they would end up using. This, like, stretchy fabric that, you know, worked really well. Many women felt like it made them look more flattering at that point. You know, you were still. It was like mainly cottons that you were using and, you know, just the tracksuits and the T shirts.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

When did you start to have conversations.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Internally like, hey, let's think about, like, performance material, and let's think about, you know, sort of doing something a little bit more innovative.

[Ben Francis]

I think one of the things that I really admire about what Chip did at Lulu was I think I could probably close my eyes and you could hand me a product and I could tell you that it was a product of theirs. I think that's so impressive.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah, Yeah.

[Ben Francis]

I would say the first piece of sort of performance apparel that we made would have been our first seamless product. And we. We were trying to work out how could we make the best physique accentuating T shirt. So it was all about making your shoulders look bigger and your waist look narrower.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And seamless means it's made with synthetic. Mainly synthetic materials.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. Yeah. So. But. And then it's. It's knitted in a tube. So rather than having flat, I guess, flat fabric that you then sew together, it's knitted into a tube as well. So it creates a really, I guess, physique hugging fit. But you can also knit designs into the product itself. And that was a big moment for us when we found out about that, because we could knit in almost like a darker color over the chest, over the shoulders for a man. And then we've realized that it makes, essentially it makes your shoulders look wider and your waist look narrower. And that's. I think that's where some of the early product principles for Gymshark really were born, about building the best gym wear that we can, but ultimately a really physique accentuating fit.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And did you have, I mean, at that point on staff in, like a staff position, who. Somebody who was a designer or. Not yet. Were you still mainly basically working with the designers that the manufacturers had on their staff?

[Ben Francis]

No, not really. The point where we. We brought in a design team, it's actually quite funny. It looks bad on me, but we. The point that we built a design team was a few years and we thought we wanted to sell, we wanted to expand and we wanted to sell women's products as well as men's, because, again, the company in the early days was literally built in our image. It was lifting wear for young men to make the physique look better, basically. And we wanted to make women's wear. And I thought, I'll give it a go. How hard can it be? We did our first women's range and it was terrible. It was absolutely terrible. No one wanted it, it looked terrible, it fitted terrible. It just didn't work. And it was at that point where we realized that if we're going to build, if we're going to do this properly, we need a design team and we need genuine designers who will, you know, think about how a women's range should look.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So by the end of 2016, you guys had done almost $13 million in sales. You've got a little over 50 employees. You're a real now, you know, still a small business, right, but still, like, you're starting to get attention at that point. Like, there's media attention, there's interest. Like, what is this UK brand that, you know, started in Birmingham? Who is this kid who started it? Tell me a little bit about, like, the attention that you started to get around this because, you know, all of a sudden, one day you're a student at Aston University and then, you know, a year later, there's like an article on in the Sunday Times about you.

[Ben Francis]

Gymshark had a lot of attention because of it being a very public brand. I personally didn't really get too much attention, which was really helpful to me because it meant I could literally focus my all my energy on running the business. That only really changed probably five years ago.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

That year, a couple things happened. Lewis left, your co founder. He left and went and started his own clothing company. And was he just burned out? Was there a split? Was there tension or friction? Or was he just kind of like, I did this, I'M done. I want to go do my own thing.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. So Lewis actually left the business. In terms of his active involvement in the business, it was around 2015. It was somewhere between 10 and 20 million in revenue. So Lewis actually left the day to day of the business then. And yeah, I must admit that I found that really hard. And I know he found it hard too, but that was tough because it felt like at that point we were what, four, call it four or five.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Years in and really taking off.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. And we'd travel the world. We'd work together every minute of every day. So that was tough for me.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

But what was the reason he gave you? I mean, did you say, hey, why are you leaving?

[Ben Francis]

Oh, yeah. I mean, we had plenty of conversations around it. Essentially, I think we just had different visions for where the business, the way that we were running the business, and we had a disagreement. And again, it was, I think it was a tough period for both of us. I was really disappointed. And I think the thing that a lot of people forget about is when things like this happen, the business still has to carry on. So you sort of. You're going through this difficult period, but you still have to run the business. You still have to. At that point, we again, probably had 20 or 30 staff. You have to look after them. You have to do what's right for the business. And that was a really tough time for, I think, for both of us. And again, at that point, the business, we were growing during that period, so we were having to. It's hard enough to run a business that's growing that quickly, but to have that going on at the same time is, again, it's really tough.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

When we come back in just a moment, how Ben becomes a better leader by building his own apprenticeship program. But why he still earns the nickname Hurricane Ben. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

How I built this.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And now a quick vital break. A little more from our sponsor, Vital Proteins. You might have heard about vital Proteins. They're all about collagen peptides. By taking collagen peptides daily, you can help support your hair, skin, nail, bone and joint health. Now, Vital Proteins has a brand new way to get your collagen. A new collagen and protein shake. It has 30 grams of protein and zero sugar or artificial sweeteners. And it tastes like chocolate. It's honestly delicious. I drink it when I work out. Go to www.vitalproteins.com to learn more and where to buy. Get 20% off your next order by entering promo code BILT at checkout. If you're waiting for your AI to turn into roi, maybe you need to do more than wait. Any business can use AI. IBM helps you use AI to change how you do business. Let's create smarter business IBM. Hey, welcome back to How I Built this.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I'm Guy raz.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

So it's 2015, and even though Gymshark is now a multimillion dollar business, there's.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Trouble at the top.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Ben and his partner Lewis are not getting along.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, there's definitely tension. Absolutely. And at that point, then I guess the only thing for us to do was go our separate ways. I mean, the only thing I could liken it to would probably be some sort of. It's like a business divorce, isn't it? And it went on for a while. It took a long time for us to sort of iron out all the details and work out what it looks like in this sort of new chapter.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And obviously Lewis is not here with. This is not a documentary show. It's a one person interview. And it's not. In no way does this. Is this meant to reflect badly on him or on you. I'm sure both of you guys have perspectives on what happened, but I'm just curious, can you kind of give me a basic outline of which direction you kind of wanted to head in and which direction he wanted to head in? Because again, probably both equally valid. Right. So what was the differences, the broad differences in vision?

[Ben Francis]

There was definitely a point of, I think, and you're right, I don't think one was necessarily right or one was necessarily wrong. I think they were just different. My perspective was very much like, I was really happy to roll the dice time and time again and just keep growing and growing and growing the business and to bring in more people, more management types at the time and build the business from that perspective. Whereas I think Lewis was a lot more. He really wanted it to be centered around us and the business act in a slightly different way. And then I think that that was the early tension. And then again, without going too much into the detail, then there was a series of disagreements between us and there was one of us that I think had to move on in order to put the business first. And I think we then had to do that.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Did your. I mean, you guys, Are you in touch today? Or was that sort of also the end of your personal relationship?

[Ben Francis]

No, no, that was the end of our personal relationship there, which I think is a shame, but it is what it is. Ultimately, so.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

All right, so now you'd mentioned earlier, like, when you feel Lululemon or, you know, other brands, you could just know what they are without even opening your eyes. Did you start to think about, hey, I want. This is what I want gymshark to be. I want us to be that too.

[Ben Francis]

We didn't consciously think about it, but I think it naturally started to build. And I think that again, for us, what we've done is we've really tried to focus on building the best gym wear in the world. It's all around gym wear, so we're not trying to make product for, again.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

At this point, for basketball or running or.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, it was all around the gym because that. That was and is our passion. So. And we'd always found that the product that performed the best was that physique accentuating product, both for men's and women's at this point. And that's. That was our real sort of bullseye. And that's what we just continued to double down on. Right.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Because gym, I guess, like, if you went to the gym in the U.S. right, I'm thinking most guys would be wearing Nike or Adidas. Right. Maybe under armour, but. But also, like people playing basketball or, you know, or tennis or running would also wear those. In your mind, we could. You're thinking like, we're the brand for the gym. Like, if people want to run and wear it, great. But like, like Lululemon became a yoga brand or aloe. We want to be the gym brand.

[Ben Francis]

Exactly that. We want to be the brand that people wear when they're in the gym.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And this is like in Direct to Consumer. I mean, you just like hit that wave. Right. Because Direct to Consumer was a model that all of a sudden, in around 2012, just begins to explode, at least in the US and then probably in the UK to some extent as well. The advantage is if you have high volume, your profit margins are much higher than if you've got a bunch of brick and mortar stores, because you don't have those.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Those expenses.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. And we could take that profit and reinvest it heavily, both into the product, but also into brand and marketing as well.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you go from like 12 and a half million, $13 million in pounds in sales in 2016 to 100 million in 2018, which is an amazing leap. I mean, the year over year growth is just meteoric. And Steve, by this point, Steve Hewitt is fully the CEO.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

But I'm curious, how did your.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You were, and I think still are the majority shareholder, majority Owner. So all those young people who started with you, they knew that you had started the company, but there was a CEO. And so how did that work? I mean, did people come to you with questions and things that they wanted to do, or would everybody go to Steve and say, hey, this is what we want to do? And what do you think?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, well, they do both. And I think that was the point where it was really clear to me how important mine and Steve's relationship was and how aligned we were. Because if people didn't get the answer they wanted from Steve, then they would come to me or the opposite way around. So they'd sort of try and play almost like mom off dad sort of thing.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Yeah.

[Ben Francis]

So our relationship was really important. Obviously, we'd speak every day. And I. When Steve was CEO, it was a great period for me because I had that period. I think he was there for probably about five years, maybe even longer. And I had a period of accelerated learning in departments in our business, knowing that I could basically fail. And I'd had a team around me that could help clean up after me. And it sort of felt like being able to do an exam, not get the result that you wanted, and then just do the exam again, Because I could literally just try fail, try fail, try fail, knowing that this team. I'd built this team around me, me to support me.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So interesting. I mean, when Steve becomes. When you hire Steve and he kind of eventually runs the business, you become head of brand. You do that for a while and then there's somebody who's better at it. And so you bring that person on to run it, and then you jump into. What's the next thing you jump into?

[Ben Francis]

I think I did product. So it was all product design, development, all that sort of stuff. And then it was more on the marketing side of things, all that sort of stuff. So more the quantifiable side of marketing for a bit. And then after that it was in sort of tech development website.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So you really kind of built your own apprenticeship model. Like you would jump from one thing to the next and stay there for a year, six months or nine months, and kind of learn on the job how to do all those different jobs.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, and it was amazing because I would, you know, I'd be in factories with the development of the product, then I'd be designing with the design or spending time with the designers. I'd be obviously at every event still working with developers on how to, you know, improve our website and email partners for CRM and things like that. I Just had. Yeah, exactly that. And like a turbocharged apprenticeship at a high level in the business.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Tell me a little bit about again. You still are super young, and now you're very experienced, which is awesome. But as you're sort of building the brand and building the company, just inadvertently by accident, you have to also become a leader of people. Did you always feel like you had those qualities as a kid, or is it something you had to learn how to develop as you got older?

[Ben Francis]

No, no, for me, I definitely had to learn as a kid. Always very shy, very introverted. I learned a lot of that through watching Steve. And to be honest, through. Through feedback, through feedback, through the business, I've had to completely change the way I work now from 10 years ago, when I was in my early 20s, I've had to completely change. I remember we did. Did. I'd never heard of it before. We'd moved into our third. Our first proper office. We built a team. At this point, we probably had, I don't know, call it 30, maybe, maybe 40 people working out of the office. And we did a 360 feedback, which, I mean, I'm sure you. You know what it is, but for those that don't, it's basically where you have feedback from a group of people that you work closely with.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Yeah.

[Ben Francis]

And I had this feedback and I read it, and I could not believe how bad it was. The bottom line, I think someone described me as Hurricane Ben, because it was. I would come in, I'd see a design, I wouldn't like it, and then I'd basically just say, that's terrible. Start again sort of thing. And people, you know, basically I could be rude to people. I. I was very abrupt and just frankly, not. Not very good at working in. In groups. That had a real big impact on me. Now, I didn't actually. I would have been about 24, 25. So this is, I guess, a good five or six years into the business. And that was a big moment for me because I realized that I really had to change if I was going to work well in Gymshark.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

How did you cope with being so young and meeting with older people? And did you ever feel intimidated or have a sense of, like, imposter syndrome?

[Ben Francis]

I don't think I ever did. That's not to say that I wasn't nervous, but I never had a feeling of imposter syndrome because, I mean, there was a point where I'd basically done every job, whether it's packing orders or customer support or product design, or I sort of Done everything. So I think when I was working with other people, I always felt really comfortable. Not necessarily because they knew more than I did. They were more experienced and smarter in many ways, but I always just saw it as an opportunity to learn.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

So, all right, you guys are, you know, you hit a, I think, like £170 million in sales by, you know, 2019 and 2020. You get to the pandemic and we'll talk about what happens during the pandemic. Because in. In virtually every case that we've studied, the apparel brands did really well, right? People were at home, they were. They weren't wearing office clothing. They were wearing what is known as athleisure wear. That year, you also had a private equity firm acquire a 21% stake in the brand General Atlantic. The deal valued the brand at this point at $1.3 billion. And I imagine it was payday, basically for shareholders. People who had shares in the company could liquidate at that point and make some money. Significant money.

[Ben Francis]

Yeah. And for me, it was that closing of a chapter from BNA from almost like that startup period. And then really now, how do we become a true serious business at that point?

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And you retained or I guess you even increased your shares at that point, right?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, yeah. And that was my point for really, I guess, committing to our business.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You didn't take anything off the table for you at that point?

[Ben Francis]

No. So my. I can't remember the exact numbers, but I increased my shareholding through that event. All my focus was on how can I work, I guess, with German Atlantic as our new partner, as you know, in terms of building Gymshark into a really globally iconic brand and that, I think everything up until that point for me was very instinctive and opportunistic. And it was just living almost each week and each month as it came. That was the moment where I genuinely thought, right, I really want to build this into something big.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And I mean, they're obviously, they're a huge private equity firm.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Massive.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And they bring experience. And did you have a board at that point, by the way?

[Ben Francis]

No, no. So the board, we actually agreed to build a board after that deal. So before that, we hadn't had a board. It was just essentially me, Paul, Steve, running the business together.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You come back to become the CEO in 2021. I say come back because you had done it when you were a much smaller business. Right. Just a tiny business. Steve transitions to executive chair at that point, and 2021, now you are nine years into this business, basically. I mean, this really kind of started in 2012 as a supplement site. So you had the experience. You were ready to go. I mean, is that how you felt? Like, okay, I can do this now?

[Ben Francis]

No, no. So I didn't really feel ready. So when Steve came on, Steve always said to me that it wasn't. We always knew it wasn't a forever thing for Steve. We were actually working in Hong Kong at the time, and we'd sort of come to the end of the trip, and he sort of turned to me and he said, listen, Ben, I think I've taken this as far as I can, and, you know, I'm sort of ready to step down. He then went on and he said, I think we need a new CEO. And I remember thinking, oh, God, this is. This is going to be hard work. I don't know who I'm going to find. I need to obviously find someone that I trust. I don't even know how to do this. And then he went on, he said, and I think the next CEO should be you. And to be honest, I didn't say anything at that point. I actually didn't really. I just said. Well, I just said what? I. I'll think about it and I'll.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

You didn't. You didn't want this?

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

You weren't trying to pursue this?

[Ben Francis]

No, not at that point. Absolutely not.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It wasn't important to you to be the CEO.

[Ben Francis]

HSA just wasn't something I was thinking about at all. I. I mean, I thought about it the whole flight home, but it wasn't immediate. It certainly wasn't. The second he told me, I grabbed it and thought, this is for me. I took a while to really get comfortable with it. Then there was, you know, a transition sort of handover period of. Of probably the best part of six months.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Something else happens, which is in the pandemic.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Right. Everyone was assuming that brick and mortar retail was really gonna be dead and that E Commerce was gonna be the only channel. Of course, that's not what happened.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And you also.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Or you guys also thought, hey, we actually.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Cause you had only done direct to.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Consumer at that point. You should get into retail. You should be in retail shops. You should, you know, own your own stores and then do wholesale as well. I mean, the biggest. Your biggest sales channel was the direct to consumer channel. Still. I still is today, I think, right?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

By far. Yeah. But how many brick and mortar stores do you have today?

[Ben Francis]

Today we have. We've got three in London, Manchester. I think we're at five. So we've Got Amsterdam, three in London and one in Manchester. And we're just in the process of opening two in New York. So we're growing at a considered rate in terms of stores. What I don't want to do is I don't just want to open thousands overnight. I want to do it in a really thoughtful way.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Well, here's what's interesting to me. There has been a little bit of a correction in direct to consumer in recent years, because what people assumed was the future has become much, much harder. Just getting people's attention is harder. When you started out with YouTubers in 2012, 2013, it's like shoot fish in a barrel, right? It was like all of it.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

You had this amazing.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It was an amazing time period to capture people's attention. Today there are tens, hundreds of thousands of influencers, micro influencers. It's really challenging to get eyeballs right. And so it's hard. You've got to keep it fresh and keep, keep it active.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

How do you guys maintain that energy.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

When there's so much competition, so much more competition out there?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, so the, the way that certainly that we see it is what we don't want to do is we don't want to become overly broad and then essentially almost bland. In a way, it's really important to me that we retain a really narrow focus. So the easiest thing for us to do would be to double or triple the size of our range and start selling basketball wear and, and fashion wear and soccer and everything that's not interesting to us. What we want to do is retain a really considered position in the gym. Like, great brands are built around great products and a great product positioning. So that's what we're really focused on. So building the best gym wear in the world. And then by doing that, it allows us to work with the best lifters, whether it's Samson, I mean, Chris Bumstead, Ryan Terry, all the best lifters wear gymshark. And that's. That's really, really important to me. And it's really funny. I was. I was working in Denver about 12 months ago, and I sort of finished work. I just went to a local gym. I think it was an anytime fitness. And I went, I went to the back, I went. I went, you know, by the dumbbells. And there was. There was three girls that were in the squat rack and they were all like hats on, headphones on. They had no. They were writing down their. I think they were deadlifting. They were writing down their lifts and they were the people in the gym. That knew what they were doing and every single one of them was in Gymshark.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I mean it is amazing, right, because you think about starting out in 2012 selling drop ship supplements and then by 2015 hitting 12 million sales and today exceeding 650 million 700 million sales. And most of your sales today still come from the uk?

[Ben Francis]

No, the us. So the US now, the US is now the majority of the business and.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Also where the most growth potential is.

[Ben Francis]

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

And here you are now overseeing a multi billion dollar brand and I think you've got over 900 employees now and you're, are you 32 now?

[Ben Francis]

33. 33. Although I feel a bit older given how 10 years have been.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

No, I mean for sure you have tons of experience, right? So you have the experience of people 20 years older than you just because you started so young and didn't know what you were doing and learned it. And so I imagine you're in this.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

For a long time.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

I mean, do you imagine running this business in 10 years, in 20 years from now?

[Ben Francis]

I feel like I got the best job in the world. I absolutely love what I do, I love the job. And all the brands I admire really stood the test of time. They're not five years old, they're 50 years old or they're 70 years old. So for me the focus is on essentially running the business as long as it makes sense for me to do so.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

When you think about everything that's happened to you, I mean you did over the course of this conversation mention Locke, that it was Steve and Paul who you met at the gym and that they, they actually were the right people at the right time, the right place. How much of where you got to, how much of this business, how much of everything that's happened do you attribute to just luck and chance and fortune, good fortune. And how much do you think had to do with the grind that you put into it?

[Ben Francis]

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of it's luck and a lot of it's timing. So like we said, social media, Shopify fitness, uptrend, bodybuilding, uptrending, more people going to the gym than ever. So, so there was an element of time in there. With that said, as we've built the business, lots of other people have recognized the same opportunities and maybe not had immediately the same outcome. So I think there's also an element of we took the risk, we took lots of risks. To this day we still take risks. And I think the commitment to the long term of our business and the ability and appetite to make those decisions has made a big difference as well. So, I mean, I wouldn't want to put a percentage on it, but it would be. There would definitely be a good chunk of luck and time in. But then with that, I think you have to take advantage of that as well.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

That's Ben Francis, co founder of Gymshark.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

Is your grandfather still around, the grandfather who started the furnace business?

[Ben Francis]

Yes, he is. He is. And he's still working. Funnily enough, he was literally working last week and he sent me a picture of a furnace that we actually worked on together when I was, well, 20 years ago, when I was 14.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

What does he think about this? I mean, he was an entrepreneur. He is. And here you are. And like, has he ever.

[Ben Francis]

He loves it. He absolutely loves it. I mean, we, like, I still see him a fair bit. We'll go out on bikes together. We'll go to car shows once a year and things like that. So, no, he, he absolutely loves it. He's blown away.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And please sign up for my [e-mail] or on substack. This episode was produced by JC Howard with music composed by Ramtina Oblouei.

[Interviewer (Guy Raz)]

It was edited by Neva Grant with.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Research help from Alex Chung. Our audio engineers were Patrick Murray and Robert Rodriguez. Our production staff also includes Kathryn Seifer, Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Carrie Thompson, Andrea Bruce, Romel Wood, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built this. And don't stop the podcast just yet, because right now you're about to hear an amazing small business story that you don't want to miss. This segment is presented by American Express with a Business Platinum membership. The best just got even better. And this week's story begins in 2015, when Lauren Dudley Stevens and her sister joined their parents for a freezing cold adventure.

[Lauren Dudley Stevens]

Our parents had just picked up the hobby of boating, and they would go out on Long Island Sound, and it was always cold, no matter what time of year out on the water.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Back then, Lauren worked in fashion pr. She flew around the world and dressed celebrities in red carpet looks from luxury designers like Gucci. But she dreamed of going into business for herself, ideally with her mom and her sister Kaki. They just hadn't landed on the right idea yet. Until that day on the boat when her mom happened to think out Loud.

[Lauren Dudley Stevens]

My mom said, you know, I just wish that I could have a cute fleece that I could wear out on the boat and then go to dinner in. And that moment for all of us was, oh, wait, that is a good idea. How many women would actually love this product?

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

They knew that young moms would. At the time, Lauren was expecting her first baby, and Khaki had just had one of her own. It bothered them how hard it was to find washable, durable clothes that fit into their full lives.

[Lauren Dudley Stevens]

I just want to feel put together every day, even though I also want to. To be comfortable in my momhood, but also going to work every day.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Lauren started to take the idea seriously. She looked into sourcing material and found a company that makes fleece from plastic bottles that wash onto beaches.

[Lauren Dudley Stevens]

When we knew we could get a recycled fabric and make it stylish, we just thought, okay, this has to happen.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

So Lauren and her sister drew up a business plan for a direct to consumer fleece clothing line called Dudley Stevens, a combination of Lauren's maiden name and her married name. And they pitched it to a successful businessman, someone they knew and admired. Their dad.

[Lauren Dudley Stevens]

We did not go to large investors and have millions of dollars invested. It was a very small family investment at the outset. We put a number together and he agreed. And then we just dove in, full steam ahead.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

They chose a manufacturer in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, built a website, and launched the business out of Lauren's basement. It turned out to be a pretty good bet. Within six months, they made their initial investment back. Not that success came easy. In the early years, Lauren and Khaki did everything themselves. Printing the shipping labels, running the website, answering emails, all while juggling childcare.

[Lauren Dudley Stevens]

I'm not sure how we did all that. I think, as any mom listening would relate to, there's nothing like having a child that makes you efficient.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

The turning point came when the company brought in $100,000 in a single day.

[Lauren Dudley Stevens]

And it was actually on my birthday, so I met my husband for dinner, and I just was on a total cloud nine. Like, so excited, scared, because we had to figure out how to fulfill all of those orders. It was like, oh, we're a legit company now.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

Today, Dudley Stevens is closing in on $50 million in sales. They just celebrated 10 years in business, and they're close to another milestone. They're proud of recycling their 10 millionth plastic bottle.

[Lauren Dudley Stevens]

It's funny that we're, like, nearing in on 10 million plastic water bottles and we're turning 10 years old. I was like, can we hit it by the end of the year. I don't know if we will, but we're close to it.

[Narrator / Host (Guy Raz)]

And that's our Small Business Spotlight presented by American Express. To build a business like no other, you need a card like no other. There's nothing like Business Platinum. If you like how I built this, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short [e-mail] survey.