On December 1st, 2021, Ben Francis stood outside of a shuttered J. Crew storefront on London’s Regent Street, the prime shopping destination in the heart of the British capital. Sporting a trim, black workout jacket of his own design, Francis had an announcement to make: Gymshark, the sportswear brand he founded, was going to open its first-ever brick-and-mortar store.

“This is such a surreal moment,” he says in a sleekly produced Youtube video of the event. “To have started this brand in my bedroom to now have a store here on Regent Street is just mind-blowing.”

Ten months later the Gymshark store opened its doors, marking a milestone for a company built almost entirely on social media savvy and partnerships with fitness influencers on Tiktok and Instagram. Started in 2012 in his parents’ garage, Francis built Gymshark into an athleisure powerhouse that in 2020 was valued at $1.45 billion when he sold a 21% stake to private equity firm General Atlantic. In the year that followed, net income more than doubled to $68 million while revenue grew by 78% to $608 million.

That growth made Francis a billionaire. Forbes estimates that Francis’ 70% stake in Gymshark is now worth $1.2 billion, making the 30-year-old entrepreneur one of the youngest newcomers on the 2023 World’s Billionaires List.

It’s been a long journey for the college dropout, who still runs the business out of Solihull, a town near his parents’ home outside of Birmingham. Born in the West Midlands region of England in 1992, Francis grew up dreaming of a career as a soccer player but quickly realized he wasn’t good enough to make it as a pro. Instead, at age 17, he joined his local gym and started taking IT classes, applying himself to his new passions by watching fitness videos on Youtube and building rudimentary apps that helped users create workout calendars and access fat loss exercises.

“They were basic, but they allowed me to ­­apply my creativity to my two obsessions,” Francis wrote in a blog post on his personal website. “Both of them entered the top charts in the UK, although, back in 2011, competition wasn’t particularly high.”

He took a stab at college when he enrolled at Birmingham’s Aston University at age 18, delivering pizzas for Pizza Hut at night and spending his free time at the gym. Not content with his $8-an-hour pay, he teamed up with a friend, Lewis Morgan, and started selling supplements online, buying in bulk from vendors and making a small margin selling them to customers from a website they named Gymshark.

But selling supplements was a tough business. At the same time, Francis was having trouble finding outfits that would show off his muscles. So he and Morgan poured their meager profits into a screen printer and a sewing machine and began stitching their own fitness clothing from Francis’ parents’ garage. (Morgan sold his stake in Gymshark for about $130 million in 2020 as part of the General Atlantic deal.) “Bodybuilding wear just wasn’t available here,” Francis told Forbes in 2020. “All my heroes were Youtubers, so I’d send them products.”

Their first big break came ten months later, in 2013, when they rented a booth at Bodypower, Europe’s largest bodybuilding expo. “We were inundated with people who wanted to meet the athletes, wanted to
see the product – and we sold out at the event,” says Francis.

They began handing out free gear to weightlifting influencers on social media, sending Gymshark’s daily sales volume soaring from $450 worth of merchandise a day to $45,000. Francis then embarked
on a guerrilla marketing campaign that relied on paying small amounts to fitness stars with intense online followings, handing out as little as $500 a month to influencers who would flaunt Gymshark clothes in their videos.

In 2018, Gymshark left the garage behind and opened its headquarters in Solihull. Francis then started organizing popups called “We Lift This City” in cities around the world where fans could snag exclusive gear. That same year, Francis was named to Forbes’ “30 Under 30 Europe” List. Sales exploded once again, growing at an average of 62% each year since 2018. In August 2020, a year after Gymshark hit $214 million in revenues and $18 million in net income, General Atlantic purchased its stake, just as the Covid-19 pandemic shut down gyms around the world. A year later, Gymshark opened its first U.S. office in Denver.

While Gymshark’s average yearly growth is far outpacing that of behemoths Nike (7% since 2018) and Lululemon (26%), it is still a long way from reaching the $47 billion sales that Nike recorded last year,
or even Lululemon’s $8 billion. And there have been some headwinds: A mulled IPO on the London Stock Exchange last year never materialized, and Gymshark shut down most of its U.S. operations in March. Still, Francis’ army of influencers has already powered him to billionaire status, and the location of his company’s new store in London – a six-minute walk from Nike’s flagship and just a block from Lululemon’s – is a sign of where the college dropout wants to take his fast-growing brand.

“When Apple started, it was adopted by architects, creatives and other sorts of cool kids,” Francis says. “Our fans count their macros and know how to do a proper deadlift.”

Text: Giacomo Tognini, Forbes US
Fotos: Levon Biss (Forbes US), beigestellt