Social Media - The Story Behind Gymshark’s Success
Thursday 27th August 2020
It was recently announced that the fitness clothing brand Gymshark has been valued at over £1bn after a £200m investment from private equity firm General Atlantic. The deal marks Gymshark as the UK’s newest “unicorn” start-up company, only 9 years after Ben Francis founded the company as a student from his parents’ garage. This success is largely owed to Gymshark’s innovative use of social media that pioneered the concept of ‘influencer marketing’.
According to The Economist, ‘social media made Gymshark’. The statement refers to the brand’s rejection of traditional advertising techniques and what Francis refers to as the ‘old school approach’ of putting as many products as possible in high street stores (The Financial Times, 2020). Instead, the online retailer pays hundreds of fitness influencers to promote the clothing on platforms like Instagram and YouTube. The influencers, who boast millions of followers between them, become brand ambassadors for Gymshark and are known as ‘Gymshark athletes’. The rise in the popularity of health and fitness social media accounts amongst young gym-goers is what enables this to operate. Gymshark’s niche audience of 16-24-year-olds frequently consumes the marketing content whenever they scroll through social media, and thus associate the brand with the influencers they look up to.
The brand further capitalises on the relationship with these influencers by creating limited edition collections with them and utilising a mixture of pop up stores and ‘expos’ to debut these. In this way, the brand creates a strong offline presence without needing to use high street stores. These pop-up stores are not only a unique opportunity to purchase clothing physically, and before online buyers, but they also allow fans to meet the Gymshark athletes in a ‘meet and greet’ style setting that is often vlogged on the influencers’ YouTube channels. Gymshark has taken these stores all around the world, becoming known for their chaotic queues and long waiting times (Econsultancy, 2020). As a result, the brand becomes more than just the products it sells, creating a sense of community and excitement that further drives sales.
With gyms having been closed for months during the lockdown as a result of Covid-19, it would have been expected for Gymshark to follow the trend of many other clothing retailers who have struggled during the pandemic. However, Gymshark continued to use social media to adapt and improve, with its full year revenues to July 2020 reaching £258m - an £82m increase from the year before (The Financial Times, 2020). As the public converted from going to the gym to running, cycling and exercising at home, so did Gymshark. Its influencers continued to promote the clothing products as before, but instead switched to doing so during home workouts and runs. The company hired personal trainers, many of whom lost their jobs during the pandemic, to run virtual exercise classes and raised £180,000 for the NHS by donating £5 for every selfie that was taken during exercising in the #NHSSweatySelfie campaign. It even temporarily renamed itself to ‘Homeshark’ on Twitter, in order to echo the government’s message of ‘Stay home, save lives’. These measures capitalised on public trends and created social media engagement amongst its consumers which, teamed with only having one pop-up shop in London to close, and a direct-to-consumer model, enabled Gymshark to thrive.
Ultimately, it seems social media is a tool that has rapidly changed the fitness clothing industry, not only for the purposes of marketing but also in adapting to the new virtual environment and creating a sense of stability within it. It is likely that other retailers will continue to follow Gymshark’s footsteps, even after the pandemic comes to an end.
