Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Ben Francis on building a billion dollar brand

Here [music] we go. [music] What's going to happen? You can wiggle [music] wiggle this car. [music]

>> It's getting official. [laughter] >> We added that in the last episode and I was like, "Oh, okay. All right, cool." [laughter]

Here's a weird idea. There's a great um creative exercise which is effectively because we're talking about the theory of constraints. It's worth knowing this where you have a [clears throat] business and you artificially impose a constraint on yourself >> to effectively spur creativity. >> And so the the typical idea given is you've got an airline and you have to make money from your airline assets, but the planes aren't allowed to leave the ground. >> Okay.

One of the ideas I had just riding here was there should be a way to make money for London taxi drivers when they're not moving, which is to rent the space. Okay? If every London taxi just had a small table, and you could call down a taxi and say, I basically want your cab for a Zoom call for an hour. I want to work in it. You go off and have a meal, right? I'll pay you a reasonable rate for the rent of your cab as effectively stationary office space >> or actually if you wanted to snooze. >> Yeah.

I mean, [laughter] you got to you got to have some rules because there's a problem with Whimo with people having sex in the cars, which is when you have driverless taxis, it doesn't take long for people suddenly to get quite amorous. [laughter] Uh so there is a Whimo problem uh with that which they have to address. It's a really interesting there have to be other things you could use taxis for other than just as a mode of transport because the big problem in London is if you're out and about in London and you've got a Zoom call at 1:00, you've got to do something dumb like go to a cafe and then order three coffees and find a stupid corner which is generally a pain. And actually every taxi is potentially an office. >> Yeah.

>> And then have you been in a way more before? >> Yes, once in Austin. >> How do you find it? Uh, I agree with my colleague who said it's totally chill at speeds of 20, 30, 40 mph, but on the open freeway at 60 or 70, you'd get a bit spooked. >> Why is it?

>> So, basically, when you go to San Francisco or Austin or LA, it's basically like driverless cars and [clears throat] you can order it on [snorts] an app, it comes >> it's a Jaguar IPACE with loads of liar and rotating things on top. >> Yeah. And the funny thing is it's not like it just like drives like like a normal driver like it drives actually like a normal driver. So there's no one there. So basically you can go to a game and you're drinking alcohol. That's why and there's no and can basically like measure the weight of the people that are on there. So if you leave something in the car, it'll alert you, etc., etc. But the funny thing is about it is if it's stuck in traffic and it knows there's a quick way to like overtake and go, it does it. You just see the steering wheel like spinning and you're like, where you going? So I decided to go there after like going to a WNBA game cuz there was like nobody there and it was insane. >> But apparently um the game So it was the uh the Golden State like the Golden State. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So So that was great. But then I really wanted to do this experiment whether I'd go into a driverless car. But I think it's actually pretty good. >> Actually pretty good. >> Yeah. It's the sort of thing that I guess the first time you do it feels really weird and then you probably get used to it very quickly.

There is a potential thing with driverless cars which I don't think humans will ever cope with >> which is theoretically you don't need traffic lights because with enough precision literally cars could crisscross at 70 mph just judging the gap perfectly you see. So you can literally get rid of a set of traffic lights and you could have cars rumbling through alternately in different directions sort of 3 ft apart and it would hugely increase the efficiency of the road network. The theory is that people would just find it too terrifying basically >> and and people mess with it. So there's there's like this whole like Instagram about like way more fails, right? Apparently one like went to the highspeed uh road on the opposite side. [laughter] >> Then there was another one that uh cuz they all go to this like parking lot to park themselves. It's like Whimo and Whimo trying to like beep at each other to like act. So there's little things like that that it needs to get better at.

But uh you can also hack them which I predicted which is one of the famous San Francisco ones is that uh if you put a traffic cone on the bonnet or hood of a Whimo it basically gets completely confused and can't proceed. So there is a potential risk which is uh things like for example carjackings you see >> because because the thing can't run anybody over you could literally you know stand in front of get one person to stand in front of a way demand that the people get out. So there are a whole load of risks where if you think about it, you know, every car potentially every motorist has the threat of I'm going to drive at your legs. >> But the Whimo obviously is heavily programmed not to do that. So it's rather like you know people will eventually exploit the weak spots. You know if and there's a famous one which is >> there are people in residential streets who don't like cars going down them. So they will report them as closed off on ways and other apps >> just to discourage drivers from going down. >> Um, and then there's this wonderful guy who did a hack I think in Chicago which was walking around with a handdrawn trolley at about 4 miles an hour with 50 mobile phones on it. You see which gave Google Maps the impression that there was massive traffic congestion >> because you had literally 50 people with phones traveling at a really low speed. So Google Maps infers from that that okay this road is unbelievably slow. [laughter] Okay. And so this guy was literally going around and screwing up the algorithm uh with his 50 mobile phones in a little trolley. [laughter]

>> And and it always occurs to me that you know we've we tend to optimize for a perfect world because that's what engineers tend to do. They tend to have an optimizing mentality. And actually uh what we're not very good at is spotting the weak spots. But it only takes one out of six billion people to find a weak spot. >> So Ben Whimo, >> h, >> you got to do it. >> Oh, do it. Yeah. >> What? Get in one. I'll give it a go. But I >> don't know. I just think it's weird. It's odd, isn't it? I mean, I'm I'll get on board eventually, but yeah, on English lanes from being on English lanes, single track lanes. >> Um, that Yeah, they'd be okay, I think. But you're right. That is an interesting issue which is obviously you know the software corrects for left-hand drive not rightand drive but there are probably nuances in British driving particularly roundabouts which Americans don't know much about which will probably take time to uh it'll take time to adapt to.

I there are probably social conventions I heard the sweetest thing by the way last night at a dinner which is Japan is this is just a driving convention the driving convention that you You flash your hazard lights to say thank you originated in Japan because it's a hyper polite culture. This is even sweeter still. Okay. >> The people who arrive first at work in Japan in the company car park >> park further away from the door. Okay. >> Because they figure that people arriving later might be in more of a hurry. So need to park closer to the door. So people will arrive really early at their Japanese place of work and deliberately park 100 yards away from the door to leave space for people arriving after [clears throat] them. That is the sweetest thing I've ever heard. I think it's absolutely delightful. >> It's amazing. I I need to go to Tokyo.

But so we've got uh one of my upcoming favorite episodes cuz I was really looking forward to getting Ben down here. So, obviously Ben, we know each other. >> Uh, and obviously you know Rory, but I wanted to make sure that we brought you in and we saw a side of you that probably not a lot of people get to see from an interview perspective. >> How I know you is as somebody that's an inventor, creative, a rational doer >> and very very self-aware, right? But I think that a lot of the times and we will talk about the Gym Shark story, people get too caught up in just the story element of it >> and I want to make sure that they see the operational side of uh the now CEO of the brand. Well, it's been 3 years now, but uh uh so but before we get into all of that, uh for those that have been living under a rock >> and don't know the Gym Shark story, it would be great for you to tell a little bit about the origin, how the brand started and where we're at today.

>> Yeah. So, um started the brand in 2012 and it it was funny really because it was never really I never really thought it would be a big business. So, before Gym Shark, I started lots of different things and they're all very small. So, iPhone apps, websites, things like that. And having done lots of different types of businesses, >> yes, >> the ambition for Gym Shark, which is going to sound really boring, was just to sell one thing online. That was it. So the original ambition was cuz I'd never made a website that had transacted. It would always been either an app or it was something that would run ads. So the initial goal was let's make a website that would sell something. Um, so and it was really actually was perfect timing, right? because found out that Shopify existed and that just made making that e-commerce website infinitely easier than it ever would have been [clears throat] >> and made the website and was like right now we need some product and then very quickly realized that that's actually really hard to do and I knew directionally that we really wanted to be in fitness and bodybuilding because that was the thing that we really love growing up um and I remember re really vividly actually I remember thinking right supplements is the obvious thing thing for us we we all take protein creatine things like that let's let's sell supplements >> and it's a big online marketplace It was huge. And I actually called a friend of mine at the time, a guy called Dan, and he worked at a company called USM, which was in long, they were office was in Long Ridge in sort of the southern edge of Birmingham. >> And [snorts] I said to him, "Right, we need some product. I need some product to put on this website just cuz I want to sell things online." He said, "Fine, I'll do you a deal." He went away. And he came back, right, Ben, I can get you a deal. I can get you a load of supplements, but the minimum order is £8,000. >> Now, I I'd never heard of £8,000, let alone seen £8,000. I was doing like pizza delivery driving at the time. So at that point I said listen I love you but I just we cannot afford that that level of investment and that level of risk. So then came up with the idea of just drop shipping cuz if you remember the goal wasn't it wasn't big it was literally just to transact online. So then we went into drop shipping. So loaded up the the the website with probably more product than it actually has today 12 13 years on >> and put all the supplements that you could ever imagine and then when someone would order off Gym Shark it would basically trigger someone else to ship the order out. We would make a very small margin. loaded up the uh the website with supplements. Nothing happened. Literally nothing happened. And I think at that point I was like 18 and you sort of assume that when you put something online, put a website live. Yeah. It's like having a shop on the high street. You sort of assume that people would just find their way there and no one did. Kept posted on Facebook, kept doing like social media in the early days. >> That was the weirdest internet phrase. If you build it, they will come. >> Yeah. Cuz you [laughter] forget the fact that there is no way of people finding it. And then it was actually through Facebook we started posting and after a couple of months finally we had our first order and I remember it vividly. It was a tub of USN hyperbolic mass 5 kilos. It sold for £52. £2 of the £52 was our profit bearing in mind but now at the time we had to pay for the domain and the host and all that sort of stuff. So it wasn't really a profit. It was just like a little bit of margin or something to go towards the domain. Um, but it didn't matter because if you think the goal was just to sell something online and I remember literally dancing around my bedroom at my mom and dad's house because it was like we' done the thing that we wanted to do. I love to see that footage. >> And that was when Neano and me and that but that was when it was like the I I guess the the bug sort of started and the the passion cuz it was such an exciting moment. And then kept posting online, kept selling supplements, but it became very clear that because of the margin on the supplements, we would never be able to build a business and we'd never be able to afford to order inventory.

How does Shopify charge you, by the way? Does it charge you a percentage of sales or does it charge you >> No, back then. Back then I this is going back 2012. Back then it was I think it was free for like the first period. It was free for like the first three months or something. So it was it was obviously they were very much in their startup phase. >> Um so yeah I and then I think they ended up starting a chart a percentage of fees on checkout or something. But um but yeah basically got to the point where we realized supplements wouldn't work. I remember being at my nan's and she had a a brother sewing machine on her dining table because she was doing like a curtain making course or something and it sort of got all that sort of >> no I can't believe this really and then it was all that that made us think well maybe we can make clothes no one was making the clothes that we wanted to wear the only the only tops that we would buy back in the day was sort of top man two for £10 so it was like [laughter] do you remember the top man two for10 >> because that's all that anyone was buying so it was like okay and they was and they were fitted weren't they all All of the bodybuilding clothes was American, so it was big, baggy, oversized. So, we sort of went >> and Top Man skinny jeans. >> Yeah, exactly. We wanted American bodybuilding wear that fitted like European, British Top Man clothing, more of the two, started making the clothes and bas basically just slowly built the business from there.

And you came up with a name early on, didn't you, Jim Shock? >> Yeah. And the name >> inspired. It was such a boring name. So, because because I'd made so many websites before, I assumed that this one would fail. So for me it was short, it was interesting and it was cheap. It was £3 pound50 off godaddy and it was aco.uk domain. There was no further thought into it than that. >> Good grief. >> It was literally just easy. And it actually it was funny because I didn't buy the.com. I didn't buy the.com because it was about 20 quid. Someone else bought it and a few years later we ended up paying three grand for it. We had to empty our bank account at one point to literally pay for the.com domain because I didn't buy it. Zoom has a similar story where there was zoom us because in the early days they were too stingy to pay for zoom.com. >> Exactly the same thing. Exactly the same. >> So this happened with us in butterfly effect. So we couldn't pay for butterfly effects. We got butterfly 3 effect. >> And I renamed the company that and I tried to get a creative spin on it because when you put a B and a three together, it looks like a butterfly. So I tried to put it [laughter] but then Michael, my co-founder, was like, "No, we need to do it properly." And that's why we made the uh the change there. We ran I can't remember what we ran on. I think it was gymshot.co.co >> for a few years until we could eventually get the.com. Got the.com and >> Yeah. I mean, >> so so the the first clothes you made, were they literally homemade or were they? >> Yeah. So the f So the first ones were almost like blank t-shirts printed. So we sort of bought a sewing machine, bought a screen print and we printed. And that was really important because you could have blanks but you could do lots of different prints. So you could sort of wait until the order came in to then make the product. So if you think at that point when you've got no money, you are literally, you know, scrging for any way to build leverage or, you know, to not have cash tied up because you just don't have the cash. So you started off with blanks and then what I would do with the blanks is I would then re label them. So the back neck label we would change. And it's really interesting actually, this is going to sound really bad cuz I did I did do English at school. Um, you can tell if you own the first ever Gym Shark batch of product because in the labels I spelled official wrong. So it says a ficky old or Gym Shark product. [laughter] So if you've got it's a thin label, it's got the shark and it says a ficky or gym shark product. But we'd imported the labels and again we couldn't afford to then swap the labels. So we were like well I'd rather have a >> dodgy custom one that most people wouldn't notice than just like a I don't know Fruit of the Loom or a Stars and Stripes or something like that.

Everyone's going to like run to the old Gym Shark stuff and they got the limited edition spelling mistakes. There was an American genius >> who in the time when you made reverse charges calls in the states and they were very lucrative. >> AT&T did heavy advertising to promote 1800 operator. >> Okay. >> Mhm. >> And this guy figured 20% of Americans don't know how to spell operator. >> So he bought 1800 operator spelled E R not O R. The last letter is irrelevant actually cuz they're only seven digits. Okay. And a 1-800 number. Um, it's like 1800 mattress. Okay, I I'll go into that later. And literally every time AT&T did a million dollar, you know, multi-million dollar advertising campaign promoting 1800 operator, he picked up for free 20% of the calls. [laughter] Okay. >> Legend, >> legendary stuff, I think.

But this is I mean presumably I suppose was Gold's Gym a bit of an inspiration cuz that was the one big brand in the US which captured that particular target audience. >> Particularly the gym in Venice. I mean, we've been there together, haven't we? Particularly the gym in Venice. That was the the mecca of bodybuilding. That's where your Arnold Schwarzeneggers would go. You'd see all the old photos, black and white, of him on Muscle Beach or in the gym. And that whole thing of And this was the funny thing. So, you'd see all the lifters wearing stringers. No one sold stringers in the UK. No one. So, that was a big thing for us to sell stringers. And that was one of the first product that we customized ourselves, printed stringers in the UK, which again now you can get them everywhere, but at the time it was very, very unique. And it was again, it was bringing that American bodybuilding influence into the UK. >> Got it. Brilliant.

>> And honestly, something that's really interesting that you said was the fact that you didn't know what you were going to sell, but you knew the audience that you wanted to serve. >> How and the industry that we wanted to work in, and that was the really important thing. I knew that we loved the gym and lifting. >> Then it was just finding out where we fit into that. >> Do you think that more like business leaders should think about that or anyone that's looking to find a business? The thing that I I think about when if I was to start again today or if I'm talking to anyone that's starting, I I think it's really important to note and I still think it's very much true to this day in in a way is having really low expectations makes a massive difference because if day one we'd have opened up the website with an intention to be a multi-billion dollar brand. >> You would have given up. >> Yeah. Yeah. Or the first the first order would have been either expected or not as exciting and everything would have been a drag. Whereas because the first aim was the first aim was to have an online transaction. Yeah. >> Then it was to have another one then it was to have regular online transactions then it was to make apparel then it was to make a profit then it was to make a regular profit and then it was to do an event and then it was to do another event and then it was to do multiple events a year whilst also being able to sell online. The first event we did we closed the website down when we were at the event because we weren't also at the warehouse so we couldn't ship out orders. So what's very interesting about this of course is that in in ter because this is called the bottleneck podcast where your bottleneck is moves okay according to what stage of maturity you're in. >> So the story from Eli Goldrat who wrote the goal. Now I may be getting this wrong so put in the comments if you know the really accurate story >> but that his father he was a physicist and he was a really sophisticated high-end physicist. His dad had some sort of business that made chicken cages and he looked at the manufacturing of the chicken cages and said, "You've got an artificial constraint here in how many you produce because of some part of the manufacturing process. If you replace this process with another process, uh you can speed up production and make three times as many cages, which sure enough they did." >> Then they came up across a completely separate problem, which is not enough people kept chickens to sell all the cages they could make. So the bottleneck went from being a production bottleneck to a marketing and and actually possibly a definitional bottleneck which is maybe you need to sell people with hamsters or something, right? >> And so it's very interesting because what you had was a really sensible staged because what companies tend to have is they have this strategy >> which they try and implement in parallel. >> Mhm. But actually what you need to do if you want to grow organically is start it you know to quote chairman Mao a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Get to stage one then get to stage two then get to [clears throat] stage three. >> Yeah. And it wasn't it wasn't until many years later probably I guess sort of when you were at the business that we actually started to think about a genuine longerterm vision. It was genuinely everything was the next day the next week the next month. I mean the week you I'm sure we'll talk about this the week you joined. you didn't do your job for months when you joined because we were because we were just again we had to look at something completely different and >> I think for me >> low expectations and that you're right that singlestep sort of ambition I think is really really important because I think there's so many kids nowadays that go I want to run a billion dollar business or I want to be this or I want to be that and I think that ambition is really really powerful but it is a marathon upon marathon upon marathons to do I' I've done this job every day since I was 18 and I think and by the way absolutely love it. I love the job I do. But I think there's so there are so many brands and businesses that have exploded for 6 weeks or 6 months or six years. There are very few that have stood the test of time for 20, 30, 50, 100 years. Our ambition is to stand the test of time and that requires such consistency and diligence and like you know not veering too far off the path always protecting your model making sure that you're to your point always focused on the bottleneck that is in front of you not the one that might be there in 6 months time I think >> good tip by the way the companies that do survive a 100red years this is a John K observation are marketing led companies Proctor and Gamble Unilver Nestle okay companies that are really focused on the customer, not on optimizing their existing product line for their or or manufacturing cost cutting. >> Those companies that are heavily customer focused tend to be 100 they've been in the sort of Fortune 500 or the Footsie or whatever for 100 years. >> Yeah.

>> And [clears throat] actually, you know, John K predicts that, you know, companies like Google won't be that impressive in 15 20 years time. M >> um because but that fundamentally the customer mean if you're focused on the customer you're focused on the real world >> whereas if you're focused on the shareholder you're focused on meeting some arbitrary metrics to please um it's not even the share owner you're trying to please it's some institution that wants to justify its own existence to the you know the ultimate share owner. >> Yeah. And I was going to say that going back to the whole thing about being customercentric, the amount of people that come to me that say, "Oh, I want to build a unicorn or I want to be a speaker." And then I ask them, "So, what do you want to speak about?" Or I ask them, "Who do you want to serve?" Like as an organization. And you can already tell the trajectory of somebody's almost like potential success based on how they answer that question. So if you think about the output of what you're going to do and not the input and there's not a forever plan, right? Which is why even though when we talk about this whole concept of building in chapters which is I like to call right you build in chapters as opposed to like going to the end of the story. >> Um, what about the the role of business plans? Has that changed? Cuz so many people before they started anything they build this business plan or this 5year plan. >> Did Gym Shark ever have a business plan at the start? >> No, not in the early days. Now we I wouldn't call it a business plan. I would call it a broad strategy and direction. And I think that's more out of necessity than anything else just because where we are now we we've got a really considered sort of strategy where I think you're right like with if you have a broad shareholder base then what people will do is they'll focus on the short term and generally in business like ours what they'll say is okay make more product to serve more people because if you've got a larger total addressable market you must be able to make more revenue if you can make more profit revenue you must be able to make more profit. That's the general that's a real generalization. every few years Apple is bullied into producing a lower cost product and every few you know and every few years it fails. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And I think that so that's that's the natural >> like that's the the gravitational pull of a business that runs like ours. >> What we've said is we want to be really narrow and we don't want to expand our product. We want to make the best gym wear in the world. And the obvious thing for us is well why don't you make football, basketball, hunting, whatever else is why don't you do a bit more like fashion? Why don't you do all these things? Whereas what we've said is no, we want to focus on building the best gymware in the world. One because we genuinely think we could be the best in the world. No one else is focused solely on that in the way that we are. >> No one else I think has the authenticity. We were founded on these principles and I think that's really really a growing market. >> It's also a growing Yeah. Which really really helps >> and [clears throat] I think um so when you linking that back to a business plan because before it was just we were just doing stuff. It was just right let's do an event, let's do this. now cuz it's more comp complicated. We do have to think about how we approach those things and how we manage our cash and inventory and opening shops and all that sort of stuff. But I would say it's a strategic direction, but we're always ready to pivot and adjust to what the customer wants or how the I guess how the market looks. >> It gives you like um a north star and a red line, right? It's almost like the business plan is there to keep things simple and keep us >> like almost like committed to the mission >> alignment. It's more that feeling of again because we're most of our business is in the US so there's always one of the team traveling. It's that thing of if no one's in New York he's completely aligned with the direction in the same way that I am as if Sean's in again in London or whatever or Carly somewhere. It's making sure that everyone knows as a particularly as a leadership team then as a broader business where are we going and why are we going there.

Incidentally you've probably resisted over premiumizing haven't you? because there must be a lot of encouragement for you to kind of leanize your pricing. >> And the re it's really important to me that is one of the things that the business was founded on going back to topline two for 10 two for 10 pound t-shirts was affordability for kids getting into the gym. >> If we walk away from that then we're not the brand that that's one of the founding principles. Like if you think again £5 an hour at Pizza Hut you can't afford to go and spend 120 quid on a t-shirt. And it's really important to me that 16-year-old kid that's just getting the gym for the first time, probably Gym Shark, particularly at the entry level because those are the kids that are into the lifting. Those are the it's the younger demographic that we're that it's important to me that we >> also they're probably the most authentic in terms of user imagery. >> Yeah. Yeah. And that that's when people get into the gym. It's when people form a lot of their lifelong habits and hopefully in the same way again the same way that we did is just get into the gym and then it becomes a part of your life. >> Yeah. >> Which is really important to us and that again that I think and again these are things that you look back at retrospectively. This wasn't a strategy at the start. We didn't sit there and go let's make it affordable. It's let's make what we could afford. >> Yeah. >> And then you then look back and you go oh that was a founding principle. That's one of the reasons that people really like our brand so let's protect that. I think that a lot of times when people start to like professionalize and think about things like values, etc., etc., they always like look at what other brands' values are for inspiration, but really your values and your pillars always existed. You just haven't taken the time to step back. >> You're almost uncovering them, isn't it? In a way. Um, and again, like I still think Gym Shark to me is still really a startup. It feels like a startup and that's really important for us to protect and I think again like you say, it's >> protecting that for as long as we can. >> Yeah.

And what are some of the changes that you've seen in the industry today versus how it used to be >> in back in the day? >> What in fitness or broader retail, e-commerce? >> Both. >> Um, well, I tell you what, when we first opened up our website, people still thought it was a bit weird to buy things online. I mean, we weren't so early. >> The website was first built 2011, 2012. >> So, it was early, but not so early. >> Not so early. Yeah. >> But to buy clothes and then people weren't totally sure on the returns policies, like how does all that work and all that. So that was early. I I mean I remember [clears throat] there wasn't an integration between Shopify and raw mail. So I manually created like a integration where it would drag a CSV out of Shopify and then automatically upload it into the raw mail system in order to then print the label so that we could manually um post the orders. So if you think it was early, but you could hack your way around. >> So Shopify was what a couple of years old. >> They must have been very very young at that. >> I think that company is a sleeping giant in a way. >> I think it's incredible. I'm such a fan. I'm such a fan. And and for many, many reasons. Purely from a selfish perspective, it allows businesses like ours to invest our resources on what we can be the best in the world at, not on thousands of developers of crap that everybody else. >> Let them do what they're the best in the world at, and then they allow us to do what we're best in the world at. And that's why I really like them. >> I've always wondered why they never put us a front-end search engine on it. Apparently there's some ethical dilemma that they can't choose between different customers. But if you think about it, it becomes the alternative Amazon. >> Yeah. You literally all Shopify because don't they they make up like a massive proportion of American e-commerce >> that that's an interesting idea where they haven't I haven't thought about that before. >> It's an amazing business. >> Yeah. Like why why don't you why can't you search for brands on Amazon? >> Because actually a lot by the way do you still deliver using Royal Mail? >> Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Very interesting thing. I'm fairly convinced that a large number of consumers prefer things delivered by Royal Mail because you have a relationship with the postman that you don't have with a standard courier. Okay? >> But the decision as to who delivers is usually made by procurement not by marketing. >> Now procurement are purely incentivized on cost reduction. In other words, securing the biggest possible rebate by putting everything through one provider. >> Okay? And of course procurement don't get any credit for incremental sales. They only get credit for reduced cost. And I've always wondered about this because I when every time I speak to an e-commerce company I go at the very least offer people even if they have to pay a choice of who delivers. >> Mhm. >> Because a lot of people have an aversion to one or other career because they've had a bad experience or whatever. And it's very interesting that because so you actually created now presumably Shopify does have integration with Royal Mail completely now. Again, it was so we were early, but not so early where people would order online. It was just a bit more than what it was now. Some of the integrations weren't there. If you were in America, you'd have to go on a completely different website. It wouldn't really function particularly well, whereas now it's just it's far more smooth. >> Yeah.

And now the word community. So, obviously when um um I came into the the the marketing world, now everybody's talking about this word community and for us it just came like natively, right? A lot of times people built his community in real life. They went to the exposed right. They almost like went to the expo and earned the right to be the name that everybody remembered when they went to the >> That for me would be one of the biggest misconceptions of Gym Shark would be we built our online community offline. And it's really interesting actually, because we what we would do is we would go to events and we obviously people would come to the event. They would follow us to see where we're going to be, where the stand is, what product they could get. And we did the events in Birmingham, in Cologne, in Germany, Ohio, LA, and Melbourne. >> Mh. >> And we would go around the world doing these events constantly. And that's where we would build the community cuz we would finish the event. And anyone that was around, we'd say, "Right, we're all going to go to the local gym. Who wants to come lift with us?" People would come and lift. And again, you would build up that following. >> And it's really, really interesting because I think it's still true. I haven't looked in a while, but I remember a few years later I then looked across all of our socials at where the hot spots were. And >> weirdly, all the hot spots was that Cologne Dustelledorf area of Germany, obviously the UK, particularly in the Midlands, which is where we were founded, Ohio in uh the States, um obviously the West Coast, LA, and then Melbourne, Australia. And I think it's that sort of it's almost like that domino effect of that's where it started. It started through the events then people would go on Facebook at the time and then later Instagram and so on and it just built out like that.

You also have one lucky feature which some clothing brands don't which is uh the brand is incredibly visible on the clothing and it's completely normal. So you get that >> you effectively get that sort of effectively unspoken word of mouth which is people see who's wearing your clothes and copy it. >> Well, it's funny you say that as well cuz when we did those first events we gave away free t-shirts to everyone that would come to the stage. I remember >> every single person I mean we overorder them massively but we had free t-shirts to everyone that would come to our stand and you're right and they would love and it wasn't it was the Apollo and it wasn't cheap it was a really really well-made product it was the perfect Gym Shark fit and it had to your point Gym Shark completely across the chest so people are buzzing so they get a really high high quality product it cost us a lot of money >> but then they go and wear that in the gym every week for the next few years and it's literally that's where it really helps push the the brand to grow >> so so one thing just to double down on that I think a lot People over underestimate the power of turning your audience into billboards or your biggest advocates, right? And what happened during that period cuz I remember I was one of the fans that actually that's when I found out about one. >> Yeah, I got one. I [laughter] had one. I have a picture somewhere on Instagram. Maybe I archived it. Uh but uh uh so cuz there was a time when like Gym Shark saw the story because I remember the Hodge Twins at the time were there and then I went to go meet the Hodge Twins and I see this brand called Gym Shark that has like four people queuing up for 4 hours, right? But then >> everyone was walking around the whole body power with the Apollo t-shirt. So, I did a bit of a So, I looked at the following before the uh the actual event and because everybody was wearing Gym Shark and tagging over the weekend, the following went up by like 150,000 people because you turned the audience into billboards, right? So, actually just focusing on your 1% and giving them a crazy experience where they advocate and tell everybody else about you is a way better marketing approach than >> one of my mantras is the real world is a medium too. Yeah, >> it's very easy in advertising to get absolutely fixated on what's appearing on a screen >> or on >> completely forgetting the fact that people spend a large part of their lives actually in the real world seeing what they see drawing inferences from it.

But they but you're right. But from a marketing perspective and from a brand perspective and a creative perspective, it it feels really intuitive that. But I remember when we really started to invest into digital advertising and it was really it's been really successful for us. But I remember being so amused at the race to who could create the best analytics. And obviously these digital platforms knew that if they could create the best analytics that would show the best ROI in the best detail, the individual running those ads could show their boss and they probably get more signed off to then go and spend more on the channel. So So you're right, it was >> they were sort of taking advantage of something that you just wouldn't get in the real world.

Two things. Uh uh so so the first one being um that aha moment for me was when I was I kept asking myself why is the price of billboards in time square so much cuz I remember once we did an exercise or we they actually gave us a discount and we did something really great for that but I was like why is it so much when everybody is like online then it occurred to me that actually everyone takes a picture on time square and that lives online. So actually what you're paying for is not necessarily because people get to see it in Time Square. It's because in the hashtag of New York and actually you appear in films. Piccadilly Circus charges a premium partly because there is a chance that you'll be featured on television coverage, films, etc. because if anybody says London in the US, they have a shot of something like that. Now, um, there's also a very funny um series of poster sites which used to be probably less so. >> But the Cromwell Road was disproportionately expensive because if you were a Japanese brand, >> okay, your CEO would fly to Heath Row and take a taxi into London >> and the principal target audience of some of those ads on the Cromwell Road was the chief executive driving in. [laughter] So the marketing director would know that he'd seen a couple of ads >> for that brand on his trip to the office and would think you were doing a good job. So there are all manner of kind of weird sort of subtifuge reasons why people sometimes choose choose the advertising media they do >> and I remember so there was one time uh and I didn't get it at the time which is why I always say that I don't think that people understand how ahead of and it wasn't necessarily because you were trying to be very tactical. It's just like you're like, "Well, let's test it, right? You're not scared to test." And I remember there was a time when we're doing paid ads and it was doing really, [clears throat] really well. >> And you wanted to see how strong the Gym Shark brand was if we turned off all the ads, right? And to see whether [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. So, he did an email to the whole company saying, "We're going to switch off all the ads." I was the one that was brave enough to say, "Ben, why?" Right? [laughter] Why are we doing this? Right. And and then one thing I realized because null says a thing. No, the CBO at Gym Shark. says, "The reason why Gym Shark is big is because more people hear about Gym Shark, not from Gym Shark itself." Right? So, Gym Shark's not the one that's going around telling everybody we're great. You have obviously the athlete roster. You have the

fans. I think there's like nearly 20 million hashtags on Gym Shark. People are advocating for the brand because of their experience.

So, [clears throat] I always say to brands right now, don't get so caught up in the almost like the the the drug of certainty that comes with paid of putting one punch and getting 10 pounds. You actually have a brand. Because what happens is when you look at your share of voice, if you had to switch those things off, if they were to disappear overnight, what have you actually got? And I think that the gap of like revenue day-to-day traction once you switch that off, tells you how strong the brand is.

And then this again this might be too much detail, but we we see our brand investment purely as a fixed cost. Yeah, it is. We so there's no obviously you can fluctuate your marketing depending on like you know how the business is going whereas for us brand investment is it's a cost of doing business end of.

It's not what happened when you turned it off by the way. At the time, immediately. Well, the problem is nothing happens immediately. You still got that flow. There was actually there was a reduction, but it definitely wasn't as big as what you would have expected it to be. And because you're living in at that point, and this is going back several years, you're living in the nuance world of cookie windows and everything else where you've got double accounts of revenue and Google and Facebook and everyone else is sort of like, you know, chipping into the sale, but they all almost take equal credit for it.

So, but what was happening is so so for Gym Shark it didn't drop off so much because a lot of the people were posting about the brand, probably people ordered that week, posted about that order. So the brand strength and the brand share of voice was very like led towards the audience. Whereas there was this period in like the pandemic when a lot of people started startups, right? So a lot of the business crops of business that you see coming right now, they're so almost like reliant on paid media. That actually that was the start strategy from the jump, right? That now that is becoming more and more expensive, you're seeing like that growth rate slowing down because they didn't think about the idea of investing that fixed cost into brand, right?

And I always say that if you just think about it in human terms. It seems like paid media is like a salary, right? Like everybody knows that it's like consistent. They know they're going to get it and they're almost like very scared to get out of that routine. Community is almost like a savings, right? It gets you out of jail, especially when times get hard or if a brand makes a mistake, etc., etc. But brand is almost like your pension or even a trust, right? That pays dividends all the time if you play it right and you're very intentional about it.

No, I agree. I think the other thing with this is, and for us when it comes to brand, it always comes back to the customer. And I think the really important thing for us is to this day, I still think this is true. We've been we've been speaking to a really underserved audience. So you've got all of the big sportswear. So Nike, to me, is one of probably the the best sportswear brand of all time, right? And that was founded on the running shoe for me. And that's where for me, if I need a running shoe, I'm going to Nike just because I have that sort of nostalgic view of that's where their brand was built and then they've built so much off it. Under Armour made the best layer, uh, Under Armour best built the best base layer that has ever been built. Um, and I know their business has sort of stretched as well, but that that was the best product ever. Lululemon. American football, was it Under Armour? American football. Yeah. Lululemon built the best ever um yoga legging and again, like I think they still build the best specifically yoga legging.

Gym Shark was built in the gym and that's really, really important to us and continuing to speak to that audience is really, really important cuz that's really foundational. That's where the community comes from, which is why we can then invest in brand, which is why we can then invest in that sort of more variable paid market.

We always talk about the the beauty of niches, right? And I always tell people that if your addressable market was only 1% of the global population, that's 80 million customers. If you can get them to spend £10, that's 800 800 million, right? And a lot of people don't think about that. They don't think about getting that real depth and meaning something to a a direct audience. to try to mean something to everybody, which I think is the reason why a lot of people get caught out.

Yeah. Well, I think the most, I mean, Google and Meta have tried to sell this idea that targeting is something that happens uh in an algorithm or in a computer. The [laughter] most effective form of targeting is actually in the consumer's mind, which is they recognize themselves in the ad. So actually, it's an act of someone instead of saying this is for you, it's actually someone going, this is for me. That's how targeting really works, you know? I, you know, I identify with this. And probably why, by the way, your focus on one core audience. First of all, you don't have a competitor. Well, actually, there are a few, but you know, effectively, you know, once you start going general, you are competing with absolutely everybody. Whereas [clears throat] you have that moment of complete self-recognition. Yeah. In in your target audience, which is that's what I'm about. This is for me.

You just get so much more leverage as well from the investment that you're making. Because what we're not doing is, in round numbers, we're not spending £100 to appeal to all these people. We're spending £100 to appeal to this really, really narrow audience. And then it goes through everything. It goes through the the overarching brand strategy, all the digital ads that you'd see, the product strategy. Like we we we narrowed our product range dramatically over the last couple of years because we just saw product that we didn't necessarily need and wasn't serving that customer. So we said, let's make a narrower range that's higher quality, and it's it served us really well.

Now I've got to ask this, which is, you know, along with Led Zeppelin, you're a Birmingham brand that broke [laughter] the United broke the United States. Um, and uh, how did you do that? When did you decide to do it? Because it's an extraordinary thing to do. It's.

Honestly, it was a combination of social media and events. I think because we were because we did the events and we grew on social media. Some of the the first event we did was Birmingham. The second one was Cologne, and then we did Birmingham, Cologne, and then we did Ohio and LA. And I actually remember the I remember landing into Ohio. It was December for the Arnold Expo. I mean, we I hadn't even checked the weather forecast. I literally didn't even take a jumper. I landed into Ohio and as we coming down, I remember looking out the window and seeing snow [laughter] and then the the guy on the plane thing, it was in Fahrenheit. I can't remember what he said, but I remember saying I was like, oh my god, I couldn't believe I'm like, there finding out what how cold it is. It was the coldest I'd ever been. I had no idea. I'm used to temperate, relatively cold English winters. [laughter] Anyway, [clears throat] this and we just went and we just did the events. And I think doing the events and building the social media there because it's all English speaking anyway, you get this natural just growth over there. And then I think over, yeah, it's been over the last few years. It's now the majority of our business.

And I remember there was this crop of influencers from Houston. So, yeah, the first influencers. So with the first influencers that we had, or the first YouTubers, there was uh Matt and Chris from California, they were from uh Sacramento. There was Alan from Germany, Jeff was from Washington State, and Lex was from Manchester. So three of the five or six were in all American as well.

Yeah. And the funny thing is, so going back to that point, I [clears throat] I seem to have this really crazy theory that especially in the UK, the brands or the B2C brands that tend to scale the furthest are those that are not from London because they almost come from an outsider perspective. So you what happens is a lot of people think, first you break the UK and then you break the US, but a lot of these guys or or girls realize that they can't get into London because they're not the cool kids of London. So they actually find more correlation with brands outside of the country. They build there and then they come back to London.

Cuz I also heard from a Scandinavian that they always said that the great advantage of a Scandinavian business was that you realize that the, you know, the Swedish market alone would never make you rich. So you had to think outside it. Whereas in some in a country like Britain, Germany, France, you know, you can make quite a lot of money just being a local brand. So you don't have to think in quite the same way.

See, I. Yeah. Yeah. You're sort of in uncanny valley, aren't you? In the UK, it's a bit of a weird one. You're halfway between the US, which is where you can become inordinately rich just serving your home market.

It's interesting cuz I found the you I I still think to this day, Gym Shark couldn't have been started in anywhere else. And and when I say anywhere else, I include Birmingham because there was a few things that had to happen. One, I mean, more people getting into the gym and fitness than ever, particularly women. That was a huge shift. Social media was on the on the like was growing and people were becoming more comfortable buying things online. That was really important. But the best expo for lifting in Europe was in Birmingham. So we then were massively inspired by that. A lot of the big American bodybuilders would come over to Birmingham. That was really important. And then because of the UK's sort of digital penetration, being able to make an online website that can ship to 70 million people in 24 hours is really, really, really powerful in an English-speaking country. So you've got and you've got in you can ship to the US in 24 hours, particularly the East Coast. You can ship to all of Europe in 24 hours. There's not I there were competitors that were started in other parts of the world that I genuinely think were at a disadvantage because of that where they were located. That by the way, I mean, Jeff Bezos when he first came to the UK and discovered that next day delivery was a standard Royal Mail service, not a premium service, was totally freaked out by that. Yeah. It's huge. So I I genuinely think there's something in that. A combination of the timing, the the you know, the the career network, the e-commerce penetration in the UK, the expo. I think that was massive for us.

And the thing is as well, so I did some research on the the founder of Red Bull. And what he did is he took the company away from the noise, right? And they created their own almost like space, right, where nobody else can kind of like infiltrate. And I kind of think that if you think about like Ble Valley and if you think about like Reddit, by the way [laughter] I've learned is no one from Birmingham actually lives in Birmingham. [laughter] It's very posh there. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so when you think about where Gym Shark is, and I remember the times when I would see like the numbers go up and the numbers on Shopify and the numbers and the following, and you forget that it's real people because you don't feel it. You're in a you're literally in a and there's nothing else like you don't like in London you finish work and then go to the pub. It's. You just I mean, we was in Reddit at the time, wasn't we? If you get to [clears throat] like 20 million McDonald's and with the golden arches, shout out to Pepes. But uh so so so what would happen is if you get to about 20 million, 30 million in London, everybody knows who you are because it's really sexy and everybody speaks, right? We never go to London. Like if you go to London, get the train to London was like a big thing, wasn't it? We go and [laughter] do a meeting with the developer and it was like really cool. I remember the first time when we had this tool called, I think it was Simply Measured or a Finino, and and we went down to London because they're trying to quote like four grand or something for the year, and we had to go and see this place. See, they charge us [laughter] much money for these things I want to see, which is hilarious that people from Birmingham don't leave. I mean, you'll meet far more mans or whatever in London than you do people from Birmingham. It's so good. I love it. They were so hard work, so down to earth, so genuine, so helpful. It's so nice.

Yeah. And then so obviously then we'll go into like the word self-awareness, which is what I think is your genius level skill, right? And one thing that as soon as I said that I'm going to go on the journey myself, I had to kind of like break myself down and say, what would Ben do, right? It's like, and he would say, "What's the best team I can build or what ingredients do I need to win the game?" Not how do I be seen to be winning the game, right? And I think that what you did very early on is you said you recognized that steering the ship at this stage of the business was not where you need to put your focus on, and you got like other people on board. Was that intentional? Did you read a book? Did that just feel natural?

I didn't read a book. Not in my early 20s. Um, no. So so what happened was I, I can't remember how old I was, but it would have been early 20s and it [snorts] was very obvious to me that I was def I wasn't the Gym Shark CEO, but what I really love was product and brand. I loved being involved in product and brand. So a guy called Steve came in and was CEO for 5 years, I think, I can't remember. Um, did a really good, really good job, and it allowed me to then go in and I ran brand for a bit, product, tech. I sort of did all the jobs in the business.

You got Tim Cook as it were to use the. It was amazing because then I I would travel around factories. I'd literally be making product. I'd be, you know, working on brand stuff, partnerships. Every single event I could go to. It completely freed me up. And what it did is it allowed me to simultaneously focus on my strengths in brand and product and be really close to the customer and the community. But then I could dabble in operations and finance and fail without consequence because I could go in, I could completely break it, knowing that Steve or the other people, again, like people like Phil, would come in and tidy up after me. [laughter] So it's the way it's almost like being able to do your GCSEs. You get a D, it's all right, I'll just go and do the same exam again and I'll get a C. Then I'll do it again and get a B, then I'll do it again and get an A, because I could just fail within reason without consequence and had a rapid expedited sort of learning being able to do both. Whereas I think a lot of people often have to choose. Now, I was really lucky because at that point we had the resource to employ CEO, suite, all that sort of stuff and allow me to then go deeper into the business. And I think now it's it's really great for me doing the job I do now as CEO because I've not to the degree that a lot of people now are doing the business today, but I've sort of done every job and I I know enough to to remember back to the days where I'd, you know, sat in the factory and walked the line and sort of been really involved in everything and, you know, original partnership contract.

That's by the way, a very interesting thing, which is we've created sort of management as this weird separate skill. And it's assumed that you can be the marketing director or the manager of something and just go from Everest Double Glazing to something completely different.

No, no. I I'm such a massive advocate. I think you have to be able you you have to know what you're talking about. You have to be able to see, touch, feel it, and know. I mean, we literally this week, we've been doing a uh like a we're doing some sort of like product work. And there was someone that we were working with who's relatively new to the business, who's really talented, but hadn't really done it before. And I was like, we need to get product in the room. You need your hands on the product. You need to be out a factory. You need to know exactly how this works because you won't really be able to do the job unless you really know it in that level of detail. And that that takes time, right? What you can't do is you can't have someone join the business and they basically do a six-month training camp. So it's this weird thing of sort of like building the plane whilst you're flying it. But for me, that especially again, doing what I did from making the product, making the website, and literally being in the nuts and bolts of it. It's so important for you to really understand the product, the community, the customer. I mean, coming to an event, that I always say, you don't know the Gym Shark brand until you've been to an event. The guy who founded Brompton Bicycles um makes a really good observation here. Is if you understand the business, you can learn a lot from a spreadsheet. If you don't understand the business and you look at a spreadsheet, basically it's worthless. You don't you you you know some topline numbers, but you don't actually know what's leading to them or what's driving them at all.

Trend line through it might look okay, but it doesn't you don't know the context. That context is so important.

You see that with venture capital. So, so when you think about somebody like Warren Buffett, right? I seem to think that he knows something that other people in Wall Street don't. Right. He lives like in a little town. So he's away from Wall Street. So Omaha. Yeah. Right. He does the same thing all the time. Yeah. He's in his [laughter] hall. Boring town. He does his thing. And I think that what everybody does is looks at like growth projections, the Excel spreadsheet, and all that kind of stuff. I'm convinced that he has people that go into the business and understand the culture. Cuz if you understand the culture of the business and whether the numbers actually match up to the ambition, the connection, the almost like um um trust in leadership, etc., etc. That may not necessarily tell you like or influence of the business is going to be today, but it tells you the longevity of where this is going to go. Do people have a growth atmosphere there? Do people feel inspired by the long-term journey? Because now people can cook the numbers to make it look like a business.

How they respond to challenge?

How they respond to challenge? Your first day in the office. Hey, so you we're not going to talk about that. I have PTSD from that day. But going back to what you said about you don't know about Gym Shark until you've seen an event. I think that what comes to that is until you see the audience in real life. And my experience, so for those that don't know, uh 2015, uh we obviously had a lot of traffic going to uh the Gym Shark website and I ended up spending a lot of my time in customer service speaking to people. But the thing that that taught me was that this is a brand that people actually care about because although people were maybe complaining about the experience, they then when I respond to them say, "I know that you guys are working really hard. I just [clears throat] want my stuff. You guys are doing the best that you can. I hope that you guys are all okay." And I never saw that before. And that's because I remember during that period um uh when everybody was like drain of energy and Steve says something like, "We need to look after our legacy before our currency, right? And if you do something that is right for the consumer, they'll be with you forever." And that stuck by me to the point where I almost like played that role as the bridge between the business and the community, right? Making sure that the business didn't get too much of its way and the community didn't get too much of its way to ensure that we really made sure that we never lost sight of why we're here in the first place.

Do you feel like in terms of like, and I think that you still play that role today, like you were still there meeting people, connecting with people. You're one of those people that shouldn't be accessible, but you're actually very.

For me, it's so you learn so much. I I always tell this the same story about um we did our first event in Toronto, Canada, and I remember getting there and a guy said to me, it was such an odd question. He said, "Why don't you do any camo?" And I was like, "We don't do camo product because who cares about camo products? No one in England wears camo." And he went, "Yeah, but in Canada, in the US, people love camo." [laughter] I literally called the products in. I was like, "Guys, can we stick some camo in?" Like, this bloke's convinced it's going to be a great idea. Let's stick some camo into the next range.

Next camo.

Yeah. Next thing it was it was the it was the top selling um.

And Brits do wear camo. [laughter]

And this was the thing and that was literally a random conversation with a bloke in Toronto in minus 10 stood outside our warehouse for the event. And and I know that's a really specific example, but I think it's so important to constantly be having conversations with the people that you're again, I guess, I guess the community. Never have ever I been a part of a business where what people say in the comment section makes it to the board level decision making where if we can be winning, but if the customers are not happy, we are not happy, which is I think the one of the things that sets Gym Shark apart and that starts from the founder and the leadership.

I think N's really good at that as well. N is obsessed with every Gym Shark Instagram page and YouTube video and everything that comes with it.

In question, you've got a call center presumably? Uh, is in like inbound for service. Are they allowed to call out?

No. So, we don't do calls. We only do uh messages and stuff.

You do messages. Okay. So, it works by text. Yeah. No, that's interesting because um one of the real really telling things with a business is how they treat their call center stuff, whether they see it as a cost to be minimized or an opportunity for brand building and relationship building to be maximized.

That's really true. There's a lovely story about James Dyson where he was being shown a load of call center statistics about the Dyson call center, which is the usual kind of average wait time, da da da, cost to handle, time to handle call. And he goes, "I'm not interested in any of this." Basically, he said, he said, "As far as I'm concerned, if one of our customers chooses to contact us, we should treat it as an honor and respond accordingly." And I've always said that's why my dad had three Dyson vacuum cleaners, even though he's quite stingy actually. Um, and the reason was he'd bought his first Dyson, there was some missing part or faulty part, rings up, fantastic experience, they send the part out for free the next day. From then on, he wasn't really contemplating any other brand. No.

And you can have those brand quakes, which I think, you know, I I I'm I'm going to spend part of my time between now and retirement creating a kind of RSPCA for call centers because I think they're the most abused and undervalued uh medium.

Yeah. Because the potential there to create um, you know, lifetime value and actually and conversational value. Now, it's not measured. Now, I think a really good call center person, if they could capture the value they created, could actually earn six figures. Okay? Now, sales people can earn six figures because they can point exactly to every penny of value they've generated, whereas with repeat custom in a call center, you know, or or rescuing a defector, for example, the value is just as great, but they can't actually quantify it.

So, so, so, well, one thing that's really interesting uh about that is that at Gym Shark, a lot of the people at the early days that started off in the customer experience team ended up working in other areas of the business and brought the voice of the customer there. But I think I think so I went to university before I actually like started working in marketing and everybody talks about the four Ps and they get marketing really complicated. And then I recently spoke to to to Ellie from Formula E and she basically rewired my thinking of marketing.

She's fabulous by the way. She's amazing. Absolutely amazing.

Amazing. We're going to get you on here. But uh uh uh she basically. This is Ellie Norman, by the way, who's marketing. She was Manchester United and now Formula E. Terrible tracing team, but we'll skip past that. [laughter] Uh, so um, shout out to the Arsenal one last night. All right, cool. So um, she basically says that she only asks herself three questions. How do we become famous? How do we become easier to find? And how do we become hard to leave? Right? And if you look at those three different buckets, right? Fame, social, storytelling, etc., etc. Easy to find is where's the customer? And let's make sure that we're there, right? And then hard to leave is how do we make sure that when people come in, there's no leaky bucket, right? And I think that when you start to look at it in that way, you see the balance, right? You can be fame and driving all this stuff, but if people are leaking, then there's a cost to that. And that's the thing that compounds, right? And I think that a lot of the times people forget that community is a moat that prevents people from leaving. And if you treat your customers, and actually I don't know whether they remember this, uh during that Black Friday week, one thing that was done was not scalable was the fact that Ben wrote letters to everybody. Like, like he actually wrote [laughter] he actually handwritten letters to the people that were the most effective. And actually our head of commercials called people during that period, not because it was a business strategy, just because it was the right thing to do. And Ben actually spent a whole day doing that and [clears throat] actually mailed it to people.

Also, no one in the business did anything for weeks, did they? And that was the whole joke is Elf hired as to run social. He didn't do any social for months. And that was the whole thing. We just everyone dropped tools, did not to focus on customer support. Yeah.

Yeah. Good grief. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is that's the thing that compounded over time. And when people try to figure out, okay, what made Gym Shark different? Cuz I I realized when I stepped out of Gym Shark and now that I'm going to have the opportunity to work with brands with big budgets, etc., etc. The difference was what they prioritize and what they cared about. And that's all. And the fact that I felt that Gym Shark was an optimistic brand in a very pessimistic like country sometimes when it comes to business, right? Everyone's a scared of risk. Just having a different mindset of let's try or we're not scared of failure or at the end of the day, as long as the customer is happy, this is the right decision. The critical thing is there are basically businesses with an opportunity mindset and there are businesses with a risk minimization or efficiency mindset.

And it's very interesting because I think the shareholder value movement, I I'm not sure that many publicly limited companies can build a brand anymore because if you look at who builds brands, it's founder-led businesses. Mhm. Typically while the founder or the culture of the founder is still alive [clears throat]. And then they're family-owned businesses, which all which also do because they can think of different time scales and they can and they can fail in a different way, which is what happens if a PLC fails, it turns into a kind of you know, either a blame game or a kind of cover-up game or a post-mortem, you know, whereas actually the mentality you can adopt in a and of course family-owned business, if you don't have shareholders, you focus on the customers or or the employees, which is by the way, almost as important, I would argue.

Something that's really interesting is obviously Gym Shark started with creators, right? Cuz at the time, no one actually knew who ran Gym Shark. Obviously, we lived in Birmingham, so about you guys. So, there was actually no face of Gym Shark. And then I remember when Ben said that he was going to start doing YouTube, right?

Reluctantly.

Reluctantly going to going to do YouTube and he was going to learn. I remember you sending me one the first video that you shot, which is now like the one that's blown up, and Robin helped you with the editing and you made everything happen. And and I remember even when you asked me for feedback, and I was like, you almost had loads of cuts because you had to keep doing the scenes [clears throat]. And the rest of the business didn't understand it, right? But now when you think about everybody, everyone almost thinks about starting the personal brand first. But you're right, the only reason I did that video was cuz a bloke in Dublin asked me to. We did we did all these we did all these events, right? And then we ended up doing so many events, the queues were so long that people would complain that they'd paid the entry price to the event to then spend all day queuing to get to the Gym Shark stand. So they were like, why am I paying to stand in a line all day now? So then we said, right, let's go and do a world tour. So we just did a world tour. We literally decided in a week and we just picked these random cities. It was we picked three on the west coast, three on the east coast. We have world tour, three in the UK. Um, and we were in Ben will be like, "Let's post about it on social, put some ads out and we're going to be in Times Square." By the way, it was Times Square. And um, and then so we did this world tour and we were in Dublin and I was chatting to a lad and he went, "Listen, I'm doing my dissertation on Gym Shark, but I can't find any accurate story. So, would you be able to do just a YouTube video to explain everything that happened?" I remember thinking, "Oh god, that's the last thing I want to do. I don't want to talk to a camera [laughter] and I just don't I just don't want to do it. But reluctantly again, in the moment, I just said, you know what, I will do it. Then a few weeks later, went home, recorded this video, and then that's when I guess the personal brand started. I never had any intention when the business was being built to be posted online personally. And you'll even see now, if anything that goes online, it I would I don't really post my personal life. It is literally about my Gym Shark life. So yeah, it was reluctantly, but even that was a customer-led decision. Yeah.

That is by the way, I mean, there's some recent IPA data on this on the power of influencer marketing. And I would argue by the way that influencer marketing is partly powerful because it's the first digital form of proper advertising, as opposed to performance marketing, which is which is valuable and important, but it's not advertising in the full sense of the word, okay? It there are a lot of things it doesn't do. And I think that, you know, the genius of Meta and and Alphabet is convincing marketers that the things that they sell are the most important thing in marketing, not memorability, creativity, uh, you know, um, you know, all all those other variables have been sort of shrunk to zero. But what's really interesting is that it appears that influencer marketing works pretty well. It works like TV level well initially. What's astonishing is the long-term effects.

Oh, yeah. And of course, it occurs to me, of course, the material's still there, you know? I mean, you know, a banner ad is gone in an instant, and you're probably on the next page before you realize it was something that interested you. Whereas by contrast, by the way, I've got a tip for you coming up. Um, uh, uh, whereas actually any material you produce that's there in eternity. And sometimes you get sleeper hits, don't you? I've never I've never thought about it like that. But yeah. But there's a great company called Tickle, which really appeals to me, where it does banner advertising, but the call to action is not click here, buy now. It's save to wallet. And so if you've got an offer, you can go, well, that interests me. I'm not actually going to I'm not going to interrupt paying my parking fine to suddenly go shopping, okay? But I wouldn't mind X% off or a free so and so. I might look at that later. And that means that so everybody looks at impressions, but they're not measuring for what you might call the time scale in which you can act on the impressions.

And also just to add to that, so I think a lot of people are trying to use influencer marketing like paid media. And I think it's going to get even worse now that Meta have announced that they're going to allow people to pay, I think they're like 2.99 or £3.99 to be able to actually not see any ads. Right? So what you're going to get is all these people that are obsessed with paid media, that are going to say, "Okay, what's the best way for us to get traction online is to work with influencers." And then what you're going to do is everybody's going to start to like increase their prices, etc., etc. But I think that the one thing that Gym Shark does better than anybody else, and I think that will continue to do better than anybody else because you're at the helm and you'll always make sure that you understand the quality of working with great humans that are great representations of the brand, is that Gym Shark always thought about, let's work with somebody for the long term.

You became an athlete.

Yeah. You became a part of the business and you were part of the team. You're not an individual on your own. And I think a lot of people, if the first post doesn't go viral or the first post doesn't drive this product, almost like sale, they're just going to stop it and say that it doesn't work. But but then also the value there is, yes, you're getting the traction, but you're also getting feedback.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right. So you're getting feedback, you're getting trust. And right now, as more people are investing in influencer marketing, people are very discerning of the authenticity of those partnerships. Right. Whereas, if you work with a brand like Gym Shark, people believe that the partnership is very authentic because it's a long-term commitment.

Yeah. Yeah. And we get that athlete feedback through the product process, which we've literally had since day one, going back to Skype calls with Chris Lovado and Matt Ogus, getting feedback on the product. But you're right, it's not just a transactional relationship. And you're right, it tends to be longer term as well.

Yeah. And people fly in, they come to the office, they meet the team, they become part of it. If anything, the amount of times that everyone's like, "Well, how are you always camera ready?" I'm like, because you'll walk into the office and this influencer with like a million followers will put a camera in your face and I don't want to like say the wrong thing. [laughter] I don't want to be ready for that moment.

But uh there's one thing that you always used to say because obviously we've been talking about Gym Shark from your perspective, but now obviously when you start to go into a scale up and the brand starts to grow, you have to make sure that that energy of continually learning almost like gets through to the rest of the team. Mhm. And there's one thing that you said about the fact that being in a scale up or being in a in a rocket ship is almost like inflation. You have to become 10% better every single year. You can't be at the same spot.

Yeah. We always say like people in the business need to like their individual growth needs to be at least the rate of the business. As in, you need to constantly be changing and adapting and growing because if you're not, if the business is growing quicker than you as an individual, by definition, you're going to be left behind.

You're left behind. Interesting. So that's really important to us, particularly. And again, that's one of the things I really try and hold myself accountable to is constantly trying to learn as much as possible.

You interestingly said that the first few months you worked there, you didn't do anything roughly even, you know, corresponding to your job description. I mean, it's a very interesting question, which is at the moment, it's considered absolutely standard that you hire for a role. Mhm. But there's an interesting book called um Counter Intelligence, actually written by a guy who headed up GCHQ. [clears throat] Which is all partly about the culture and the hiring practices they had going back to like Bletchley Park uh and British intelligence and codebreaking. [clears throat] They didn't do that at all. They hired talent and then they found a role for them subsequently. And it occurs to me that the very business of you know, there's an American football phrase which is Vince Lombardi, which is hire the best athletes. So Vince Lombardi didn't go out looking, I'm going to get the terminology wrong. You know what is it a tight end or a [laughter] quarterback? Am I getting that right? Okay. There is something called a tight end, believe it or not, I think. Okay. And he he wouldn't go out looking for a specific person. He'd just hire the best people and then effectively take it from there. And actually, I think there's an artificial bottleneck we've created in recruitment where by defining what we want in advance, we're massively limiting the talent pool from which we can draw.

Yeah. So one thing that I'm starting to do right now is is in testing like phase. We're now being very visual and very almost like uh uh honest about what our long-term goal is. Right? So we tell people, this is what we're looking to achieve. This is the the value we're looking to add. How can you help us get there faster? And what role do you think that you can play? So, you're almost like coming to us with, this is how I can support. This is what good looks like. Give me the opportunity to make that happen. Right? And the cuz what happens is you almost put yourself the pressure of expecting to be the expert of how to solve the problem by telling people what you want them to do. But really, if you say, we've got a people problem, we want to get people to do this. How can you help us with solving that problem? Then actually you almost like manage the person because it kind of like created the direction for them. But then obviously you have to make sure that the brilliant basics are where they need to be and you have to be very good at describing the problem. But effectively, if you do get to that stage, people can actually like come in with a sense of ownership of a problem that they can solve for the business forever, not just during that period of time, which I think is really interesting.

Yeah. No, I agree. If you set the direction, then let people try and work out how you get there. I I think that's absolutely spot on, rather than rather than micromanaging every. And the other thing that always happens with very large organizations is they create silos and then silos have their own narrow metrics. So you end up with people pursuing something which is perfectly rational within the narrow part of their business remit, but is actually not helpful to the organization. I mean, there are literally cases in procurement, there's a famous case I heard where uh the person was told, go out and negotiate them down the supplies down by 3% every year. And he comes back and goes, "Oh, great day today. I negotiated them down by 9%." And the boss goes, "You total idiot." He goes, "What's wrong with that?" He said, "What are we going to do next year?" And so the person was [laughter] deliberately maintaining their own employability by just gradually kind of salami slicing the suppliers. And it was completely, I completely wrong-headed behavior, but within their own narrow sphere, that's perfectly economically rational.

So so a good friend of mine, um, Timmo, who was on the the podcast, and you've met him before, right? Oh yeah. Whenever people ask him what does he wish, what did he wish he did uh when he was younger or what advice he has for younger people that want to start their own business, he says he wish he had worked for somebody, right? Because there's so many mistakes that he learned first time being a founder of a business. Now, you did that, but you worked for yourself effectively. You went into the business and you kind of like worked in the different roles before you ended up like, what what's your thoughts on that?

I think the two things. So the first thing I did have a the first job I ever did, which you'll know this. So the first job I ever did, which was actually started as work experience, was with my granddad and we would line furnaces in the Midlands. Which was wonderful for for many many different reasons, but the top two was one, teaches your work ethic. When you're working in a factory, you work. And the second one was he and he was a one-man band. He's um he would go, he still does it to this day, actually sent me a picture the other week of a furnace we lined 15 years ago, whatever it was. Um, but when we were there, he would tell me about how he started his business and he risked everything, right? Like he risked the house, everything on his business. So then for me, fast forward into starting Gym Shark, I was risking whatever cash I earned from Pizza Hut. The risk was zero. So I felt a complete freedom, which I still, being honest, to this day sort of feel to take a a large amount of risk and speculation in building our business because I always think I'm not risking the house like he had to with my mom, her.

sister, my nanny and that sort of thing. So that's that. Even though it's not a direct operational lesson, it's more of a philosophical lesson, and there are many more I learned from him, by the way, through that first ever period of work. But you're right. Then when it came to Gym Shark, being able to go into each function and know how supply chain works, how product design and development works, how branding works, sponsorship, events, everything, rather than just being a helicopter. That, I think, was really powerful.

You heard my theory, which is that if you grow up, if your parents run a shop or a cafe or a restaurant, it's like a free MBA.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, because also you get to see the whole business in the round. And you know, then you know, someone who goes to Harvard Business School is taught there's a marketing course, there's an accounting course, you know, and actually, they're all interconnected in reality.

Where were we? We were on a trip in, I'm going to say, Vietnam, and we had like a minibus going to the factory. And I remember I had to load up my laptop because I had to run payroll. I remember I was running payroll and you know, Lois, Lois [laughter] over and was like, "What are you doing?" I was like, "I'm running payroll." And she went, "What? Someone does that?" I was like, [laughter] "Wait, it didn't just happen by magic." You know what I mean? And you're right, because like, what people forget is there are so many things that happen. Like, all these things happen in the business constantly.

And I think you're right. When you just come into a business, you just assume that it just happens. And we actually have people that come from far bigger businesses than ours into our business. And they're used to a complete other level of infrastructure that we do not provide. And we've had people that they're looking left and right and they're going, "Where's my person to do X? Where's my person to do Y?"

And we're like, "Well, that's you. You have to do it." And it's so, yeah, I think for me working in the business was really powerful because I could hone my craft and really understand our business in a way that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. Because when you are the CEO or when you are running the business, there are so many other things that just come up on an average day. I think that's why so many CEOs work so many hours because I think half the time is just things that you get dragged into. And there's this thing where you're the only person who can resolve a conflict between...

Exactly. [clears throat]

And there's an interesting philosophical question there, which is, do we need to look at how businesses are structured? So, there are other people who can effectively adjudicate when there's a disagreement between marketing and procurement. I will pay you a lot of money because [laughter] you can outsource that part of the job.

Because it is a ridiculous crunch point, isn't it?

Yeah, you're right. All the problems will always come up because, you're right, problems happen and people try and solve them. But all the worst, biggest problems then come in.

Yeah.

Elon always talks about the fact that when you're a CEO or founder of an organization, you just deal with all the [ __ ] that other people can't solve, right? So, you're basically there in service of all the [ __ ] basically. And when, because you're the only person that can actually solve that problem, and often than not, the new things that other people have in...

I mean, this is an interesting bottleneck question, isn't it? Which is the conventional sort of military structure of business hierarchy, ridiculously concentrated with the power to effectively decide in a trade-off between two business functions is one person, which is, and there are probably really important trade-offs which people don't take to the CEO out of sheer embarrassment. Okay.

And, you know, there are people who, as I said, are engaged in behaviors they know are absurd, but again, you know, they're bonused on a bad proxy metric or something of that kind.

Yeah.

And again, the only person who could change that, because it's probably enshrined in your bonus structure, is again, one person.

Yeah. But actually, this is quite interesting because I think there's a, if we looked at it from a cybernetic point of view in terms of information flows, we'd say this is massively flawed and inefficient. Because what you'd want is, you'd want that top point being someone that can connect the dots and see the opportunities rather than try and...

I guess the issues. Yeah. And so, one of my final questions here is that one of the key core, almost like values at Gym Shark at the time when we first set up, what our values are going to be, right? I think I remember Null put a couple of us in the room and we actually tried to figure out like, what is Gym Shark, right? And one of the key ones was all about thinking like 19-year-old Ben, right? And I think the idea behind that is that the person that's going to take us out of business is not the people that we know today. This is going to be a 19-year-old in the mom's garage, spot the holes that we have, right? That will figure out the areas that we're missing and they will come and challenge us from that perspective. So, you're better off taking yourself out of business and letting somebody else do that for you, is basically what Gary Vee talks about. Now, when you think about 19-year-old Ben, what he talks about, he... You're better off taking yourself out of business than somebody else by you out-innovating yourself.

Got it. Innovator's dilemma thing, which is you eat your own children to an extent.

Yeah. Yeah.

Crazy. But going back to the question, what is it about 19-year-old Ben in terms of like ideology, characteristics, behaviors that you think that it's vital to keep? But then what are the things that you have to unlearn to become who you are today?

Um, well, keep would be close to the customer, close to the product, you know, proactive risk-taking, willing to think outside the box, the typical sort of entrepreneurial things. The things that you then have to try and walk away from is, you need to work out how you can, in an entrepreneurial way, build leverage in a business. Like, now we could never simultaneously, like, we've got a shop in the Dubai Mall now, we've got one in New York, one in London, we've got the e-commerce business, we've got all these other things going on. There's loads of things that we're trying to do, we're building all this different product, obviously, a startup.

And the London shop, if I'm right, is only partly a shop?

In the sense that it's as much a space...

Yeah, it's a flexible gym space. It was so funny because when we first, and I was being a bit, I was pushing the envelope a little bit when we signed the lease. I said to Null and Mitch, who was sort of designing it, I said, "Right, you're now building a gym that sells a bit of stuff," whereas obviously we sort of like mixed things. I thought if I [laughter] almost like in a negotiation, if I overindex, then we can always backtrack and bring in more product.

Nice. Yeah.

But you're right. You walk in and you'll see there's a running track. You'll see the floors are soft. When you actually look at the product that hangs there, you look up to the ceiling, there's a button where you can press that button and all the product raises up into the ceiling. We run classes there. There is a class at the back. There's changing rooms. Everything's all there. So, it is a completely flexible space. And for us, it's more, it's more a cathedral for the brand. Because interestingly, when we opened it, and it's been very successful since we opened it, but all the surrounding London postcodes increased in e-commerce revenue. And I guess if you add up all that, that probably adds up to more than the increase in the store's revenue. So the sort of halo effect of that store has been really beneficial for...

Do you work with Herdify to do that? I was just wondering, there's a company called Herify which massively concentrates on what you might call geographical hotspots, and it's mostly used to inform sort of media investment. But they argue effectively that there are these huge network effects. And you actually look at the, you effectively look at the postcodes and you notice effectively the effect, an uplift in website sessions and revenue since the opening of that store.

Yeah, that's proper measurement. That's good. Excellent. We like this.

So, it's basically a community center disguised as a store.

Yeah.

And it's, we were talking about the fact that actually, with where the world is right now, and obviously the fact that we all live online, brands now play a different role where they're actually, and brands like Gym Shark have taken it upon themselves to actually bring people together because nobody else is doing that. And you talk about it like it was just a matter of fact, and obviously I know that you're not looking at all these different like articles saying, "Oh, we need to do more community." Why did you feel that that was a priority and why that was important?

I think it was just instinctive. So, joining the gym at 16, I learned everything from YouTube. So, and again, it's interesting because you'll know, and I do see them occasionally, and people will say, "Oh, Gym Shark's strategy is this." And I look at it and I think, you're giving us far too much credit. Like [laughter] this wasn't...

The University of YouTube shits on the Ivy League, doesn't it?

Absolutely incredible. We learned everything from YouTube. And I think, but going back to that strategy point, it's just, there's so many things that we... I think one of the consequences or the benefits of being close to the consumer and closer to the product is you will notice opportunities that ordinarily you might need consultants and loads of people around a table to maybe figure out and spend a load of money. But it's just intuitive and it just comes to you. And then if you feed that into an entrepreneurial founder business, then you're probably more likely to benefit from it. And I think you're right about the public, public business brand building structurally. There are so many, I guess, speed bumps for a business like that to get over from finding the idea, funding the idea, informing the market, and so on and so on. Whereas as a business like ours, we don't have to. And I think going back to your founder question, or your 19-year-old Ben question, protecting that sort of intuition in a business, I think is vital.

Ben, you've been incredible.

Absolutely sensational.

Thank you for that.

Thank you, lad. That was fun.

Thank you. [music]