It's getting official. We added that in the last
episode. And I was like, oh, OK, all
right, cool. It's a weird idea.
There's a great creative exercise, which is effectively,
because we're talking about the theory of constraints, it's
worth knowing this, where you have a 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. OK.
And 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.
OK, If every London taxi just have 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 wanna 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, you've gotta, you've
gotta have some rules. Because there's a problem with
Waymo with people having sex in the cars.
Oh, Which is when you have driverless taxis, it doesn't
take long for people suddenly to get quite amorous.
So there is a Waymo problem 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 1:00, you've got to do
something dumb like go to a cafe and then order 3 coffees and
find a stupid corner. Yeah.
Which is generally a pain, Yeah. 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?
I agree with my colleague who said it's totally chill at
speeds OF203040 miles an hour. Yeah, 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 you can order it on an app, it comes.
It's a Jaguar I pace with loads of lidar and rotating things on
top. Yeah.
And The funny thing is it's not like 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 it can basically like measure the weight of the people
that are on there. So if you leave something in the
car, it will alert you, et cetera, et cetera.
But The funny thing is about it is if it's stuck in traffic and
he 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
because there was like nobody there and it was insane.
But apparently the witch game. So it was the the Golden State,
like the Golden State. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that was great. But then I really wanted to do
this experiment without going to driverless car, but it was
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. Yeah, you probably get used to.
It 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 miles an
hour 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 three feet 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 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
high speed Rd. on the opposite side.
There was another one that because they all go to this like
parking lot to park themselves. It's like way more on Waymo
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.
You can also hack them, which I predicted, which is one of the
famous San Francisco ones, is the if you put a traffic cone on
the bonnet or hood of a Waymo, it basically gets completely
confused and can't proceed. So there is a potential risk,
which is 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 Waymo, demand that the people
get out. So there are all 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 way MO 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.
And then there's this wonderful guy who did a hack, I think, in
Chicago, which was walking around with a hand drawn trolley
at about four 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 travelling at a really low speed.
Yeah, So Google Maps infers from that that, OK, this road is
unbelievably slow, OK. And so this guy was literally
going around and screwing up the algorithm with his 50 mobile
phones in a little trolley. And it always occurs to me that,
you know, we, we, 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, what we're not very good at is spotting the
weak spots. But it only takes one out of 6
billion people to find a weak spot.
So Ben Waymo, you guys do it? Oh, do it, yeah.
What Game One, Yeah. No, no, that's fantastic.
Give it a go. But now I just think it's weird.
It's hard, isn't it? I mean, I'm sure I'll get on
board eventually. But yeah, on English lanes, that
can be on English lanes, single track lanes.
That yeah, they'd be OK, I think.
But you're right, that is an interesting issue, which is
obviously, you know, the software corrects for left hand
drive, not right hand drive. But there are probably nuances
in British driving, particularly roundabouts, which Americans
don't know much about, which will probably take time to,
it'll take time to adapt to. I mean, 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. OK.
The people who arrive first at work in Japan in the company car
park, park further away from the door, OK, 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 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 one of my upcoming
favorite episodes because I was really looking forward to
getting Ben down here. So obviously, Ben, we know each
other and obviously you know Rory, but I 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
the now CEO of the brand, what's been three years now.
But so, but before we get into all of that, for those that have
been living under a rock and don't know the Gym Shark story,
it'd be great for you to tell a little bit about the origin, how
the brand started, and where we're at today.
Yeah. So start 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 has 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, 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 because I've never made a
website that had transacted. It would always be in 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. So, and it was really actually
was perfect timing, right? Because found out that Shopify
existed and that just made making that ecommerce website
infinitely easier than it ever would have been and made the
website 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 loved growing up.
And I remember really vividly, actually, I remember thinking
about supplements is the obvious thing thing for us.
We all, we all take protein, creatine, things like that.
Let's let's sell supplements. And it's a big online
marketplace already. It was, 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 officers was in Long
Bridge and sort of the southern edge of Birmingham and I said to
him, right, we need some products, I need some products
to put on this website just because I want to sell things
online. He said fine, I'll do your deal.
He went away and he came back in, right.
Ben, I can get you a deal, I can get you a load of supplements,
but the minimum order is £8000. Now I've, I've never heard of
£8000, let alone seen 8000 lbs. I was doing like a Pizza Hut
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 because 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 website with probably more product than
it actually has today, 1213 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 this the
website with supplements. Nothing happened.
Literally nothing happened. And I think at that point, I was
about 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 will just find their way there.
And no one did. Kept posted on Facebook, kept
doing those social media in the early days.
That was the weirdest Internet phrase.
If you build it, they will come. Yeah, because you forget about
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 a first order and I remember it
vividly. It was a tub of USN hyperbolic
mass 5 kilos. It sold for 52 pounds, 2 lbs 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 too little bit of margin or something to go
towards the domain now, 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'd done the thing that we
wanted to do. And that was where Neono and me
and that. But that was when it was like
the, I guess the, the, the book sort of started and the, the
passion because 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?
Back then, back then, this is going about 2012, back then it
was I think it was free for like the first period, it got free
for like the first three months or something.
So it was, it was obviously they were very much in their start up
phase. So yeah, I, I and then I think
they ended up starting a chart, a percentage of fees on checkout
or something. But 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 I can't believe this, Yeah.
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 2 for 10 lbs.
So it was like, do you remember the top man 2 for £10?
I. Remember they had the Yeah.
Yeah, because that's all that anyone was buying.
So it was like a. Kind of night out there.
And they were, and they were fitted, weren't they all?
All of the bodybuilding clothes was American.
So it was big, baggy, oversize. So we sort of went.
And top man skinny jeans. Yeah, exactly.
We wanted American and bodybuilding wear that fitted
like European, British top man clothing.
More of the two started making the clothes and they just
basically just slowly built the business from there.
And you came up with a name early on, did you, Jim Shock.
Yeah, and the name inspired, He 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 sure it was
interesting and it was cheap. It was £3.50 off GoDaddy and it
was a.co.uk domain. There was no further thought
into it than that. Good grief.
It was literally just easy. And it actually was funny
because I didn't buythe.com. I didn't buythe.com because it
was about £20. Someone else bought it and a few
years later we ended up paying 3 grand for it.
We had to empty our bank account at one point to
literallypayforthe.com domain because I didn't buy it.
The zoom. Has a similar story where there
was zoom dot US because in the early days they were too stingy
to pay for zoom.com. Exactly the same thing.
Exactly the same thing so. This happened with us in
Butterfly Effect, so we couldn't pay for Butterfly Effects.
We got butterfly three Effect and I renamed the company that
and I tried to get a creative spin on it because when you put
AB and a three together, it looks like a butterfly.
Yeah, such how to put. Very nice.
But then Michael, my Co founder, was like, no, we need to do it
properly. Yeah.
And that's why we made the the change there.
We ran coming what we ran on, I think it was jimshot.co.co.
Yeah, for a few years until we could eventually getthe.com,
gotthe.com and yeah, I mean. So so the the first clothes you
made, were they literally homemade or were they?
Yeah, so the third. 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're literally, you know, scrounging
for any way to build leverage or, you know, to not have cash
tied up because you just don't have the cash.
So we, you start off with blanks and then what I would do with
the blanks is I would then relabel them.
So the back neck label we would change.
And it's really interesting. Actually, this is going to sound
really bad because I did, I did do English at school.
You can tell if you own the first ever Gym Shark batch of
product because in the labels I spelt official wrong.
So it says a thicky old Gym Shark product.
So if you've got it's a thin label, it's got the shark and it
says the thicky old 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 yeah, yeah, dodgy custom, one that most people
would notice than just like AI don't know, a Fruit of the Loom
or Stars and Stripes or something like that.
Everyone's going to like, run to the old gym shark stuff.
It's got the limited audition. About spelling mistakes, there
was an American, 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. OK, and this guy figured 20% of
Americans don't know how to spell operator, so he bought
1800 operator spelled ER, not OR.
The last letter's irrelevant actually, because they're only 7
digits, OK, and a 1800 number. It's like 1800 mattress.
OK, I'll go into that data and literally every time AT&T did
$1,000,000, you know, multi $1,000,000 advertising campaign
promoting 1800 operator, he picked up for free 20% of the
call, OK. Legend.
Legendary stuff, I think. But this is, I mean, presumably,
I suppose, was Gold's Gym a bit of an inspiration because 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, particularly the gym
in Venice. That was the the Mecca, a
bodybuilding. That's where your Arnold
Schwarzenegger 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 a 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. And the industry that we want 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.
You think that more like business leaders should think
about that or not 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 know 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 they won, we'd have opened up the website with an
intention to be a multibillion 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, 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 terms, because this is called the
bottleneck podcast where your bottleneck is moves OK according
to what stage of maturity you're in.
So the story from Eli Goldratt who wrote the goal.
Now, I may be getting this wrong, so put in the comments if
you know the really accurate story.
Yeah, 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, 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 stage because what companies tend to have is
they have this strategy which they try and implement in
parallel. But actually what you need to do
if you want to grow organically is start it.
You know, quote, Chairman Mao, a journey of 1000 mile starts with
a single step. Yeah, get to stage 1, then get
to stage 2, then get to stage. Three, yeah.
And it wasn't, it wasn't till many years later probably I
guess sort of when you were at the business that we actually
started to think about a genuine longer term 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.
Because we would just, again, we had to look at something
completely different. And I think for me, low
expectations and that you're right, that single step 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 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've, I've done this job every day since I was 18.
And I think, and by the way, I absolutely love it.
I love the job I do, but I think there's so much, there are so
many brands and businesses that have exploded for six weeks or
six months or six years. There are very few that have
stood the test of time for 20-30, fifty, 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 it's in front of you, not the one that might
be there in six months time. I think good.
Tip by the way, the companies that do survive 100 years, this
is a John Kay observation, A marketing LED companies, Procter
and Gamble, Unilever, Nestle, OK.
Companies that are really focused on the customer.
Yeah, not on optimizing their existing product line for your,
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 FTSE or
whatever for 100 years. Yeah.
And actually, you know, John Kay predicts that, you know,
companies like Google won't be that impressive in 1520 years
time because but that the fundamentally the customer mean
if you're focused on the customer, you're focused on the
real world. Yeah.
Whereas if you're focused on the shareholder, you're focused on
meeting some arbitrary metrics to please some.
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 customer centric,
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 and supposed to like
just like going to the end of the story.
What about the the role of business plans?
Has that changed because so many people before they started, they
build this business plan with this five year plan.
Did Jim 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, OK,
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 really real generalized.
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 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 what 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 gym wear 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. Also a growing market, which.
Also, yeah, which really, really helps.
And I think so when you blinking 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 because
it's more 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.
Like it gives you a like 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.
Environment, it's more that feeling of again, because we're
most of our businesses in the US, so there's always one of the
team travelling. 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 it shines 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 premiumising, haven't you?
Because there must be a lot of encouragement for you to kind of
and. The, the, it's really important
to me that is the, one of the things that the business was
founded on going back to top line 2 for 10 to 10 LB 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 on
AT shirt. And it's really important to me
that that 16 year old kid that's just getting into the gym for
the first time, probably doing a part time job, can go and buy
gym shark, particularly at the entry level, because those are
the kids that are into the lift and those are the the younger
demographic that we're. It's important to me that we're.
Also, they're probably the most authentic in terms of user
imagery. Yeah, yeah.
And that there, 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,
it's 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 retrospectively, this
wasn't a strategy at the start. We didn't sit there and go, no,
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 found in
principle. That's one of the reasons that
people really like our brand. So let's protect that.
I think that a lot of the times when people start to like
professionalize and think about things like values, etcetera,
etcetera, there was 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 and covering them, isn't it?
In a way, yeah. And again, like, I still think
Jim 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? But in fitness or broader retail
ecommerce, both. Well, I'll 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 what year was that? The website was first built
2011, 2012. Yeah, yeah, it was early, but
not so early. 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 there wasn't an integration between
Shopify and Royal Mail. So I manually created like a
integration where it would drag a CSV out of Shopify, then
automatically upload it into the Royal Mail system in order to
then print the label so that we could manually post the orders.
So if you think it was early but you could hack your way away
around. So Shopify was what, a couple of
years old they. Must have been very, very young
at that, yeah. I think that company is a
sleeping giant and I. Think it's incredible.
I'm such a fan. Yeah, I'm such a fan.
And and for many, many reasons, purely from a selfish
perspective, it allows businesses like ours completely
to invest our resources on what we can be the best in the world
at. Yeah, not on thousands of
developers. Replicating a lot of crap like
everybody else's, yeah. 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 a 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, all Shopify because I don't they they they make up
like a massive proportion of American ecommerce.
Yeah. Yeah.
That that's their interesting idea where they haven't, I
haven't thought about that before.
It's an amazing business. Yeah, like why don't, 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, 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.
OK. But the decision as to who
delivers is usually made by procurement, not by marketing.
Now procurement are purely incentivised on cost reduction,
in other words, securing the biggest possible rebate by
putting everything through one provider.
OK. 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 because a lot of people have an aversion
to one or other Courier 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 done now, but again
it was so we were early but not so early where people would
order online, it was just a bit. Weird, yeah, 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 and it wouldn't really function
particularly well, whereas now it's just it's far more smooth.
Yeah, another word community. So obviously when 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? Yeah.
A lot of the times people feel like how Jim Shark built his
community was digitally, but I always tell them no, Jim Shark
was a brand in real life. They went to the Expos, they
earned their 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 Jim 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 event in Birmingham, in Cologne, in
Germany, Ohio, LA and Melbourne. And we would go around the world
doing these events constantly. And that's where we would build
the community because 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 live with us and people and left.
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 hotspots were.
And weirdly, all the hotspots was that Cologne, Dusseldorf
area of Germany, Obviously the UK, particularly in the
Midlands, which is where we were founded, Ohio in the States,
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 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, yeah, which is people see
who's wearing your clothes and copy it.
But. It's funny you say that as well,
because when we did those first events, we gave away free
T-shirts to everyone that would come to the stand.
I remember every single person, I mean, we over ordered them
massively, but we had free T-shirts to everyone that would
come to our stand. And you're right.
And they would love polo. And it wasn't, it was a pilot
and it wasn't cheap. It was a really, really well
made product. It was the perfect Gym Shark fit
and it hurts your boy Gym Shark completely across the chest so
people are buzzing. So they get a really high
quality product. It costs 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 of people over underestimate the
power of turning your audience into billboards or your biggest
advocates, right? And what happened during that
period? Because I remember I was one of
the fans that actually that's when I found and doubt about
yeah, I got one one I have a picture somewhere on Instagram.
Maybe I archived it. But so because there was a time
when like Jim 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 Jim Shark that has
like 4 people queuing up for four 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 that before the 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 partying approach that one.
Of my mattress 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 yeah. Or on print yeah.
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'd be, 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 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'd probably
get more signed off to then go and spend more on the channel.
So you're right, it was they were sort of taken advantage of
something that you just would wouldn't get in the real world.
Two things so so. The first one being that aha
moment for me was when I was, I kept asking myself why is the
price of billboards in Times Square so much?
Because I remember one who did an exercise or 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 Times Square and that
lives online. So actually what you're paying
for is not necessarily because people get to see it in Times
Square, is because in the hashtag of New York.
And actually, you appear in the film.
Yeah. Piccadilly Circus charges a
premium partly because there is a chance that you'll be featured
on television coverage, films, et cetera, because if anybody
says London in the US, they have a shot or something like that.
Yeah. Now there's also a very funny
series of poster sites, which used to be probably less so.
Yeah. But the Cromwell Road was
disproportionately expensive. Yeah.
Because if you're a Japanese brand, OK, your CEO would fly to
Heathrow 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.
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 that there are all manner of
kind of weird sort of subterfuge reasons why people sometimes
choose choose the advertising media they do.
And I remember, so there was one time 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're trying to be very tactical.
It's just like, you're like, well, let's test it, right?
You're not scared to test. I remember there's a time when
we're doing paid ads and it was doing really, 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 yeah, yeah.
Didn't e-mail to the whole company saying we're going to
switch off all the ads. I was the one that's brave
enough to say, Ben, why, right? And why are we doing this,
right? And then one thing I realized,
because Knowles says a thing, Knowles, the CBO at Gym Shark,
he 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 the experience. So I always say to brands right
now, don't, don't get so caught up in the almost like the, the,
the drug of certainty that comes with paid of putting 1 LB and
getting £10. You don't actually have a brand.
Because what happens is when you look at your share of voice, if
you're just switch those things off, if they were to disappear
overnight, yeah, 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've we
see our brand investment purely as a fixed cost.
Yeah, it is we. So there's no obviously you can
fluctuate your market in depending on like you know how
the business is going, where is it for us brand investment is
it's. A cost of doing business, end
of. It's not so.
What happened when you turned it off, by the way?
At the time, I mean, well, the problem is nothing happens
immediately because you've still got that flow.
There was actually, there was a reduction, but it, it definitely
wasn't as big as what you would have expected it to be.
And, and because you're living in at that point, and this is
going back to several years, you're living in the nuanced
world of cookie windows and everything else where you've got
double counts 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
the branch 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
have business that you see coming right now.
They're so so almost like reliant on paid media that
actually that was the starting 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
Brent, 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're not, they're going to
get it. And they're almost like very
scared to get out of that routine.
Community is almost like your savings, right?
It gets you out of jail, especially when times get hard
or even brand makes a mistake, et cetera, et cetera.
But Brand is almost like a 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 sports where 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, if
I need a running show, 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.
Under Armour best built the best base layer that has ever been
built. And I know their business has
sort of stretched as well, but that that was the best product
ever that was American. Football.
Was it under? Armour yeah, Lululemon built the
best ever yoga legging. And again, like I think they
still build the best, specifically yoga legging.
Jim Sharp was built in the gym and that's really, really
important to us. And continuing to speak to that
audience is really, really important because that's really
foundational. That's where the community comes
from, which is why we can then invest in Brown, which is why we
can then invest in that sort of more variable paid marketing.
We always talk about the, 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 808 hundred 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. They're trying to.
Mean something to everybody, which I think is the reason why
a lot of people get caught out. Well, I think the most, I mean,
Google and Meta have tried to sell this idea that targeting is
something that happens in an algorithm or in a computer.
The 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 target thing really
works. Yeah.
You know, I, you know, I identify with this.
It's 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 you have that moment of complete
self recognition. Yeah, 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 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've, we narrowed our
product range dramatically over the last couple of years because
we just saw a 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's 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 the United
States, you know, broke the United States.
Yeah. And how do you do that?
When when did you decide to do it?
Because it's an extraordinary thing to do.
It's like. 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,
though. 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're
coming down, I remember looking out the window and seeing snow
and then the the guy on the plane thing, it was in
Fahrenheit. I come in what he said, but I
remember. Saying 83 Fahrenheit.
I was like, Oh my God, I couldn't believe.
I'm like, they're 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 anyway, this.
And we just went and we just did the events and I think doing the
events and building the social media 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. The first influencers, so we the
first influencers that we had or the first Youtubers, there was
Matt and Chris from California, they were from Sacramento.
There was Alan from Germany, Jeff was from Washington State
and a lecture from Manchester. So three of them.
Five or six were in all American as well.
Yeah. And The funny thing is, so going
back to that point, I, I seem to have this really crazy theory
that especially in the UK, the brands or the BDC brands that
tend to scale the furthest are those that are not from London,
because they almost come from as 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 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.
Because I also heard from a Scandinavian that they always
said that the great advantage of a Scandinavian business was that
you realise that the, you know, the Swedish market alone would
never make you rich. So you have 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. Yeah, see, I, yeah, yeah.
You're sort of in uncanny valley, aren't you?
In the UK it's a bit of a Which. Is you're halfway between the
US, which is where you can become inordinately rich just
serving your home. Market it's interesting 'cause I
found the you I, I still think to this day Jim 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 get into the gym and fitness than
ever, particularly women. That was a huge shift.
Social media was on the on the like was grow, 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 EU KS 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,
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 we're 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. Yeah, 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, the Courier 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 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 when nobody else can kind of like infiltrate and I kind of
think that if you think about like Blythe Valley and if you
think about like Reddish in Solihull by the Solihull by the
way OK 121. Is no one from the Birmingham
actually lives in Birmingham? Coalfield, actually.
That's very posh up there. Yeah, yeah.
So, so, so when you think about where Gem Shark is and I
remember the times when I would see like the numbers go up and
the numbers on shopper fly and the numbers of 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 don't finish work and then
go to the pub. You just.
I mean, we was in Redditch at the time, wasn't we?
If you get to like 20 million. To McDonald's and.
We the golden arches. No, Yeah, yeah.
Shout out to Pepe's but 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 we.
Never go to London. Yeah, we're like, go to London,
get the train to London was like a big thing, wasn't it?
We'd go and do a meeting with the developer and it was like
really cool and. I remember the first time when
we had this tool called, I think it was simply measured with
Affinio and, and we went down to London because they're trying to
quote like 4 grand or something for the year and we had to go
and see this. Place they charge isn't this
much money for this thing yes see.
You took him to Nando? Yeah, which is hilarious.
That people from Birmingham don't leave that I mean, you'll
meet far more Manx or whatever in London than you do people
from Birmingham. It's.
So good, I love it. It was so hard working, 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 why, but 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
recognize 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, like was that intentional?
Did you read a book that I. I didn't read a book.
Not, not my early 20s, no. So So what happened was I can't
remember how old I was, but it would have been early 20s and it
was very obvious to me that I was deaf.
I wasn't the gym chart CEO, but what I really loved was products
and brand. I loved being involved in
products and brands. So a guy called Steve came in
and was CEO for five years. I can't remember, did a really
good, really good job and it allowed me to then go in and I
ran brand for a Brit bit, product tech.
I sort of did all the jobs in the business.
And you got chim cooking, as it were, to use the actual analogy.
It was amazing because then I, 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. So it's the way I like.
It's almost like being able to do your GCSEs.
You get AD. Oh, that's right.
I'll just go and do the same exam again and I'll get AC, then
I'll do it again and get AB and 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, C-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 being really involved in
everything and, you know, original partnership contracts.
Also 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 and feel it and know, I
mean, we literally this week we've been doing a 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 of 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 fly in 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 products of the
community, the customer. I mean, coming to an event that
I always say you don't know the gym shop brand until you've been
to an event. The guy who founded Brompton
Bicycles makes a really good observation here.
He says 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 know some top line numbers, but you don't actually know
what's leading to them or what's driving.
Them at all trend line through. Yeah, it might look OK, but it
doesn't. You don't know the context.
Context is so important.
You see there 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 the same Omaha. Omaha.
Yeah, right. Like he does the same thing all
the time. Yeah, he's in his Solihull
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.
Because if you understand the culture of the business and
whether the numbers actually match up to the ambition, the
connection, the almost like trust in leadership, et cetera,
et cetera. 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 is?
Growing how they respond to challenge.
How they respond to challenge. Your first day in the office.
Hey, so you know 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 in real life and my experience.
So for those that don't know 2015, I've obviously had a lot
of traffic going to the gym shop 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, then when I respond
to them say, I know that you guys are working really hard.
I just want my staff. You guys are doing the best that
you can. I hope that you guys are all OK.
And I never saw that before. And that's because I remember
during that period 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's 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 1st place. They 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 are shouldn't be accessible, but
you're actually very. For me, so you learn so much.
I always tell this the same story about we did our first
event in Toronto, Canada. 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 and the US, people love camo.
I'm using camo. I literally called the product
team. I was like, guys, can we stick
some camo in like this bloke's convinced it's gonna be a great
idea. Let's stick some camo into the
next range. Let's come on.
Yeah. And next thing it was, it was
the IT was the top selling and. Bricks do wear camo there.
And this was the thing and that was literally a random
conversation with a bloke in Toronto in -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 ever 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, one of the things that sets Jim Shocker
pause. And that starts from the the
founder and the leadership, I think.
Noel's really good at that as well. 100 Noel is obsessed with
every gym chart, Instagram page and YouTube video and everything
that comes with it. Well, how's the question?
You've got a call centre presumably.
Is it like inbound for? Inbound service, yeah.
Are they allowed to call out? There no.
So we don't do calls, we only do messages and stuff.
You do messages. OK, So it works by text.
Yeah, yeah, No, that's interesting because one of the
real really telling things with a business is how they treat
their call centre staff, whether they see it as a cost to be
minimized or an opportunity for brand building and relationship
building to be maximized. There's a lovely story about
James Dyson where he was being shown a load of call centre
statistics about the Dyson call centre, 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.
Is it, as far as I'm concerned, if one of our customers chooses
to contact us, we should treat it as an honour and respond
accordingly. Yeah.
And I've always said that's why my dad had three Dyson vacuum
cleaners, even though he's quite stingy actually.
And the reason was he 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.
And you can have those brand quakes, which I think, you know,
I, I'm, I'm going to spend part of my time between now and
retirement creating a kind of RSPCA for call centres because I
think they're the most abused and undervalued medium because
the potential there to create, you know, lifetime value and
actually and conversational value.
Now it's not measured. Now, I think a really good call
centre person, if they could capture the value they created,
could actually earn 6 figures. OK, now sales people can earn 6
figures because they can point exactly to every penny of value
they've generated. Whereas with repeat custom and a
call centre you know or or rescuing A defector for example,
the value is just as great, but they can't actually they
quantify it. So, so, so one thing that's
really interesting about that is that a 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. Interesting.
I think because 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.
Oh, she's. Fabulous, by the way.
She's amazing, absolutely amazing, and we're gonna get you
on here. Yeah, but she basically this is
Ellie Norman, by the way. He's Martin.
She was Manchester United. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Now Formula E. Yeah.
Terrible tracing team, but we'll skip past that, so shout out to
the Arsenal 14 nil last night. All right, cool.
So she basically says that she only asked herself three
questions. How do we become famous?
How do we become easy to find? And how do we become hard to
leave, right? And if you look at those three
different buckets, right? Fame, social storytelling,
etcetera, etcetera, 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
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 letters, actually handwritten
letters to the people that were the most effective.
And actually I hit a 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 the whole
day doing that and actually mailed it to people.
No one in the business did anything for weeks, did they?
And that was the whole joke. Is Elf as hard as to run social?
He didn't do any social for months.
And that was the whole thing. We just everyone dropped tools
to. Yeah, to focus on the customer
support. Yeah.
Good grief.
Yeah. Yeah.
And The thing is, that's the thing that compounded over time.
And then when people try to figure out what made Gym Shark
different, because I realized when I stepped out of Gym Shark
and now that I'm going to have the opportunity to work with
brands with bigger badges, etcetera, etcetera.
The difference was what they prioritize them, what they cared
about. And that's all.
And the fact that I felt that Jim Shark was an optimistic
brand in a very pessimistic like country.
Sometimes when it comes to business, right?
Everyone's a scale 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's happy, this is the right
decision. The critical thing is they're
basically businesses with an opportunity mindset and they're
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. Typically while the founder or
the culture of the founder is still alive 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 APLC fails.
Is it turns into a kind of, you know, either a blame game or a
kind of cover up game or a post ration, you know, whereas
actually the 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 the OR the employees, which is by the
way, almost as important, I would argue, yeah.
Some of that's really interesting is obviously Gem
Shark started with creators, right?
Because at the time no one actually knew who ran Gem Shark.
Obviously we lived in Birmingham.
So yeah, about you guys. So there was actually no face of
Gem Shark. And then I remember when Ben
said that he was going to start doing YouTube right,
reluctantly, he's 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 he made everything happen.
And, and I remember even when he asked me for feedback and I was
like, you almost had loads of cuts because you have to keep
doing the scenes 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 because a
bloke in Dublin asked me to. Because we did what we did is 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 paid the entry price to the
event to then spend all day queuing to get to the gym chart
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 up random cities.
It was we picked through the West Coast, 3 on the East Coast.
We have World Tour 3 in the UK and by the way, we're in.
Ben, we'll be like, let's post about it on social and put some
ads out and we're going to be in Times Square, by the way, that.
Was it? Yeah, that was it, Time Square.
That was 12. And and then so we did this
world tour and we were in Dublin and I was chatting to it aloud
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'm
looking. I don't want to talk to a camera
and I just don't. I just don't want to do it.
But reluctantly, again, in the moment, I just said to you,
John, I will do it. Then a few weeks later, I 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, I
would, I don't really post my personal life.
It is literally about my Jim 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 influence and marketing.
And I would argue, by the way, that influence and 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. OK, it, 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, you know, you know,
but all those other variables have been sort of shrunk to 0.
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 because 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 realise it was something that interested you.
Whereas by contrast, by the way, I've got a tip for you coming
up. 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 by
now, it's save to wallet. And so if you've got an offer,
you can go, well, interest me, I'm not actually going to I'm
not going to interrupt paying my parking fine to suddenly go
shopping. OK, but I wouldn't mind X
percent off for 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 impression.
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 were obsessed with paid media that
are going to say, OK, 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, etcetera, etcetera.
But I think that the one thing that Gym Shark does better than
anybody else, and I think they 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 the
great humans that are great representations of the brand, is
that Jim Shark always thought about let's work with somebody
for the long term. You became an athlete, you
became a part of the business and you were part of the team.
You're not an individual on your own.
I think a lot of people, if the first post doesn't go viral or
the 1st post doesn't drive this product almost like sale,
they're just going to stop it and see 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.
Right. So you're getting feedback,
getting trust and right now as more people are investing in
inference and marketing, people are very discerning of the
authenticity of those partnerships, right?
Whereas if you work with a brand like Jim Sharp, people believe
that the partnership is very authentic because it's the 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 Lovato 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 to 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 there's influencer with like a million
followers will put a camera in your face.
And I don't want to like say the wrong thing.
I don't want to be ready for that moment.
But there's one thing that you always used to say, because
obviously we've been talking about gym shock 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 energy of continually learning almost like
gets through to the rest of the team.
And there's one thing that you said about the like 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, 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.
Yeah. 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.
There's an interesting book called Counterintelligence,
actually written by a guy who headed up GCHQ, which is all
partly about the culture and the hiring practices they had going
back to like Bletchley Park and British intelligence and code
breaking. 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, it's 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 my terminology wrong.
But you know what? Is it a tight end or a
quarterback? Am I getting that right?
Am I right? There is something called a
tight end, believe it or not, I think.
OK. 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 whereby 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
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 because what happens is you're most 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, 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 they 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 so 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 that I. I think that's actually spot on
rather than rather than micromanaging everything.
And the other thing that always happens with very large
organisations 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 the person was told, go out and negotiate them down to
the supplies down by 3% every year.
And he comes back and goes, oh, great, day-to-day, I'm
negotiating them down by 9%. And the boss goes, you totally
idiot, what's wrong with that? He said, what are we going to do
next year? And so the person was
deliberately maintaining their own employability.
Yeah, by just gradually kind of salami slicing the suppliers.
And it was completely and completely wrong headed
behaviour. But within their own narrow
sphere, that's perfectly economically rational.
So, so a good friend of mine, Timo, who was on the the podcast
and you've met him before, right?
Whenever people ask him, what does he wish?
What did he wish he did 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's, what's your
thoughts on that? I think, well, there's two
things. So the first thing I did have a
the first job I ever did, which you'll know there.
So the first job I ever did, which was actually started at
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 the top 2 was 1 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 he would go. He still does it to this day.
And she sent me a picture of the other week of a furnace we lined
15 years ago, whatever it was. 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'd
earned from Pizza Hut. The risk was 0.
So I felt a complete freedom, which I've still been 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 mum, her
sister, my nanny and that sort of thing.
So that's that. Even though it's not a direct
operational lesson, it's a more of a philosophical lesson.
And there's 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 like product design and development
works, how branding works, sponsorship events, everything,
rather than just being a helicopter that that was I think
was really. Powerful.
You've 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 around and you know, then you, you know,
someone who goes to Harvard Business School is taught
there's a marketing course, there's an accounting course
that you know, and actually they're all interconnected in
reality where. Were we we were 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 so I had to run payroll. I remember I was running payroll
and you know, Lois Logan over and was like, what you doing?
I was like, I'm running payroll. And she went, what someone does
that wait, it doesn't just happen by magic.
And you're right, because like what people forget is there's 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 that it just happened. 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. Yeah.
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? We're like, well, that's you.
You have, you have to do it. And it's a.
So, yeah, I think for me, working in the business was
really powerful because I could hone my craft and really
understand that 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, you there's so many
other things that just come up on a on an average day.
I think that's why so many CEO's work so many hours because I
think half the time it's just things that you get dragged into
and there's this thing where. Well, you're the only person who
can resolve a conflict between exactly and there's there's an
interesting philosophical question there, which is do we
need to look at how businesses are structured?
So there there are other the people who can effectively
adjudicate when there's a disagreement between marketing
and securement. I will, yeah.
I will pay you a lot of money because yeah, you have solves
that part of the job. Because it is a ridiculous
crunch punch, 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.
Are bucket stops here? Yeah.
Elon always talks about the fact that when you're a CEO, you're a
fan of an organization. You just dealt with all the shit
that other people can't, can't solve, right?
So you're basically they're in service of all the ship
basically and when and because you're the only person that can
actually solve that problem and often they're not the new things
that other people have in. I mean, this is an interesting
bottleneck question, isn't it? Which is the the the the
conventional sort of military structure of business hierarchy
ridiculously constantly. In other words, the only person
with the power to effectively decide in a, 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.
OK. And you know, there are people
who, as I said, are engaged in behaviours they know are absurd.
But again, you know, they're bonused on, you know, bad proxy
metric or something of that kind.
Yeah. And again, the only person who
could, who could change that because it's probably enshrined
in your bonus structure, is, again, one person.
Yeah. And actually this is, 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 you what you'd want is.
You'd want that top point being someone that could connect the
dots and see the opportunities rather than try and I guess.
Yeah, nice. The.
Issues, yeah. And so, so one of my the final
questions here is that one of the key core, almost like values
a gym shark at the time when we first set up what our values are
going to be, right? I think I remember Noel 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 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 is going to be a 19 year old in the mum's garage.
That's about 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.
What what what she talks about he did the.
You're better off taking yourself out of business than
somebody else. By you out innovating got like
yourself. Got it.
Innovators dilemma thing, which is you eat your own children to
an extent. Yeah, yeah.
Crazy, but yeah. Yeah.
But going back to the question, what is it about 19 year old Ben
in terms of like ideology, characteristics, behaviours 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?
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, you need to work out how you can in
an entrepreneurial way build leverage in a business like now,
we could never simultate like we, we, we've got a shop in the
Dubai Mall now we've got like one in New York, one in London.
We've got the ecommerce 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 at
the start, at the start of the. London Shop, if I'm right, is
only partly a shop. The in the sense that.
It's as much as space. Yeah, it's a flexible gym space.
It was so funny because when we 1st and I was being a bit, I was
pushing the envelope a little bit.
When we signed the lease, I said to Noel and Mitch, you were 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 it almost like in a
negotiate negotiation if I over index then we can always
backtrack and bring in more product.
That's where, yeah. But you're right, you walk in
and you'll see there's a running track back, you'll see the
floors 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, and for us it's, it's more,
it's more a cathedral for the brand.
Lovely. Because interestingly, when we
opened it and it's been, it's been very successful since we
opened it. But all the surrounding London
post codes 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 in the stores revenue.
So the sort of Halo effect of that store has been really
beneficial. Do you, do you work with Herdify
to do that? I was just wondering a company
called Herdify which massively concentrates on what you might
call geographical hotspots. And it, it's mostly used to
inform sort of media investment, but they argue effectively that
there are these huge network effects and you, you actually
look at the, you effectively look at the post codes and you
notice effectively the. Effect an uplifting 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, this disguise
the store. Yeah.
And 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 Jim Shark has
taken it upon themselves to actually bring people together
because nobody else is doing that.
And you talk about it like it was just like 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
learn everything from YouTube. So, and again, it's, it's
interesting because you'll know. And I, I, I do see them
occasionally and people will say, Oh, the gym shark strategy
is this. And I look at that.
I think you're giving us far too much credit like this.
It wasn't. This was the.
University of YouTube shits on the Ivy League, doesn't it?
It's absolutely incredible. We learn everything from YouTube
and yeah. And I think, but going back to
that strategy point, it's just just, there's so many things
that we, I think one of the consequences or the benefits of
being close to the consumer and close to the product is you will
notice opportunities that ordinarily you might need
consultants and loads of people around the table to maybe figure
out and spend a load of money. But it's just intuitive and it
just comes to me. And then then if you feed that
into an entrepreneurial founder LED 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 pretty go back to
your founder question or deal 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 lads, that was fun.