From Delivering Pizzas To Building A Billion Pound Business Empire | Minutes With | UNILAD

just for context we were doing revenues of around 300 pounds a day online prior to that event everything was handmade after after the event we turned the website back online and in the first half an hour of the website being live we sold 30 000 pound in product as a youngster i was too honest i was very quiet i just sort of got on got on with it i didn't particularly enjoy school but i wasn't a nuisance i wasn't like a naughty kid or whatever i sort of did it because i had to but because of my gcses i didn't get the best grades my mom essentially marched me back to school and just says right you are gonna you are gonna work incredibly hard and you're gonna get good grades now and she really sort of like fought for me because the school originally didn't actually want me to come back and she essentially persuaded them to take me back on for another couple of years which was brilliant i was let back into school under the under the agreement that i did the essentially the the um subjects that were given to me i did business studies which i did okay at um and it which was like a huge pivotal moment for me was how well can i develop websites or you know build different things um and for me that was completely game changing so i absolutely fell in love with that and i did you know incredibly well which was a brilliant moment for me because i hadn't particularly done well in academia before that so you start university and you're doing um business what was university life university live for me was was essentially i it was it was very functional i went into aston in the day i do my lectures i'd normally finish those lectures about four or five o'clock i then go from there to peak to her and i do my shift which would normally normally be from five till ten half ten by the time you've cleaned up i had massive freedom because i'd if i was in if i was in the um the restaurant i could essentially i'd get a free pizza for every shift which was brilliant i would be pot washing if i was in the restaurant and if i wasn't i'd be out obviously delivering the pizza in which case i could mess around on my phone in between you know in in between deliveries i could read stuff or by the time i'd started gymshark i could respond to customer queries in between my deliveries which was perfect for me so let's talk about starting jim shark going back to 2011 2012 or even before that when i was sort of growing up massively into bodybuilding everything that he was looking at was it was over the pond we were looking at americans for the most part we were watching american youtubers body power just conveniently enough was 20 minutes away from where i lived so it was at the birmingham nec which was just a huge strike of luck for me um but it was that one time of year when you could go in and these people the lifters the fitness i guess stars would come into birmingham for one weekend a year and you could physically see them talk to them meet them do like all of that and that was just something i'd never experienced before in 2010 2011 i think i was visiting the expo just as a bit of a fan after the 2012 event i went home and i was chatting to my mom and my nan who um now to sew and so on and it was that made me think right i'm going to buy a sewing machine and a screen printer at the time and sort of make make the product myself and to be honest the gymshark website was because i'd never made a website in fitness that would transact so it wouldn't sell things so it was it was more of a like a test almost like previously i would test myself could i make an app that would do this and then i wanted to do it could i do and create an iphone app that would do that and then i managed to do it then it was all these different things and this was just me making a website that would transact and i just had this sort of innate gut feeling that we needed to be at this event i had no idea how much it costed what it would look like what would we do how we would have enough product to sell i just wanted to be there so i essentially walked up to the the show organizing they had like a small booth near the entry and i just said next year i just would like a stand here whatever your cheapest stand is i want i want this stand and i'll never forget it was three thousand it was three thousand pounds i didn't have three thousand pound at the time like i'd never seen three thousand pounds so it was a bit of a i guess it was a bit of a leap to sort of say or i guess agree to have that um but it was definitely one of the best decisions i've ever made so because everything was handmade we turned the website off a few days before the event so no one could get their hands on the product so i think a lot of people that were getting on the website probably couldn't get their hands on it so anyone local or even in the uk was going to make their way to the event so we sort of accidentally created scarcity we also kept the website off for that weekend we we launched a product for the event so we we took the product there and we launched it at the event which also wasn't available online tease that on facebook because at the time that was that was the only social platform that we had as well as youtube and we brought our heroes to the event people that we idolized and had fired for years and those people were youtubers um or now as people call them influencers i'm sort of there unloading stuff out of the van it's probably probably 30 yards away from the lorry loader to the other the loading bay to the to the stand as i'm walking over to the stand with the box i'm seeing a flood like hundreds and hundreds of people flooding straight from the nec entrances to the gymshark stand and you know at first in that moment you think this can't actually be true i can't believe that this is actually going on are they you know are they going to go past the stand i was thinking of every sort of reason as to why this is nothing to do with us but literally floods of people were there to see gymshark the brand sort of inadvertently went viral whilst having this sort of scarcity and demand all of that combined with the fact that no one else was making product for the the true lifter the bodybuilder after the event we would just we would lay on the floor in the sand completely just like we were absolutely knackered hadn't slept all that weekend we just weren't non-stop um and like someone sort of wandered over from a big big big brand and they just said like how the hell did you do that and the only thing that we could say back to them was i've got no idea i honestly it was just i was just shell-shocked just for context we were doing revenues of around 300 pounds a day online prior to that event everything was handmade um after that event we completely sold out of everything at the event i was i was sat in my in my parents living room and it was like i don't know midnight one o'clock in the morning i actually flicked the website back on and in the first half an hour of the website being live we sold 30 000 pound in product so i'm sat in the pitch black downstairs in the living room just having had this insane sort of half an hour sales period i'd been scrambling at my laptop to turn the stock off because at the time every single product was set to infinite stock because there was never any chance of selling out of it so to go from 300 quid a day to 30 000 pound in half an hour everything good sold out it was um it was absolutely mind-blowing it was like living a dream i'd never experienced anything like it and i there was never a point where i thought it would ever happen i quit pizza hut i think it was shortly after that we'd i remember it was around the period where we broke a 250 000 in revenue which was a obviously a momentous occasion it was brilliant and pizza hut was brilliant for me because one it was a job i enjoyed i learned a lot doing it and i had the flexibility to do gymshark in between deliveries but not only that the money that i earned from pizza allowed me to you know to live and it meant that every penny that jim sharp made would be reinvested into the business for you know the first few years of its life and that was um that was absolutely brilliant and it helped the business grow so so much so yeah it was a big leap because at the same time as leaving pizza hut i left university and albeit that didn't actually make a massive difference in to me financially um emotionally that was an interesting decision because i'd worked so hard to get there like like i said i was not and i'm not naturally an academic person or i don't i don't think i am i'd given everything to get into university and ultimately i did it because i wanted to make my parents proud because they'd worked so hard for me however the second i told them that i'd made the decision and i said this is the decision and i'm going with it there was not one time ever they brought it up again after i've made the decision they completely and utterly backed me and i i think that made a massive difference as well what would you say was the the best decision you made in the early days of the company so when you start a business you have to have a very very clear vision about where you want the business to be and the likelihood is that will be somewhere where people won't have seen or been before so i'd characterize my role at gymshark at the time is i had to grab the business by the scruff of the neck and drag it to where i thought was right regardless of what anyone would say and there were so many people that would say you want to get your product into different retail stores you need to do this or you need to do that and i had to be the person that would say no this is my vision and we're going to carry it there by hook or by crook now as soon as then the business gets to a certain stage arrogance and i guess that sort of dragging the business mentality just isn't the right thing to do because you have to then surround yourself with brilliant people people that are better than you that can help grow the individual aspects of the business in a in a scalable way that was incredibly incredibly difficult for me i had to learn to trust people which was equally difficult because the business was my absolute baby i'd been involved in every single facet of it and all of a sudden i had to realize that i can't be involved in every single facet of it and i had to learn to build great teams what has been the pro your single proudest moment so when gymshark started i was your typical pizza typical 19 18 year old lad i was working at pizza i was on the four pound 90 i think it was an hour and fast forward to today you know there's 550 staff we've got offices in london in the midlands which we're building a big a large campus there we've got offices in hong kong in mauritius in denver colorado um this calendar year will have sold over half a billion dollars worth of product which is again crazy and just to be clear as well half a billion dollars worth of product only through our website this isn't like we have hundreds of stores around the world and that's a mind-blowing um level to get to so the company's now been valued over a billion pounds when that moment happened how did you feel it really hit me when i was driving home um what we'd achieved there was this just moment of um just it sort of hit me as to what we'd achieved um and it didn't last long to be honest because the second i started thinking about like sentimentally about what we've achieved in my mind to jump back to the first screen print the sew in um the events the risks the moments of the highs and the lows it all just hit me in that moment and it was a really it was an amazing feeling and i had that moment of just i guess joy um and excitement that deal had been done in a way where we were always looking forward as to what we could be and go on to be which you're starting to see now building a business you know valued over a billion was just something i never thought that we would do several years ago i was far more arrogant far more like pig-headed i i didn't listen to other people in the way that i would know i didn't take things on board partly because i was just more immature but partly because it's what i felt and was probably right for the business at the time whereas now i'd say i listen a lot more and i've managed to i guess develop myself throughout the years what advice would you give to the next fan francis it's it's so easy to look at jim shark in isolation that this thing that blew up and did incredibly well but people forget about the seven websites and the four apps that were produced beforehand which failed miserably and the reason jim sharp can exist and has done what it's done today is because of those prior failures failures will allow you to succeed so i think people need to reframe they think about failures and just give it a go go all in on something and see what happens and you know what if it doesn't go well then that's cool you can always try something new i walked from directly from the stage to this i remember sitting on this sofa in like the reception area and just started getting this like about these palpitations i remember saying to myself like oh this is it this is where you die

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Id: 2uNI24lNGAQ

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021