How I Started The UK's Fastest Growing Company: My Gymshark Story | Ben Francis

I'm Ben and I love to make things and one of those things is Jim sharp which I created when I was 19 years old I'm now 24 and I've never had so much going on in my life Jim sharp is officially the UK's fastest growing company and I'm traveling a lot we're about to take some huge leaps to compete with some of the biggest companies so I've decided to document this journey I think the best place to start is with the Jim short story where I started and how Jim shots tired as a young teenager all I did was make websites my first fully functioning website sold license plates so the first bit of money that I earn I bought plates and sold them online with my friends next I got my first iPhone and I was absolutely fascinated by it I instantly downloaded the iPhone SDK and started to learn to develop I mean for iPhone apps two of which were fitness apps and both of them made it into the top charts in the UK in several other countries and they were about teaching you how to work out populating your calendar and diary with workouts and things like that next I made a fitness social network website called two-tone calm it got several thousand members but it just wasn't getting the traffic for it to be sustainable and then the next website I made was the gym shot website I incorporated Jim shark in 2012 and my friend Lewis another time I'd spend all my day at University then after that I'd deliver pizzas for peds aher and any time in between the tour has been in the gym or working on Jim shell now we couldn't afford to stop because we had no money so the solution that I thought was to have every single supplement you can ever imagine on the website and we didn't stock any of them and what I did was when people would order off the website it would automatically trigger another retailer to dropship the supplement to them and we just add a small margin to it I think it took about two months to get our first sale and we've done a lot of world tours and we met a lot of people x-rays and stuff and a lot of people asked me advice on starting a business and I think the key thing that I would say based on the way that we started Jim shark is that you have to be creative with both the front end of you being the business and the back end because if we weren't creative enough to think of the dropshipping solution for the back end of the business then Jim shot wouldn't exist at all so it's from doing this that we earn enough money to be able to stock other people's brands of clothing and when we go I realized that there was nothing out there like what we wanted to wear so we spent everything we had on a screen printer and a sewing machine and we started to design our own answer to fitness wear which is longer stretchy and more feared this stays that every single gym trial product was custom made I remember spending hours and hours printing the t-shirts so in the t-shirt designing all the logos and then putting them off burning them into screens it was just this was the most manual time for Jim shark and I remember going to body power around this time and just walking around and seeing sort of the bodybuilders the more I guess it was a little bit more boring than what it is now and thinking this Expo is missing something huge so I went straight to the show office it and I just said to them like what can we afford what can we get we have to be a next year and I remember literally emptying the bank account on the floor space for body power the following year so after signing off for body power next year the following year was spent just non-stop work again just packaging orders and print in sewing just non-stop custom making product it was really really tough the hours were long it was non-stop but it never really felt like work because we were always just creating what we love I was absolutely obsessed with YouTube whilst I was working I remember watching Scott Herman and Scooby every single video that they would ever upload Matt oh gris-gris levar doh Jeff side Lex alarm just watch them all the time and as massive fans we decided to send them the jump shot product like for the first person to ever get Jim sharp product the first Jim shark athlete I remember when he got it and he gave us his feedback and loaded a video in it it was just the coolest thing ever at the time no one else was doing this now it's called influencer marketing but at the time it just came totally natural to us as we were just fans of the guys I guess at the end of 2012 we started designed the looks fitty track suit they track suit and the product that would shoot Jim shark into huge growth when we finished design it the minimum order quantity was so high that it costed again everything that we had at the time but we love the product so much and we knew that it was such a game-changer that we just went with it we ordered it and it was due to arrive May the following year ready for body power I remember receiving the samples of the looks track suit on Christmas Day 2012 and it was the most excited I had ever been to have this gym shop product in our hands that we had to physically make ourselves was just incredible we invited Matt Chris Jeff Alan Lex to the body power expert they all said yes and it was absolutely awesome so we headed off to the body power Expo and my dad and my brother Joe stayed back to package all the orders and cover things whilst we were away and there was nothing that could prepare us from what we were about to experience at this Expo we went from just sort of being an online business we'd have never actually been out to sea physically the people that we were affecting in person and I remember turned to the expo and the second the doors opened we were flooded I have never seen so many people just draw into a stand once ever it was absolutely incredible it was unmanageable we spent the whole weekend talking just helping people obviously people were buying the déjame truck product and we were with the guys it was so crazy that Dan and Craig our two friends dropped their phony University exams and lost their degree so that they could come to Birmingham to help us out that weekend it was just so busy dan Blackwell and ash Grant came and they helped us out all weekend as well I remember they brought their friends who we didn't even know and they helped us out it was so cool to be a part of we didn't even realize it but at the time we were revolutionized in the way that expose were done like in this industry it was just the best experience for our entire lives everyone went home and I remember being sat in the living room it was like one night because during the expo we turned all the stock down so there wasn't too many orders and I remember doing a pose and I flicked all the stock back on I put the look tracksuit on the website and the website literally blew up we had more traffic and had more sales in the first 30 minutes of me putting the stock back on the website than we had in the entire of the Jim jockle history and I remember being sat there we'd sold out I was chlorine at my laptop to try and turn all the stock off that night and afterwards I was sat there on my own in a living room thinking wow we have made something incredible over the next few years tons happened we kept creating the product that we love we went on a huge Expo World Tour loads of stuff joined Jim sharp because we were growing so fast Luis decided to move on because he wanted to do other things we launched our women's range which at first wasn't great but now it's a huge part of a community and this we bought on our first female athlete Nikki black we invested heavily into the Jim sharp women's brand and community and that's been great I think anyone that saw this flex launched a few weeks ago will know just how crazy the growth is right now we thought we'd have enough flex leggings and lasses maybe a month or two and they sold out in minutes so we're really working on this right now more recently we got to a point where we had to make a decision we could keep going as a small relatively fast growing business or we could take some big risk and go for the big time and that was a decision that I wanted to make what that really helped me to understand this is Paul and Steve who both when the gym shop business with me and they taught me the importance of the structure and the backend and the foundations of a business as well as the investment in the front and the market in the products and the creativity that I love so much and I think it's the combination of my front end creativity and their brains on the back end that has allowed us to create a company that is so agile structured and it's constantly invested in people and creating the things that we love especially now because we've got 70 staff in the UK we ship from Norway and Sweden and we're an international business it's so difficult for someone of my age to run so having those guys to help me in the back end of the business is just priceless to me so there it is a really short overview the gym shark story and I'm sure there's loads that I've missed so if anyone has any questions then feel free to comment them below I want to thank everyone that came out to the gym shop world tour and asked me to do a video like this because if it wasn't for you guys asking them they wouldn't have done it I want this channel to be a documentation of my journey and a source of inspiration and information for others too so if anyone has any further questions then please like the video comment the video subscribe and thanks for watching you [Applause] [Music] and as you can see anyone that has arms or 12 inches this will go out today as well so another happy customer good you Michelle post ready to go Jeff seid stuff my laptop if you see some more coming in the stockroom a little bit this is the headquarters if you want bodybuilding clothing that's right just sewed the new gym shot labels in so yoga gym shout Fitness logo on this finger as you can see you've got the official Jewish art modo the pickled ginger hanging tag very you know once you've got the quality string official Jewish art merchandise so all-around wonderful partner around wonderful product baby blue screen the best first second the next fourth fifth six seven eight nine ten well that's the cars actually packaged and as you can see I can't actually move my chair back anymore this one's just the whole car boat it is just absolutely rammed incredible speed of production this has been Frances handmade the thickness of this ink pad the thickness of ink yeah such an good nice shiny [Music] let's just thought you pick a tutorial I have to fold to teach it quite out flat face down and pull the one side over pull the other side over and then simply fold it over twice more like that and then you've got a perfectly folded teacher another happy Jim short customer so I don't Brown the but doriot but all the racking here we'll have more soon so just in the unit print them off the desired bit nervous the first woman wronged and I find with the ink just spewed ink everywhere fresh ones coming out now maxed out on the includes putting out looking good so far [Music] perfect just this is the area where you know some more carpet down here desk here here in the corner look just got stuck on the floor Roman packaging all these need to go up today the only one bag of postage put them in as well we normally take about four a day I think the racking on here just load of stock things like that things about two thousand resting come into you got the office chair ready racking that we need to take back with the printing machine some old friends on there see it's the dryer scrap basically desk over there few things here rocking over on the side the blue gonna put the racking up quite high I mean the roofs pretty hard so we're gonna double up that racking yeah it really say you've got the string of small medium large accessories on the bottom so I've actually invented the shorter dispenser small medium and while it's gonna be large and all you have to do is just pull out the short dispenser easy doesn't take up any room simple quick effective so these ready starting to get in order [Music] you you so as you can see we were packing up the unit as we were actually moving some

Channel: Ben Francis

Views: 2,733,833

Rating: 4.9505472 out of 5

Keywords: gymshark, ben francis, gym, business, fastest growing company, gymshark owner, gymshark ceo, marketing, ceo, fitness, bodybuilding, fitness wear, nike, lululemon, under armour, gary v, gary vaynerchuk, casey neistat, young entrepreneur, entrepreneur, workout, business inspiration, business motivation, influencer marketing, fast track 100, tony robbins, eric thomas, guzman, summer shredding, summer, shredding, christian, karina, elle, be bold for change, karina elle

Id: MpftE7RwQnM

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 26 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Waja_wurr90]

Well what about when he looses that business, he seizes to be popular and people won't buy his shit? Which of course is made by wage slaves to begin with so he is living off the backs of wage slaves to have a pleasant life, sort of like a NEET in that way lol

Point is, it's all bullshit fundamentally but yeah sure obviously if you must get money to be allowed to be alive and not starve which in this current society we do, of course it appears very much preferable as an individual to get that money by doing stuff you like BUT there is no perfect way to do it that doesn't involve something fucked up nor is any of it safe or reliable.

[u/fixerpunk]

Yes. This is my ideal situation. I am good at quite a few things but have a hard time doing them in the context of employment, where I am being ruled over and sometimes using my work for purposes I don’t agree with.