How I Co-Founded GYMSHARK... A 0 - £1Billion Company! (My STORY) Lewis Morgan Podcast #005

[Music] right welcome back to the podcast guys this is actually the second recording we've done here and the reason being is because there's so much information for me to get out regarding gymshark and how fun it has been the whole entire journey the podcast was three hours long and most people aren't really gonna listen to that so it needs to be a little bit more structured so we are re-recording it um i've got dan and ryan here and they're gonna ask me questions so i don't go off on a tangent dan was one of the first employees alongside joe so um he cannot back up some of the stories and add his insight too so yeah let's get things started so i think uh first question needs to be kind of how did you and ben meet so we both went to the same school together we were acquaintances in school but then we we clicked a lot more when we both did double ict together we started doing projects and he knew a lot more about websites than me i was a little bit more creative in that sense so like i would always let's say copy some of his work and he had another guy that sat next to me and dan would always copy their work and it was pretty funny and we just clicked from there and then we went to the gym together and and we just grew our relationship even further so how did jim shark get born from that was it a project at school or what was it how did how did the whole thing come up about it no it wasn't a positive school per se but we did projects regarding websites and we then thought okay well if we were making websites online let's we were obviously into the gym and we thought if people are selling supplements they're obviously making money online and we kind of got addicted to how can we make money online so we thought okay if we start selling supplements and we can rank above them on google because most people don't most people search for a supplement like waste gold standard optimum nutrition protein they'll just search it in google it'll come up the first time and they'll just click on it and they'll buy it they won't generally always search the cheapest and back then we kind of manipulated google so we were above everyone else in google shopping you can't do that now we did that through shopify and collections and stuff um from there people would buy from us we would house supplements from other companies on our website and if you ordered from gymshark supplements it was back then we would then order that straight to you and we would never hold any stock and we were making like two free four pound margin but that's how we got started drop shipping then basically yeah dropship supplements so everyone knows us now as clothing but we weren't clothing back then this is in 2011 september 2011 going into 2012. you started selling supplements how did you transition then into the clothing like what what sparked that off so we wanted to sell something called stringer vests and obviously back then you couldn't get stringer vest from anywhere else but america so if everyone that's listening remembers azir's who was a an australian guy who inspired millions of people around the world back then he wore this stuff all the time he wore really small shorts really fitted clothing and long string of so you basically went to the gym almost in nothing so you could see all your muscles everything you could just pull it down so it was just the way it was it was a gym hack to have your top off in the gym but obviously you didn't have your top off in the gym and people love that so we wanted to make this type of clothing but you couldn't get it you could only get it from america as i said and shipping back then was like 50 for a t-shirt so you'd pay 25 for for a stringer and then you'd have to ship it over and that'll be like 75 people weren't paying that so from there we thought okay let's start making that we started printing our own vest we bought the blanks we got a print we started printing our own stuff from there and stuck that on the website and it basically sold a lot quicker than all the supplements so that was how our transition into the clothing aspect came about so who started buying this stuff and where where where was the traffic coming from in the early days so the early days at the very start i had a big following on facebook that back then which was like 50 000 to 200 000 likes and followers it was on facebook back then which is the equivalent to a few million on instagram now um and we were using those guys at the very start to push traffic to the website but because it was such a unique niche market we could sell to people like ourselves that knew they wanted that product that they couldn't get elsewhere so we kind of focused on a niche built everything we had around the niche and grew from there basically i think people also might want to ask or know why you had like 50 000 or 100 000 followers and likes on facebook back then which is equivalent to a lot now and if i remember correctly it was because you had a really lean shredded ab picture which you can probably follow up on the screen now if you if you still got it and it had like veins going up his abs it was a really good picture and i think just loads of people saw him was like mad how do i get this physique so luke used to get contacted by like loads of people from then you know who going to the gym working out like how do i get this and i think he just grew up following from that i wasn't big i was just really lean back then this is when i was 17 so i was just super straight i had really good ab structure and because it was so lean and i'd get them pumped and i'd take pictures and they were just shredded and it was like what the hell that picture look the picture completely looked fake it looked plastic but yeah we'll pop up on the screen and from there i i gained quite a lot of followers so you started selling some supplements and then you started flinging some clothes to your facebook uh followers how did it develop from there then so obviously we were we were selling also not just to the facebook guys we were selling to our niche market of bodybuilders that well this is following let's say that wanted the stringer vests and the small shorts and stuff um but we wanted really fitted clothing and no one else made it at that time it was a lot of baggy stuff back then things have come on in the last 10 years dramatically in terms of clothing in regards to fits but we thought to ourself if we can make ourselves look better in the gym without actually looking better physically then that's half the battle and if we knew if we did that then people would keep going back to the gym so that was our kind of business plan let's make clothing let's make tapered bottoms let's make tapered track suits let's make fitted vests so your shoulders would pop your legs would pop it would thin down at the ankle like that's how the human human anatomy is so we kind of copied that arnold look and put it into clothing and it just yeah everyone absolutely loved it so anything that we loved we wanted that we couldn't get anywhere else we practically made so people are really uh liking the clothing that you're you're making you're enjoying wearing it yourself like and people are buying it from your facebook pages like what was the the bigger plan to try and get it out to more people oh well we me and ben never actually fought too far ahead we were always living in the future but our plan at that time because things were moving so fast and the company was growing so rapidly we were only really thinking six months down the line so from there we thought okay well let's go to body power 2012 as a visitor and let's see how it is because we knew at the time a lot of people were going to these expos i think it was around 20 000 people were all in one place over a short weekend which is a lot of people um so we thought to ourselves okay but if we can get our brand in front of these people then we didn't so we went to the body part 2013 um 2012 sorry as a visitor and we saw slow clunky brands and they were sponsoring guys that had only won competitions and these guys would had only won competitions they weren't very big on social media they were very small and obviously they were getting paid probably quite a lot of money sweet fought to myself we watch a lot of youtube videos so if we can get all the guys we love to watch on youtube right now who are getting forty thousand fifty thousand views on youtube and we bring them here that's more than the whole entire expo is getting the whole weekend and they're getting these daily views so we thought if we can bring these online views to england to the nec body power then our brand would explode that was our thinking so we kind of scheduled ourselves for the next year after seeing bodybuild power 2012 so we scheduled body part 2013 in which was an absolute massive step for us i can't remember how much it cost i think it was around eight to ten thousand which was a huge jump considering we were only making small numbers like we're probably making 500 a week maybe so that was that was big numbers for us to just jump into that so you just booked it and then just thought joel we're gonna we're gonna work it out in the next five months exactly that we thought to ourselves we want to be here we knew we wanted to be there we knew we wanted to make a massive impression we knew we wanted athletes there we knew we were going to obviously sell our clothing there we just hadn't connected all the dots on how we were going to do it yet we knew we just knew we wanted to be there so we booked a slot we put a deposit down for it and we thought okay well we need we've got a whole year now to make the money to pay for this stand basically and it was a big scary jump for us uh we went it was like a two meter stand we went for by maybe 10 meters so it was long and thin so it was you could get to it from every angle it was big front facing and yeah we we had a year now to connect all the dots we just chucked ourselves in the deep end and here we go so you've just booked uh this stand for next year and you took a big gamble and you've got 12 months to kind of work it out but what was your plan in them 12 months like how would you go would you just like how was how did that look what was you gonna do to kind of get more sales in these next 12 months and where was you even gonna like where was you making the t-shirts how was your printing them what was the processes like that tell them about the massive whereas you had back then yeah so so obviously back then i know we've kind of skipped ahead but back then me and ben were i was i was working as a pot wash and at burton's menswear so i was a part of washington burton's menswear had two jobs he was working at pizza hut as a pizza delivery driver so in the day we would go to uni because we were both at uni at the time um we'd go to uni we'd print t-shirts on the night and then when he was at pizza hut i'd be printing t-shirts when i was at work he would be um sewing or printing or packaging whatever it needed to be um so we were kind of just just absolutely winging it we had we had all the stock at ben's well we had all the stock at morehouse for printing and all the stock for selling at ben's house so he would come and pick some t-shirts up from me he would take them back to his house and obviously i'm sure you guys have watched ben's videos you've seen our sewing machine that we had so what he would do with that is we were buying t-shirts from other companies that had labels in so he would cut that take up the label saw the gym chart labeling basically that's what we were doing with the sewing machine and from there we'd get orders we'd hand right every single order that we were getting out onto like a jiffy bag basically package people's orders up load them into ben's ben's car um and then with the help sometimes of either dan or joe or ben's dad steve um we would take them all to the post office and it was actually quite funny because we were obviously getting quite a lot of orders back then and we never really had a post office scheduled pickup at our house because we didn't really understand what that was or anything like that so we would load ben's car up we would physically drive to the post office every single day or every three days with hundred orders let's say which was a lot of orders in one big bag and we'd stand in the post office queue and we would manually ship them all out one by one but of course we're stood in the queue for two hours and you've got old mary's behind just losing their losing their head trying to hit us with a walking stick kicking off in the queue oh we had so many arguments with people trying to tell us that we shouldn't be in there and i'm thinking well we're keeping this place afloat so it was actually pretty funny but the operation was a little bit at the very start of a [ __ ] show we were completely winging it no business process or anything it was just an order coming in off it goes order coming in print but what we used to do back then as well we would have loads of blank t-shirts or blank vests or blank whatever it would be get a screen printer and we would print to order so if you if you ordered a you know our old fitness logo if you order our old bodybuilding logo that means we could stock them both on our website without holding a lot of stock so we had a lot of skus on our website which means we could grow faster and we could sell more products to one customer so it kind of helped us scale a bit faster but we we were struggling and that led us on to think okay we can't continue this we need to start getting our clothing made abroad and then once we can get it made abroad then we can ship it in and we can service all our customers and we can get ready for that growth because we knew in the next 12 months we were gonna if we pulled off what we thought we could pull off we were gonna get crazy amounts of orders and we can't physically print that it's just not gonna work so this is when we started to look externally in the middle east or in asia places like that to look for a clover manufacturer for jim shark how long did it take to do one order back then with the screen prints oh man 30 minutes per order for like a screen of t-shirts uh no not probably not per order but the whole process of the screen printing process was long-winded it was very messy you had if you got in because there was so much ink everywhere as well if you touched a piece of clothing with your fingers and you had a bit of ink on it then that piece of clothing was gone because you couldn't get the ink off so it was very messy there was a lot of waste you'd get like it looks like a picture frame you'd cover it in this um this i'm not sure the term but this like green ink basically you'd use this gym shark like tracing paper right and you put a light on it and then you'd wash it off after you have a stencil and you just pull it through it onto the onto the actual t-shirt then you put it under a heat like process and it would cure the ink so when you washed it it wouldn't come off so that's basically what we do and we just print a few of them put it away so we'd we'd get which what we tried to do is we'd print five to twenty of each size of each style that we could and stack them up so we didn't have to keep sending up every day but obviously that was going so fast we were sending that out daily so we knew we had to look outside that realm and start to get cloven in to grow okay so um was you on track uh financially and everything ready for body power did you have to take any help on uh financially from like parents or loans or anything like that to make sure body power happened uh no so even from day one starting jim sharp we kind of just drop shipped and built cash up and kept putting cash into the business me and ben never took any money out we never took any salaries we never run any of our personal bills through the business so we just kept keeping the money in the company we both stayed at home when we went to uni we both again had jobs um so we knew and we were comfortable that the money that was generating from even if we didn't grow over the 12-month period we knew that we could cover the stand cost so we weren't really too worried about that but that wasn't our main focus then our main focus was how can we get jim sharp to 250 000 to 400 000 to a million that was our main thought in our head because the stand two months after once we booked it was less of a less of a stress but as body power slowly came around and that was a big stress because we had so much to think about so many moving components and this is when we started asking for help more from dan more from joe ben's brother and more from steve uh ben's dad so when body power came around was you still hand printing these t-shirts or did you start buying them abroad yeah so no in that in that space of time we'd worked out a plan we ended up getting t-shirts from abroad uh we actually got something called as everyone knows the the gymshark lux track suit which was a track suit that was very fitted it was unique and what we wanted to do once we once we got all the athletes on board so we wanted to we knew that we wanted to create a team that was all in matching clothing so we wanted to create a team we wanted so we wanted to create obviously good clothing a team and then jim shark and link all those guys together which was the emotional connection which is what catapult with gymshark up from there so buddy power's coming around you've you kind of know that you want to uh get some athletes along how did you pick these did they did you just email them did they even like did they pay you did they get back to you like did you have to agree to pay them like what does the whole af getting the athletes interested in gymshark and willing to agree to come to body power um what what does that whole process look like good question i mean at the time what we were doing is everyone used facebook so i would message people on facebook and they'd replied to me and i basically said like we got together and we thought okay so if we get lex we locked lex uh lex fitness matt ogus um lovato who was his like duo at the time uh alan gabbay jeff's side and we did ask johnny star but johnny star couldn't make it but there wasn't at that when we found these guys it was literally just messaged them on facebook and let's see what they did we went from low to high rates i think we messaged lex first because he was uk based messaged him on facebook he replied straight away we ended up meeting him at his gym locally and then he agreed like okay let's come then we got ogres and lovato on and then we ended up getting jeff and then we ended up getting allen but what we did is we kind of used everyone's social media power as a pull to get each other on before if we can get them all there it's going to be hard for us just to get let's say one and then have them enjoy themselves or want to come back next year but if we can get five people that are all big on social media they can all use their different followings to grow then they're all going to agree so we only ended up paying for their flights just to come over from america because back then most americans didn't and probably still now most americans don't really leave america so bringing them over to the uk was a massive thing for them and they would really want to do that because they're probably not going to have the opportunity or may not to come over and before if we get the guys from america over as well then all of the uk guys that are never going to go to america to see them are all going to flood to see them at body power and that concept worked it's just like it was like influencer marketing before it even been called influencer marketing so it was around with like the bigger brands and celebrities but like it was really early days well no no one was getting paid on social media instagram was very small i know instagram wasn't there yeah i think it was i think it was starting to end at the end of uni yeah so instagram wasn't very big people didn't didn't get paid for posts but then no one did so we were able to get people for a very cheap price and have a very very big return on investment well yeah pretty much for for like the athletes you know this the original gymshark family where it was being born for them to get a flight to england to receive free clothing to meet other like-minded people like you know my ogus might have known about jeffy but never had a chance to meet him so this was all like you know a gold mine for them like they had to take the opportunity it was it was amazing i suppose their only opportunity really to come out was to win a big bodybuilding competition or something like that and then get get sponsorship with like i don't know usn or ultimately like a big company like that so you i can see why they were so keen to come along as well and obviously body power was in your hometown in birmingham which made obviously a lot easier for you getting stuff there and yeah and that it did but it was a big struggle but even then they probably didn't even consider body power body power was probably never even on their radar they probably never even heard of body power at the time because i mean there was there was big ones in the us like the arnold and stuff and but they were so different to how they were after we had been in them for two three years because we had changed the way they all worked like it was completely different they were very structured almost like gyms were gym owners would go there just to see if they could speak to the owners of the supplement companies and stuff like that it wasn't really consumer based at the very start but we turned it into a consumer-based business and you would just flop there to get loads of free stuff like we kind of yeah we forced that we forced everyone's hands for these experts so let's rewind a bit and then let's talk about how much like was body power a success like what what did it look like what did that very first one look like as in when you because you're kind of going a little bit ahead there yeah so body parts coming around we're thinking we need to get we need to get the stock in we're obviously getting the track suits which which i mentioned uh getting everything ready to launch obviously orders are still coming in the back end we're still we're still trying to prep for body power we're still going to body part and we're setting up the stand and orders coming in the back end but this is where we really needed craig dan joe and ben's dad steve and we also had like some of our girlfriends helping and and and people will help him um it came around fast we would be there like filling up the stand at night time um whilst joe and ben's dad were sending out orders in the day um dan and craig were actually had actually had uni exams around the same time as body power and they never even ended up going so they pretty much quit uni to join jim shark me i ain't still paying that student honestly if the amount of the amount of help we received around this body power we probably wouldn't be where we are now because we couldn't really have done it alone because we were we weren't even paying them at the time they were just doing it for sheer help of of the company so they took a massive gamble in risking their whole life on gymshark and they didn't even know how far it was going to go they just took a risk on me and ben um but but yeah i'll never forget when we get there we forgot the coat hangers so we had to send someone back to get the coat hangers we're already really stressed i think i was really ill at the time as well and the first day is a little i think it was first day is a little bit more of a trade day so there's not some there's not like consumers there it's just people coming to me so you know athletes weren't there we were all setting up stand on this day friday comes along which is you know it's not really supposed to be a busy day they only let a few few thousand actual actual consumers in anyway music's blasting we're thinking we're still setting up the standard this point it's like two minutes to go we're still setting up the stand all the hair is on the on on the on the speakerphone the next bear is opening absolutely ransacked within seconds zombie apocalypse zombie apocalypse stan got completely flattened everyone flew over and that was it i don't even think we really sold anything on that day because we couldn't we we we didn't we set the stand up wrong we didn't have everything ready to be sold on that day and there was too many people so i think that day was pretty much right off we couldn't even move so obviously after that day we had to make a decision straight away okay we can't sell like this tomorrow we can't even get the stock out of the back of the because we didn't really have a stock room we were peeling off the side of the stand to get the stock out the back so we kind of had to have a bit more of a think on how the hell we were going to sell we needed more people there was not two or three people trying to sell so then this is when on the saturday we decided okay this is when we're gonna get some more people we're gonna get you know ben's dad we're gonna get joe we're gonna get some some of our girlfriends we're gonna get uh dan and craig and then even that wasn't enough to satisfy the demand that we had so we we were getting random gym shot fans we've given them a bum bag and we were literally just saying rotten you'll do the job and we just took a bun bag on them and they were taking sales for us honestly you can't roll what we're up to there's no cv or anything no cv didn't know anything to do with their character we just thought okay well you're obviously shopping you and you must be a nice person because you're a gymshark fan everyone is and we just gave them a bum bag and they started taking sales for us it was crap it was crazy i think they're just just to be surrounded in that environment with like all the athletes and people seeing them and not like i said the looks track suit this iconic jim sharp product um you know these gymshark fans were just happy to be involved in any way shape or form like i said if you ask someone now come and work in their stand for free and handle their money and look after me no why would definitely if you you could have easily over over fought a lot of stuff in this process that would have maybe stopped you you're making them decisions but you needed you just kind of took in your stride didn't you i think as well like a lot of things wasn't thought about like i said you mentioned you forgot the coatings on the first day but even things just like it's not just about getting a stand and getting the athletes to it there's things like queue management like that that wasn't even thought of replenishing like stock on the evening you know to body power there's things like money you know we had issues with like five pound notes yeah and stuff and prices so you can go into that no receipts no receipts we had obviously from them people were trying to scam us like emailing customer service literally coming back to saying i bought this at body power it's it's it's ripped send me out a new one or it's flat out and like there were just people trying to kind of scam it off the back of it all right it's just it was just a whole entire overall overall it was a great success but it was a huge stress but from there i think a couple of days later i can't remember the exact date we launched the gym shark looks track suit to the public there was only a couple available on the stand we had new stringers available on the stand and then we did a massive we used this we used body power as a hype for our new products and then we launched them after and i remember being in the cinema we were only making it say at the time like a couple of grand a week and then we made 60 grand in like 20 minutes and we just left then i can't remember what we did we left and we went back to back straight to the unit i went back to the ends or went back tomorrow and we just instantly started packaging we couldn't believe the phones were going off i think at the time it was probably only only an iphone 4. you can imagine what was going on and he blew up let me set the scene as i wondered we weren't just in the cinema was in the cinema about four or five of us laptops open i remember we were quite in the front as well so screens blaring in their face people behind saying like you shut your laptop oh listen and we're all like how much you look how much we're selling look how many people on the website look how many people the orders have come through it was so yeah we shot the laptop straight up straight back to because you had a little where else then that's time to package the orders so off the back of what dan just said there about the warehouse um what at what point did you decide that it wasn't a hobby anymore it was an actual business and and then what was your plans to then scale it up from there so we were actually only in like a 300 square foot old shoddy next to a canal unit right and we knew obviously gymshark's growing fast now we're going to start to need to employ people and no one's going to come and work in the shed like in the winter you're going to probably if you're staying there with no heating you're going to die so we thought to myself we now need to start scaling this so we looked for a nice unit this was probably one of the biggest steps because you're tied into a big contract we'd never had contracts never really had debt or anything like that so this was quite a big step for us to start signing things we had to start to go to solicitors and obviously you know get contracts looked at and start signing this is where things started to get real for us and we realized this ain't really a hobby anymore we need to leave our jobs now because we're still doing our job so i think this is around the same point we left our jobs and um we signed the new lease for the new unit which was probably like a five-year lease with a three-year black brake clause i believe um it was only something like two grand a month plus rates which was again still a big thing for us um so we got into this new posh nice unit all of our stock you can imagine it was a 2 000 square foot unit we only had you know 150 200 square foot worth of stock so it's in the corner of the room at the time we got a table tennis uh table just set up in there we're thinking if we ever outgrow this we've completely made it anyway three weeks later stop flies in half full already two months after that the unit's rammed we're thinking like we are really on to something here we decided okay we're gonna need to get the next unit so we started applying for the next unit which was next door same thing again luckily we had three units next to each other nice big units that no one had and we could slowly start to get in them so i think we signed another um lease so we had two big units now we knocked through so we could go between them and um in around the same time is is where we started uh mdv which is another brand we have um and we put that into one of the units as well so we weren't just running gymshark then we also started another clothing company so we we were kind of up to a lot of things and in in that same time we only had gymshark code at uk we we decided okay so actually we had gymshot.comcat and gymshark.com so in and around that time we fought to our south right we need to start only having one website and just having gymshark.com but we had to buy the gymshark.com domain for i think it was around 2000 pounds and i didn't really want to do that at that time but ben taught me into it and he said like this is what we need to do and i said you're well yeah that's what we need to do and we ended up buying it and at the same time as well someone we used to buy clothing off from you know two years previous had also registered our trademark and we really just didn't like him and he had finished our trademark and we had to end up paying him money to give us our tried trademark back which is again another funny story which maybe somebody did something sneaky there it's sneaky i mean anyway ben ended up talking me into getting that trademark off him because we needed to we both hated him and we both made a decision then like okay we're gonna have to just pay this guy off and he's gonna have to give us our trademark back i mentioned as well i want to touch about the table tennis table in the unit at the beginning in the warehouse we there's a funny story when i think we were just causing a lot of commotion because the warehouse is next locking um a house in a state so he was thinking we got a new motorbike coming yeah one of someone i don't think lewis had a new motorbike but just passes um cbt cbt so we're making a racket and real obviously moving in stock they're all working like i was like we weren't like eight or eight every day doing or just hanging around at least so i think the police came to see like what the noise and commotion was about but there was also interesting like what we were doing because you know how old you at the time 18 19 yeah 19 20 how's this you know how's this kid looking after all this and then i think like they end up having a i think ben and i think it's been in the police and because ben was really good at tablets so ben and ben and the policeman had their other one be one of the tablets table i think if he'd please him one he would get some free clothing he walked away so everything's going smoothly now you've expanded into a few different uh units you're making lots of sales you've got the nyx body power to to look forward to obviously it's quite manic at the at the place is there anything um that that kind of took you by surprise in that in that year or anything that kind of threw a spanner in the works um so obviously as everyone knows now black friday is a massive thing but back then black friday cyber monday it was still a very growing thing and it was more american and we didn't really know what it was and i remember we were just getting around that time it was like two two weeks before a black friday submarine and i remember ben came to me and he was just like we should do this this a sale on this day and i was like what is it and he was like it's like cyber monday and i think it's monday black friday what's this because it was a new thing not no one really knew before okay well let's just gamble let's just put 20 off bearing in mind we've never discounted ever so no one ever really received a discount it was only over 10 off which was uh just for athletes code so the maximum you were going to get was 10 off right and then on this day i think we did 20 to 30 off right we were not it was like expos all over again but online shopping oh my god we were we were backlogged from orders i think it broke our website we were backlogged for orders for three four weeks we had no stock for the foreseeable so we just didn't we underestimated how good it was because we didn't really understand so that was a massive span in the works because then we had to you know not only were we sending out orders we also had a lot of customer service to emails to go through and yeah that's a little funny story there as well regarding the customer service because we'd all sit there at the end of every single day doing the customer service right and when there was a when you could when you could see that someone had opened one every now and then the same customer email would pop back up like it had been unopened and i was like you know what's going on here and then you'd click on it and you'd see it but i could return and you had to walk into the house and do the return so we were all sat there doing the easier emails just replying to someone so no one had to get off their chairs and it would come to the end of the day and they'd be like 20 emails and everyone was just sat there everyone was like looking around looking at everyone cuz no more emails this is mad as well i see i didn't know what black friday was until ben lewis told us and the sales was going on but as lewis said it was manic because not only was backlogged in orders no stock like you gotta remember lewis and ben were still doing things like website you know you know thinking around the website ordering new stock designing new products like planning like the next body power and getting new athletes running social media this is majority was all ben and lewis like people on me and craig and joe and and steve we were helping with orders returns and customer service like you know the nitty gritty stuff but lewis and members store doing all these other things which people forget at the same time as well as i said having a second cloven brand as well so they've literally got about 50 things to think about every single day so i was a gymshark fan early doors and i had like uh gymshark clothing and i noticed the change of the logo so what was the thinking behind the change of the logo why did that happen right there what's the first gymshark product you bought then and prove you're a real fan i'm not sure the name of it but it was a it's a stringy with the tension body border like a round logo and then jim shah fitness probably fitness yeah that was the one and then i had a gray t-shirt with blue gym shark but it had that logo at the end of it it had the words okay so yeah that was one of the t-shirts we sold exclusively at the expos yeah so yeah i did actually what i bought it from this yeah so we used that as a marketing tool to get people to to the exposure this was a t-shirt that was given out sometimes free if you were looking off some of the athletes and it was also for sale but only at that expo so if you had it you everyone knew that you'd been to there and you'd met people in person which was great but we going back to the logos we identified very in and around 2015 which is when we draw we launched the fit track suit that we knew we needed to change our tension bodybuilding shark to a more commercial mainstream logo and it was a hard concept to get your head around because obviously you've just spent three years building up a brand with a tencent shark logo everyone knows there's nothing like it in the world and then you're now going to change it to a small logo like this that's very sleek small not loud at all people are probably thinking what the hell are you doing but for the mainstream people they're not like ladies and and the older generation aren't going to buy a tensing logo so we thought to ourself okay well how can we compete with the likes of uh of knowledge adidas in the future so we ended up changing our logo to this sleek shark logo which was luckily we went to the same guy that uh built our logo in the first place we told him exactly what we wanted the first thing he came back with was this we said back to him not sure let's change it a little bit but then he changed it and it just wasn't the same so we ended up going with the first logo actually he sent back to us which was crazy and we knew we could fit this into into smaller places we could fit in the future onto different parts of clothing you know maybe shoes maybe headphones i don't know we were just planning for the future early doors so yeah we actually ended up running two logos for a while until we got everyone used to the new logo and then we transitioned fully into the fit logo even now to stay though you see jim shot bringing about the old collection yeah for the uh i guess for the for the hardcore original jim sharp fans because there is still some collections i've got the legacy i think they call the legacy now it's called that yeah so you've you've swapped the website over to dot com you've changed the logo you've got your trademarks so a lot of things all coming together now um so he was getting ready for the next load of like body power and all that kind of stuff what what was um the products like at this point yeah so we're around 2015 here and every single year we wanted to be bigger and better than the year before so jim 2013 was just body power right 2014 was jim sharp body power in the uk and then i think it was just the fifa vivo was just fibo so we had one one 2013 2014 2015 we decided to do the gym shot world tour and for the gym shot world tour we were gonna go to l.a ohio australia um fibo germany and uh body power and these were all big expos all from around the world so we knew we could kind of you know spread gymshark brand to different places in the world um very easily just with these expos and again back to what i said originally those athletes are probably not going to go to those parts of the world unless we take them there so it was a good thing for all parties obviously in that time we knew that we needed to create a new product um just launched to people every single year and and this was this year was the launch of the fit track suit the fit track suit was different to our luxe track suit it was more it was it was all black from here downwards and then it was grey on the top it was a new stretchy more fitted material really thin and these were our gym shot fit bottoms which were probably our best the new logo as well with the new logo which were probably our best selling product for for years to come down we had them in black blue gray um we just kept launching wiki colors so we had like gray and red gray and blue blue and black um what other colors do we have in the main three there might have been one there might be another color but and we had it so people could mix and match and change things up and that created a new opportunity for people to buy and to buy different things and it would hit a different market because the lux suit was very wintery based and it was very fitted even though people didn't just wear it in the winter this new fit track suit would take us to a new level so we started making new products we started making seamless we started doing everything with this new logo and we slowly transitioned purely into this new logo ready for the world tour so with the world tour did you have to get like more athletes with bigger followers is that was that always the goal to try and get literally more athletes into the gym shark family or the and then and then with bigger followings or that was the plan literally try and get bigger following trying to get our main athletes to grow we never wanted to release anyone we wanted to create like a gymshark family once you were in this bubble you would grow within this bubble and we would take you as far as you needed to go so we tried not to get rid of anyone that we we could because that's how it wanted to be so we kept adding to our bubble we got a lot of furious pete we got nikki blackhead uh guzman steve cook vince steve cook vince carter yes and the hodge twins twins yeah we've got the hodge twins so we were adding to our bubble um obviously some of those guys you know didn't work again with us just because uh they liked working on like a non-exclusive basis and some guys felt the whole family feel and carried on with it we had mark fit as well cath um so yeah everyone everyone kind of stayed with us it was it was amazing paige half away just keep coming back towards martin bradley martin yeah sophia girl in germany she was huge she came like a cat yeah so so at different expos we had different athletes because obviously some guys were closer to germany some guys just couldn't do it at the top time of the year and stuff like a different commitment so we had different athletes would take to different expos again took a lot of planning there was only a team of maybe you know five six people doing this type of stuff and the same people were flying around the world that were doing to everything so the same people would fly around the world and obviously not being in the uk we had to tie a lot of strings together that we've never done before so we're in la and we're trying to tie everything together move athletes around and do the expo at the same time and entertain people it was an impossible thing that we somehow pulled off i just don't know how we were doing it i think that was one of the hardest things jim chad did like at this point we realized what what made the business grow like it was don't get wrong it was like right time right place for jim shot to be born but lewis and ben recognized that influencer marketing fitted clothing and the expos were the three amplifiers of the bill that's based off those three things so for them to like gamble and go from just body power one year to then body power and fibo which is a whole separate conversation of all its you know problems and issues that rise of going to different country to then going from zero to a hundred to go into like six seven exposed to australia l.a like louis said there's things you that you can't even fathom you have to think about like i said flights hotels like who's lewis and ben had to do all this stuff at this time so obviously this world tour like was there anything that stood out that is kind of good memories for you um that year went really fast every everything every single place was fun like it wasn't work we were making money we were making friends we were meeting people and we were having fun i've probably never laughed in one year so i've never been so tired right so stressed but i've never laughed so much at the same time in all my life everything was funny it didn't matter what we did like we would go to expos right i'll never forget this we would go to we'd go to like i think it was at the allied fit expo and it was a massive hall and there was there was like gymnastics and wrestling and stuff and we'd go over to the wrestling rings and we'd be wrestling in them and we'd go and we'd get ourselves bearing in mind we're running a multi-million pound company here with loads of athletes and we were all still kids we were jumping off rings and and all sorts and just jumping onto mats and pretending to be wrestlers and ddt and ourselves and everything it was just completely crazy didn't you like um book the wrong hall as well where you stand at one of one of the others so fibo was a german german expo right and uh we'd never been there before we didn't even go over to visit and see if it was even busy it makes body part look tiny as well by the way well 250 000 people i think it has a foot traffic of and but bearing in mind body power is you know 25 000 people it was at the time and because we'd never been there before and we booked it so late we ended up booking the wrong hall so the less busy hall so obviously there's probably not there was barely anyone in there but obviously gymshark paul was pulling people in um but that was kind of an error on our behalf because we'd never been in been there before we just kind of chucked ourselves into it and i mean you tell everyone what happened with all the oh man manic so like after the first body power they tried to design the stand bef going forward so this time we had like pricing on the wall so they could yeah remember that you've got to remember how much everything was so those prices on the wall they could choose it from and we thought oh this other coat hangers understand they can almost like a shopping experience when the stand opened and about 400 people flooded the stand straight away you'd look over them all and all the stuff's gone but we only saw about three things at the moment they must have thought it was for free or something so that all just got like taken robbed straight away but yeah just little things like that it's just they're funny when you look back here but like really it's something like you you can't think and plan for it until it's happened to you like you know what i mean well it was the way they operated so obviously in england stuff isn't free whereas obviously in those countries if stuff's out it's deemed just like you know this you can probably have this and we'd never understand the different geography and how things work different countries so people just like oh that's that must be just free i remember the one year when you had the the athletes on the top of the stand throwing t-shirts out yeah fifteen i think that was it yeah yeah so you gave we'll talk so we we're sorry yeah we made our stand even bigger and we had two two floors and you could have a microphone we had the hodge streams on uh what what was their sayings what was the high stream saying they do their live shows on top and throw loads of t-shirts i was like who's ready for something honestly there's hundreds of t-shirts getting thrown out so how many t-shirts did you buy for i think we bought a hundred thousand t-shirts to give out and we could sell them on black fridays and stuff it was a pretty standard simple t-shirt that we had so you could sell it year round but it was a good business thing you did because when you went to the expos back in the day you got like a free sample of supplements and a free pre-work pre-workout so lewis and ben's came with saying like you know why give them like a nap let's if we're going to give out these many t-shirts let's make them look really good feel really good if you're a clothing company you need it's really good so then people like oh this is nice so they end up buying like 200 000 t-shirts thrown them out by the box load we did all this all what seven eight expo still had like forty thousand there and we were throwing them out people fighting over yeah people were but to get so obviously getting the money back like it's a crazy business decision when you look on paper but obviously like the what we were people were probably buying on from that was it wasn't kind of quantifiable on paper but obviously people would get this t-shirt and think i really like this they'd see it in the gym and if 10 people saw it then at least it's just brand awareness isn't it big wet brand awareness if one person buys just from that then you've made your money back for three four five t-shirts so like it was really it was still this t-shirt to the day and like i said if anyone's watching you in in the gym it's like it's a great short sleeve t-shirt like a tealy blue gym shark across it with things sort of defeated logo at the end of it you see it everywhere i see it to this day tag tag me in all your old products i wanna i wanna have a look like on on instagram tag me in anything you've got i'll have a look at any old memories there's anything just my hand like you can imagine like we go to la we have to do the stand entertain you know the athletes we usually try and book some as well like an activity or something whilst you're there and then before you know it it's like right did you used to go to gyms and stuff when you was there yeah we got that in a sec but we used to yeah from live and it was like pat onto the flight now we're going straight to ohio but yeah the gym's like he'll roll up with all the athletes and because these are tight anyway they don't want to spend money so like they're going to like the pure gyms or some of the equivalent of pure gyms in there you can carry on what you like low budget low budget gyms and obviously it was hard for us just to get into these gyms some of them you couldn't get in so we had to buy day passes and the day pass was like 30 30. 30 pounds and we were just so tight that we'd only get there'd be like 10 athletes and we'd buy like three passes right so you know do the math there was three people in it in each cubicle so it was one of them glass glass like flutes basically you'd have to get into it open you don't have to cram yourself in and it would open so we'd have three big bodybuilders all their bags and their camera equipment into these little like fl alien looking flutes completely crammed in and god forbid the door didn't open the other side we would have been just like 70 just so we can say multi-million pound business yeah yeah correct but that was our mentality yes it is today like look after the look after the pennies and you also have the pounds like we still are in that mindset today yeah so obviously that that was the world tour was pretty mayhem like did you do after the world tour did you realize that you needed some extra help like obviously employing staff or even help running the business yeah so this is towards the end of 2015 now obviously you've got black friday coming off we're going into 2016 um we knew we needed we needed help and we needed major help and we used to speak to some guy in the gym called paul richardson which is uh he's still a part of the business now and uh he was giving us some really good advice on obviously you know nice old head he was giving us some great advice on how to to take our business to the next step and he introduced us to um a big problem of ours was suppliers at the time and um he introduced us to some guys and we ended up not really getting on with these guys but we ended up really getting on with one of the guys who was called steve hewitt who's again ceo of the company today and um we would speak to him and every time we spoke to him he would structure things really well for us and make us see you know things differently and it was it was amazing so we kind of had them on like an ad hoc basis and then we just we made the decision to kind of brief bring steve in-house and have him like connect all our dots together that we weren't so good at and that really catapulted our business um into the future um so we got these guys on board in 2015 i think steve um yeah steve on board and then paul came fully on board 2016. we got uk's fastest growing company that year um and things just propelled from there the year after that we ended up getting the gym shark oh so in that time actually when they came on we moved office to a big office in redditch we split our warehouse and our office um this point we maybe had 30 30 staff in the office and and 25 30 staff in the warehouse um then in 2017 we ended up getting a shot lifting club right after that sorry sorry after that so we ended up getting the gym shock office and then we ended up ended up getting shot lifting club the year after that and we just kept going on to higher hatch went from six uh 30 staff to 70 staff to 150 staff to 300 staff and the company just propelled itself from there just from getting the right people involved in the company so obviously the the huge success that jim sharks had over that time why why at that point and then did you decide that you wanted to take a back seat and not not have an involvement in the day-to-day running of jim shark because obviously once when the company the company gets to a certain size and the things it's hard to make everything move the way you want it to and um i just wanted to kind of focus a lot i like to get i like to start things from the ground up a lot a lot to be really really involved so like i started divorcing into property in the stock market and i just really enjoyed it and it just worked out for everyone that that's just the way it happened um yeah so what's the plan for you now obviously people watching this will know that you've you've sold your shares in gymshark so what's the plan for you now over the next three years yeah so i mean yeah i've sold my everyone's probably watched ben's video i've sold my shares in the gym shark company for a nice sum um first things first from that end everyone's gonna be thinking are you ecstatic i was like we always knew we would do really well but the most important thing for me was was to to give money to my family to make sure that like my sisters and my mom could like live free and never even worry about anything bother my house you know just really just take the biggest stress away from them that i could and that's the most amazing feeling that you can get from it and i don't really want to rush into anything else right now i just want to focus on the body as i call it the podcast and just focus on interviewing people speaking to people just getting everyone else's life experience out there a lot more and that is going to be my main focus for the foreseeable obviously things are going to come up with property and things are going to come up in regards to investment opportunities and obviously you know the stock market investment opportunities so those things i'm going to be keeping a very keen on and if opportunities present themselves i will jump on them so so just to kind of uh wrap up this uh podcast q a with yourself if um there was somebody listening to this or watching this that is just starting their journey um in business is there one bit of advice that you would give them to kind of to help them through well i'd say you know learn from everyone else's mistakes because from everyone's mistakes you can try and you know avoid those pitfalls and obviously the simple thing don't give up because you never know where it could take you we probably almost gave up on gymshark like three or four times throughout the whole process at the very start and if we did then we wouldn't be here today and everyone listening wouldn't be here today so never give up you know but at the same time don't be too deluded to the fact of you know if things aren't working and you're trying out for a year then you kind of need to stop basically but you just don't know where things can take you i think a benefit for you as well and it doesn't have to be it's not like a set in stone rule but for you and ben like you enjoyed it it's what you wanted to do they wanted to make fitted clone for themselves don't get wrong you can make a business based off pure you know profit and you know you look you can see the return but these didn't think to himself jim shots going to be a multi-million pound yeah well billion valued at a billion now they did it as like a hobby it was that was an afterthought but i think as well like dan said the most important thing is based on that is start while young there's no better opportunity to start when you're young and you have don't really have any any commitments any real overheads you know when you start to get you need to move out and get a house and then you need to start to have kids everything becomes a little bit harder your focus is not on the task ahead you've got other things to think about if things go wrong then you've got a big problem you know trying to prop your family up you know you could be homeless so there's no better time to start than you know right now so yeah um thank you everyone for listening um stay tuned for the party we're gonna get some brilliant guests on and this is gonna be a regular thing from now on this is a temporary setup that we're in uh we're gonna be moving into my new house and then we'll probably end up getting an office so dan and ron will probably feature on it quite a lot more and yeah just let us know below who you want us to get on the party thank you

Channel: Lewis Morgan

Views: 264,045

Rating: 4.9238181 out of 5

Keywords: gymshark, billion dollar brand, gym, shark, ben francis, ben, francis, young entrepreneur, business owner, business inspiration, uk business, gary vaynerchuk, whitney simmons, robin gallant, nikki blackketter, mattdoesfitness, david laid, fitness brand, uk entrepreneur, uk, fast growth, entrepreneur motivation, motivation, fast growing business, lewis morgan, reece wabara

Id: h3GvP59tEF4

Length: 54min 4sec (3244 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020