How I Built This with Guy Raz - Gymshark: Ben Francis. From pizza delivery to billion-dollar fitness brand.

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

At 19, Ben Francis was lifting weights during the day and delivering pizza at night. He didn’t have money. He didn’t have fashion experience. He didn’t even know how to sew. What he did have was a front-row seat… to a new online trend. Before Instagram and influencers became a strategy, a handful of YouTubers were redefining gym culture — building identity and community online. With his gymwear brand Gymshark, Ben didn’t try to compete with Nike. He didn’t try to buy ads. He did something much more powerful: He built relationships. He sent free T-shirts to the Youtubers he admired. He learned what gym-goers actually wanted to wear: tapered tracksuits, and shirts that emphasized their muscles.Today, Gymshark is valued at more than a billion dollars, and Ben is the youngest billionaire in the UK. But his story is not just about business. It’s about identity, discipline, humility—and learning to grow as fast as you can learn. What You’ll Learn: How to build a brand by building community first How to hire smart people without losing control of your companyAvoiding imposter syndrome by creating your own apprenticeship program How to get stronger by staying in your lane Timestamps: 06:15 - The IT education that changed Ben’s life17:48 - Gymshark’s first sale: a £2 profit that had him dancing in his bedroom20:06 - Early apparel—Screen-printing T shirts, a single sewing machine 23:50 - How YouTube bodybuilders became their best marketers 40:48 - How Ben hired his own boss–and what he learned from him47:44 - Expanding to the US: a bone-chilling trip to Ohio  50:35 - The bodybuilder’s aesthetic: big shoulders, narrow waist53:58 - The painful breakup between Ben and his co-founder 1:04:49 - Why he earned the nickname “Hurricane Ben.” 1:12:30 - A legacy company: Resisting the urge to grow beyond the gym 1:19:19 - Small Business Spotlight This episode was produced by J.C. Howard, with music by Ramtin Arablouei.Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Alex Cheng. Follow How I Built This:Instagram → @howibuiltthisX → @HowIBuiltThisFacebook → How I Built ThisFollow Guy Raz:Instagram → @guy.razYoutube → guy_razX → @guyrazSubstack → guyraz.substack.comWebsite → guyraz.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special.

There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business, Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing

through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe, all loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries, visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna,

walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better your home might be worth more than you think find out how much at arbb.ca slash host so you get to this conference this body power conference how or what happened there was there were people curious like what is this gym shark thing like what how do people respond Well, that was probably the most surreal weekend of my life because prior to the event, we were selling around 200 to 250 pounds a day in revenue.

But I just remember spending the whole time just grabbing products, selling product. And in the event, we completely sold out of everything that we took. And after the event, I remember we were so tired. We all just lay down on the floor in the stand. And there was a guy who had worked at a different stand, and he walked over to us. And he said, how did you do that? And I remember looking at him and saying, I've got no idea. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists,

and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how an online shop selling T-shirts took Ben Francis from college dropout to being the youngest billionaire in the UK. There's a moment in the early 2010s when something subtle starts to shift in fitness. people start filming their workouts and posting their progress and crafting a bodybuilding identity online. Workouts effectively become public. And right in the middle of that shift was a teenager named Ben Francis. Now, at the time, Ben wasn't a founder. He was still in college. He was delivering pizzas at night, going to the gym in the afternoon, and tinkering on websites in his bedroom.

But Ben saw what was changing. He saw that gym culture was becoming a community you could join from anywhere. And he wanted to build a uniform for that community. So he and a few friends started making clothing specifically for weightlifters. They didn't know apparel, but they knew how the clothes should feel, how they should move, how they should make you look when you loaded the bar and stepped up to lift. And then there was the second insight, maybe the bigger one. If you want to build a brand, don't buy ads, build relationships.

Ben reached out directly to the powerlifters and bodybuilders who were shaping this new online culture on YouTube. Not celebrities, not athletes with agents, real people with small audiences who trusted them. And when those lifters started wearing Ben's new brand, Jimshark, it didn't grow, it exploded. But here's what's unusual. As the company scaled, Ben didn't pretend to know. everything. He learned leadership from the more experienced people he hired. He effectively built an apprenticeship inside his own company. He studied logistics, design, marketing, the supply chain, tech, until he could eventually step into the role of CEO with total confidence. Today, Jim Shark is

one of the most influential fitness brands in the world with nearly a billion dollars in revenue and a global community of fans, lifters, and creators. But, To understand how Ben built all of this, you have to go back to where it started. He grew up in the 1990s in early 2000s near Birmingham and England's Midlands. As a teenager, there were two things he loved, going to the gym and at school studying IT. It changed my life, to be frank, because it's where I learned how to learn. We were so fortunate. It was the school that I went to was, for whatever reason, that obviously accelerated tech.

because I had access to the creative suites. I remember Dreamweaver, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, I can't remember what else was in there. But then being 18, knowing how to use that software, it was like, you know, knowing how to use magic. It was absolutely brilliant. Yeah, it's like a language. And when you're that young, like your brain is just absorbing all this stuff.

And if you love it, you can figure it out. So you were being trained to do this. meantime getting ready for university. And by the time you got to university, you went to school called Astin University, you learned these skills of school. And I read that, okay, building a website, I can, you know, I can understand it. And you started to build sort of small businesses, right? Like I read, for example, that you tried building a website that, like, sold personalized car

license plates. Yes. Yeah. So that was the first thing. That was actually when I was at school. So I would have been, I don't know, 17 maybe the oldest. By the way, how did you, because personalized license plates in the UK are, I think, are very expensive. It's not like in the US where you just go to the DMV and register.

Like, it's sometimes people pay like hundreds of thousands of dollars for personalized license. How are you able to sell those on a website at 17? Oh, well, we just sold cheap ones. Oh, you would buy, you would buy existing ones. So it wasn't particularly sophisticated. We would literally, they would come. through and you could buy them for 300 pounds or something, but you could sell them for two or three thousand. So what we do is we'd sort of see what was coming up for release by the ones that

look like that could be valuable, put them on the website and then sell them. So you'd have to sort of hold stock or inventory, I guess. It does like a flip on basically. Basically, yeah, yeah. And it's just sort of that early day sort of thing. And so that was the first thing. And then my first iPhone, I think I got when I was about, it must have been 18, because I remember I was at school when I first got it, university sort of time. And it was having that or seeing that first iPhone that then made me really interested in the idea of not just web development, but app development. I remember having that first iPhone and thinking, I would love to learn how to do this. So the leap from building websites to developing apps, like it wasn't an insurmountable leap.

You could basically buy the off-the-shelf software you needed to start building the apps, and you could figure out how to build an app on your own. Yeah, just through YouTube. And for me, those apps were in fitness. So it was, I don't know, how to get in shape. And, you know, it was like different areas where you'd look at different exercises, learn how to do them. It would all just be text imagery and video. Okay, right.

And they were fitness app. So let's dive into that for a moment. I mean, you got in to go into the gym at what age? About 16, 17. And the gym was really important to me because it was that first time in my life where I realized that I'll get out of it what I put in. Yeah. So if I go to the gym five days a week for a year,

I will be in a better position at the end of that year than I was at the start of it. And that was a fundamental and really important lesson for me. You could literally see the changes. Exactly. Yeah. And so how did you, when you started to go to the gym, I mean, going at 16, you're younger than most people in there and can be intimidating. And, you know, like, did you just, like, get into the habit of going every day? You find the local gym.

You sort of go with friends. I think at that age when you're a teenager, go after. to school, you sort of travel in a pack of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, basically. We all do the same workout. Chest Monday, back Tuesday, shoulders Wednesday, legs Thursday, arms Friday sort of thing. But you're right, it was, because I would go into the gym and, and you'd see all these big lifters. Yeah. Yeah. Especially when you're a young teenager and you're really thin. You'd assume that they all, you think that they're all looking at you. You think you're doing

everything wrong in, in reality. They're probably more interested in themselves than they are you. And, you know, you know, no one really cares that much about what. other people are doing. But it was intimidating. So I'd just go with friends and we'd lift weights and we'd have fun and we'd go after school. All right. So that's a, that's becoming an increasingly important part of your life. But also on the side, like you're trying out these businesses and websites. Did you ever make any money doing these businesses like personalized car license plays or no? No. They all failed miserably. None of them made any money. Most of the apps were free. The ones that weren't, you know, the downloads were so tiny.

It was like a few quid. So it was nothing made any money at that point. But it seems like already you were, I mean, you were generating these ideas in your head about businesses, like things you could do and ways you could make money, you know, digitally. Is that right? I mean, was your sort of head moving in that direction already at that age? Yeah, the thing for me was when things, quote, failed,

it never felt like a failure. So when I was about 14, everyone here does work experience. So you go away, you do work experience for a little bit and you know, you find out what it's like to actually go into an office or a factory or something like that. So when I was 14, I went and did work experience with my granddad. He basically had his own business. Or he has his own business. So he'd line furnaces. So we'd go into factories around the Midlands.

We'd literally go into the furnaces and the job would be you either line them with brick or ceramic fibre. So it's basically like an insulation around the midlands. the inside. And there was a lot of things I learned there. So one, I learned hard work. But the thing that that really stuck with me was he told me about all the risks he had to take when he started his business. He had two kids. He had a mortgage. He had a wife. And when he was building his business, he had to take massive financial risks that risked the house and, you know, the roof over the head of his kids. So fast forward four years later, I'm 17, 18, and I'm trying to start my own business, I genuinely felt like I had no risk. I was at the time I was working at

pizza hurt. I was earning four pound, five pound an hour. You know, I could buy domain names for three pound 50 at the time. Yeah. My risk was zero and I'd always been brought up to know that there was genuine risk in starting a business. And then that allowed me to recognize it at the time. I didn't really have any risk compared to what he had. So, all right, so you get to university and you're working at Pizza Hut, as you mentioned. And when you got to university, had you already started to think about a new business idea? So it wasn't actually an idea necessarily for a business. Going back to the whole idea, the whole thing was I loved doing new things and I loved learning new things. At that point, the aim was simply to sell one thing online. And I remember we sort of

opened up Shopify website. It was all there. You know, we bought the domain name. And then it was a bit like, okay, now we haven't got anything to sell. Now, at this point, we hadn't thought to sell apparel. At this point, we really wanted to sell supplements because we'd, you know, get into the gym, taking your protein shakes and all that sort of stuff. And there was a friend of mine who worked at a local supplement shop. And I remember calling him up, his name was Dan. And I said, listen, Dan, I've got this website. I want to sell supplements online. Can you do me a deal? I want to buy some supplements off you and I'll sell them. And he went, yeah, I can do you a deal. I'll do you a deal. And he came back to me the next day and he said, right,

I've, you know, I've got rid of all of our minimum order quantities, but the lowest I can go is, I think it was 10,000 pounds. Now, at this point, I'd never heard of 10,000 pound, let alone seen 10,000 pound. That would have been years worth of income for me at pizza. Right. So that was obviously a door close. You would not be able to buy stock. No. You wouldn't be able to buy a bunch of supplements and hold them.

No, exactly. So at that point, it was almost like a good problem because then we started thinking, well, how can we? Because remember, the aim was literally to sell something. something. And that's when we found out about drop shipping, where we could literally load at the website with hundreds of supplements, have them slightly more expensive than what the drop shipper would obviously sell them to us for. And then when people order them, it would then ship through the drop shipper to the customer. And you called it, you called it Jimshark from the beginning. Yeah, it was run on jimshark.com.com. And jimshark was the name that you came up with. I mean,

you got the domain, but it was, tell me about that name. Yeah, to be honest. Because I never thought it would be anything big, it was a real arbitrary decision to the point where I can hardly remember why we called it Jim Shark. I know the domain was cheap. I know it was about £3.50. I know it was available. So no, I don't, it was just, it was just like, I guess, an instinctive decision at the time. Got it. Can I rewind for a sec? Just because I want to go slightly back a little bit, which is, first of all, you're talking about we. And I want to kind of dig into this because I guess at university you met a guy named Lewis Morgan. Yeah. And he would eventually work with you on Jim Shark.

Who is Lewis? How did you meet him? What's the story? I knew Lewis from school. We weren't friends, but we knew of each other. We became friends through the gym. And it was a case of like, I think we were racing who could have the biggest arms, the quickest or something like that. And then it was through the gym that we would then bounce in all these ideas off each other.

So that's obviously where then we found Shopify and drop shipping and built from there. All right. There's one other bit of context that I'm curious about, which is Birmingham, I think, and maybe I'm wrong with this, is sort of like the center of bodybuilding culture in the UK a little bit. Like I guess there are like bodybuilding conferences and conventions in Birmingham. Is that right? Yeah. So there's a couple of things. So one, Dorian Yates, one of the best bodybuilders of all time is from Birmingham.

but you're right. The biggest and the best bodybuilding and lifting event, as far as I was aware, certainly in the UK, possibly Europe, was actually run out of Birmingham. And it was called the body power event. And we'd all go there just as fans. And it was really cool because all of the biggest and the best bodybuilders were always from the US. So to be able to go and see them, see the brands, see the big bodybuilders in Birmingham was just an amazing thing as a 16, 17, 18 year old. And when you first decided to start this sort of drop ship Shopify website, it was you and Lewis or anyone else? Yeah, it was literally just me and Lewis for at least 18 months, probably even the first two years. Right. Okay. So you launch a site and how did it do?

Well, we had the Shopify website. It looked amazing. It was full of supplements. It looked incredibly professional. We sent it live. absolutely nothing happened for weeks. Nothing. I sort of didn't realize that because the website was like, I assume that people would just come across it and find it. No one found the website. We completely had to try and work out how to get traffic there. And it was actually Facebook. We started Facebook pages. Obviously, there was a JimShart Facebook page and lifting pages. And this is just pages that you were starting. You didn't have cash to put ads out. No, we had no money, no ads, no nothing. It was literally just organic Facebook pages. with pictures of lifters and bodybuilding news and things like that.

And I think it probably took a couple of months. And eventually we had our first sale. It was 52 pounds. The cost to us was 50 to the drop shipper. So we had a two pound profit. It took us about, I don't know, call it two months. So we were earning a profit of a pound a month. But it didn't matter.

Because if you think about that two months prior, the whole ambition was to sell something online. And that feeling of selling something online, was just absolutely brilliant. And I was, honestly, I was just absolutely blown away. I was dancing around my bedroom at like 19 years old, whatever it was, 18, 19 years old. Just so pleased that we'd sold something. So, I mean, getting an order is exciting.

But, I mean, you mentioned your margins were like incredibly low. One to two pounds per, you know. Order. Yeah. So how long did you keep it as a supplement business before you start to think, you know, maybe, maybe we should look around for a different product. Yeah, it would be somewhere between six to 12 months, maybe, something like that. And we did sell and we managed to build up maybe we're getting a sale or two a week,

but because the margin was so low, there was a point where we were genuinely debating as to whether or not this is even worth carrying on. And then my, so my nan had done a curtain making course. Your grandma. Yeah, yeah. And she had a sewing machine on the dining table in her house. And it sort of made me think, well, I wonder if we could actually make our own clothing at this point. And now at that point, we then bought a sewing machine, we brought a screen printer, we'd save the money for it.

And we started to basically to try to hand-make, hand-print our own clothing, basically. And that was where it all really started to kick off. But again, this was like, let's just try selling clothing on this site. Yeah, exactly that. And it was, there was definitely a thing of no one made clothing specific to bodybuilders and lifters. And it's less even, it was more around the branding. No one sold product that was dedicated to that sort of that group that we were very much a part of. So we ended up at that point, we sort of bought a load of blanks.

And again, it's a fairly standard thing that I guess a lot of people do today. We started screen printing and in some areas as well, sewing our own product. All right, so let's kind of break this down. You buy a sewing machine and a screen printer. And how much does that stuff cost? The screen printer was about £1,000. Sewing machine would have been a few hundred quid. So at that point, it would have been all in just over £1,000.

But we could make lots of different product, different logos, all on the same blanks. And blanks are just blank t-shirts. Yeah, blank t-shirts, blank t-shirts, blank, hoodies. And you get them in white, black, grey, almost like a similar sort of thing to like a fruit of the loom, standard t-shirt with logos. And it was all made to order. Like if somebody ordered a shirt, then you would screenprint it, basically. Yeah, literally.

We'd wake up, we'd see if there was an order, screen print it, take it to the post office, send it, and then that was it. And this, presumably, this didn't really cost you that much money because you could just go to, like, a, I mean, were you literally, like, just going to, we would call it, like, Ross or, you know, or T.J. Max type stores and just buying bulk t-shirts? No, we bought them from a UK wholesaler. So you could buy, again, the minimums were low, like the minimums might have been 10 per size or something.

So, and then going back to the versus the supplements, because we still had supplements on the website at this point as well. We could sell, I make 50 pounds worth of supplements, make two pounds in margin, or we could sell 30 pounds worth of clothing and make 15 pounds. So it was that, that to us completely changed the game because all of a sudden, we were sort of starting to build a model where we could reinvest

in our own business and that's when we could really start to grow it. But initially it was just t-shirts, tanks and... Hoodies. And hoodies, okay. And, I mean, was there, in your mind at least, like a big vision at that point? Or was it just, let's just do this and see what happens? No, it was really gradual. So the first moment was, let's make a website that sells something online.

Then it was we got the first sale. Then it was almost let's get our second sale. Then it was let's try and get a sale a week and then a sale a month. And then the bar was always incredibly low. It wasn't for many, many years until we really started to think ahead. You almost just think about the next thing and dedicate. We found ourselves dedicating ourselves wholeheartedly to just what that next thing was. So again, like with the supplements you were thinking maybe people would stumble on it and order supplements.

I can't imagine all of a sudden the floodgates open and people are like, oh, they have T-shirts and hoodies now. I mean, was it still like crickets? No, it was exactly that. And it was all done through Facebook pages. But the big moment for us was then the next year when we went to that body power event. And we visited as customers, as we always did. And we went up to the show office

where you can book for the next year. They would generally book a year in advance. And we went up there. And I remember saying to them, please can we have a stand? We want to book a stand for next year. And I think it was a minimum of 3,000 pounds. So again, it was a lot of money to us. But at that point, we'd sort of started

to sell enough to give us the confidence that between the sales on the website plus the jobs that we had, we could probably, within 12 months, we could get the money together. You can make 3,000 pounds. Yeah. Yeah. And you decide that you're going to go to this conference. And what were you going to do there? I mean, how were just T-shirts and hoodies and T-tops going to be? enough to generate excitement. So we booked the space the year before and then that whole year, it sort of gave us something really big to work towards. We were then like, right, let's build our business to this event. So the event was in May. And at the time, all of our fitness information, going back to sort of that web development era, all of the information that we learned was through

YouTube. So it was just through watching YouTubers and all our favorite fitness people were on YouTube. So we ended up just sort of building relationships with a handful of YouTubers. And I actually remember Matt Ogus and Chris Lovado, they live in California at the time, remember jumping on Skype to them and just talking about the products that we were making. They gave us feedback. We'd send them the product. They would put them in their YouTube videos. And what was the product? It was something beyond T-shirts? No, no, it was just the T-shirts and tanks. And because this is kind of early-ish YouTube, it wasn't that hard to just connect with them and say, hey, I'll watch your YouTube videos.

Can I send you some stuff? Yeah, and they were really just excited. I don't think they'd probably spoke to anyone from the UK before. And we, through that year, we then not only built enough sales to cover the $3,000 for the stand, I think we actually upgraded the size of the stand. I think it probably cost us another $3,000. But we even had enough money by the following May before the event

to fly those YouTubers out to the UK to come to the event. And we, I remember we called them or we asked them if they wanted to come and they were just over the moon. They obviously, they just immediately said yes. So they flew out to the event and that was a, we didn't even realize it at the time. That was a game changer for us. And the idea was like what did you propose to them, just wear Jim Shark stuff and beat our booth? Yeah, literally come to the event, we'll fly you out. Obviously put you up in a hotel, come to the booth, we'll go to the gym.

I mean, we'll just, I guess, chill together and have a good time at the event. All right. So you're getting close to this conference. And tell me a little bit about how you start to think about what you were going to feature there. Honestly, we didn't. Beyond having the YouTube, like being there with the YouTubers and having the product, we didn't think too much about it. The big thing for us, it was the launch of our first ever track suit. So we had the event, our first ever track suit, which we built up to on our Facebook page at the time.

and obviously the YouTube, YouTubers were there as well. That was everything, and we were just sort of going, excited to be there. All right, let's talk about the track suit. How did you design it? I mean, you obviously knew how to design a website, but did you know how to design clothing?

Oh, no, no. We just had to learn as we went, really. We was just searching around online. We found manufacturers. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated process, but it was just us trying to build the track suit, that at the time no one else was making and that we really wanted. And I'm assuming you went to like to China, right?

Because that's where all the manufacturing happened and still happens to some extent. Yeah, yeah. So the first truck suit was made in China. And I can't remember how we found the manufacturing. It would have been on, you know, on Ali Barbar or something like that. I think it was. I think that's where we found them. And it was all around the fit.

It was very tapered at the waist. The trousers were tapered. It was very much around that tapered fit at the time. And the taper fit. presumably you, you know, you look better in it, right? Especially if you're, because it shows off your muscles or whatever. I mean, even for sort of skinnier guys, right? If it's more fitted, it can sort of enhance the way your body looks.

Yeah, and that's where it was really born. And that's what we tried to do today, right? We try and build some really physique accentuating clothing. That's where all that began through that first track suit and through that early product. Even before that, just buying all the inventory, how much do you estimate you had to spend just to order the inventory to hold it? It would have been less than 10,000 pounds, but it would have been in the thousands. And how did you have that cash? That was through a combination of pizza hurt, building the business, and just basically reinvest in every single penny that we had.

Because we had no cost, every single pound of profit would literally just go into that order. All right, so you get to this conference, this body power conference, and you have like a bunch of big guys at the booth. And what, I mean, you've got a track suit there. Yeah. And I'm trying to imagine like what, I mean, how or what happened there? I mean, was there, were people curious? Like, what is this Jim Shark thing? Like, what, how do people respond?

Well, that was probably the most surreal weekend of my life because we, we, we, we, we, we, you know, we, we, we, we, you know, we. We hadn't even finished setting up the stand. I remember I was still running from the van to bring the product in. In the days before this, you know, all the YouTubers have been posted on Facebook, on YouTube, letting everyone know that they would be there. And we didn't really know how, I guess, how big or how famous they were. But they'd let everyone know that they were being there. And as soon as they opened the doors to that event, it just felt like people flooded to the stand.

And people were there to see, you know, their heroes, basically, because they'd never seen them before. So it's interesting because most of these guys would walk down the streets of Birmingham or wherever and nobody would have any idea who they were. But at that conference, these guys were rock stars. In the world of lifting, they were huge. The younger sort of late teens, early 20s audience knew them. But then the older people maybe at the time in their 30s or their 40s just had no idea because YouTube was very much a, it was just so new at the time. But then the people that visited Astand also ended up buying products. And from whatever it opened on that Saturday morning all the way through to close on Sunday night, I just remember spending the whole time just grabbing products, selling product.

And in the event, we completely sold out of everything that we took. And I'm trying to figure out why. Like, again, as you described it, it's a really basic track suit, right? It's not, I mean, it's tapered, so it's probably differentiated. But Jim Shark was an unknown brand. but there was excitement. People were like kind of coming to your booth and checking it out. What do you think explains it?

Do you think it was the fit? Yeah, I think the fit of the tracksuit, it was definitely a fairly unique design, but to your point, it wasn't revolutionary. I think the fact that their heroes on YouTube were wearing it, so this was most of the people at the stand were young kids. It was us basically. It was teenage guys. And what was the retail price of the gym suit?

I think we had to do everything cash that weekend. So we literally just had sort of bags around our way. We were literally just selling everything. I think it was round numbers. I think it was 30 pounds and we were just selling it all for cash. And after the event, I remember we were so tired. We all just lay down on the floor in the stand. And there was a guy who had worked at a stand, a different stand.

And he walked over to us. He was a bit older and he hadn't even heard of the YouTubers. And he said, how did you do that? And I remember looking at him and saying, I've got no idea. When we come back in just a moment, Jim Shark breaks into the U.S. market and Ben lands in Ohio in December without checking the weather first. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.

So it's 2013 and with the help of some YouTube influencers, Jim Shark sells a ton of track suits and T-shirts at the annual Body Power Expo. prior to the event we were selling around 200 to 250 pounds a day in revenue. Because we were at the event and we couldn't ship from the website, we turned the website off the weekend. That's how small the business was, going back to it being a project. And the following week when we turned the website back on and we posted online that we were back live, we did £30,000 in revenue in 30 minutes, sold out of everything.

And that weekend was really important because it was the weekend I both quit. university and pizza hurt to pursue Jim Shark. So I was so happy because going into it, I was so nervous because, I mean, I was the first person in my family to go to university. And I remember calling my mom and dad and saying, I'm going to drop out. Because they were so proud of the fact that I'd worked so hard to get into university. That was not a given for me whatsoever. And I called them and I said, I'm going to leave university.

And you know, when you sort of expect, you like a kid, you sort of expect to get told off. And they were so supportive. They just said, listen, if this is what you want to do, then go for it. So now you've got a real business. And these influencers at that time, were they getting paid or were they were just happy to get free stuff and to be? No. No. This is before that era where you have to pay like a million dollars for a post or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. But also the advantage back then was if you had 20,000 followers in 2013, the algorithm was different. Like those 20,000 followers would literally watch the videos. Of course, today if you have 2 million, maybe only 1% of those people are even going to be aware that you have a new video out. Yeah. Yeah, I wish I could say it was some wonderful strategy that we built. It literally wasn't. We made a website because it felt it was interesting.

We made the product that we wanted to wear. We went to the event we wanted to go to and we sent clothes to the people that we love to follow. It was literally, to your point, a really natural process. and there was in no way a strategy. We didn't think too far ahead. We just did what felt right and instinctive. But you knew that once that you sold $30,000 and a half hour of tracksuits on your website, you knew that this was, you had something here, that this could actually have legs.

Yeah. I remember being sat there. It was the middle of the night in my mom and dad's house. The website, I had to literally go through every single, because all the stock was set to, like, infinite. inventory. So you were just, there was no stock levels, but I knew we'd sold out. So I had to go through every product and zero the inventory, so everything was sold out, sort of clawing across my laptop to get it all sorted. And sat there once that was done, just thinking, wow, we've got something special here. And that, again, that's just where it all began. And at that point, we were signing up

to the next event, the next body power. We were signing up to another event. We obviously just bought more inventory. And we doubled down on everything that had worked for us, particularly in that sort of couple of months. We just doubled down on it. And you were living with your mom and dad. You were 20, 21 or whatever. Yeah, I mean, you're a young guy. And in the inventory, where were you keeping it? So at the time, it was just in my mom and dad's basically, like, in their house. And it was just too much to keep in there.

But in the run-up to the event, we thought we have to find a unit. So we found it was a local unit in the countryside. It was a place called Droitwich, which you won't have heard of. and it was an old shed on a canal, and it was made out of asbestos, and it cost us £300 a month. But it was our space, and that's where we stored everything. But still, in those first, like, 2013, 2014, 2015, it was still track suits and T-shirts, tanks, sweatshirts.

That was it. That was what you were selling. Yeah, and it was in that period then. So the following year, we then started to do the events. We did our first event abroad in Germany. that's when we were up brought in our first, essentially the first Jim Shart staff. So the first person that joined was actually my brother, and he joined to package the orders whilst we were away at the event.

So that's when we sort of started to build out the team. But it was literally like an order would come in, he would package it up, walk to the post office with a bunch of boxes, and mail them out, or DHS or UPS or whatever you were using. Yeah, exactly. that. And then at the end of the day, the last thing we would always do is sit on our laptops and we would go through all of the customer queries. And we wouldn't leave until everything was sent out. Every query was responded to. And then obviously we'd go to the gym. All right. So I read that in 2014, you're, you ended that year with about 250,000 pounds in sales. So great, amazing, but still tiny, right? And around this time, I guess you meet two guys, two businessmen. who will eventually play a pivotal role in helping Jim Shark grow. One is a guy named Steve Hewitt, who I guess had some experience in the apparel industry.

And the other was a guy named Paul, Paul Richardson. So how did these guys start to help you? And by the way, how did you meet them? So we'd go to the gym and there'd be local business people that had run businesses and you sort of knew who they were. When you go to the gym all the time, you sort of end up knowing who's who and chatting to people. So again, we sort of befriended Paul. Paul gave us some advice on a few, I guess, a few bits. And Paul then connected us with Steve. And I think at that point, that's when we sort of arranged the meeting. And I remember we sat down with Steve and Paul was

there. And we just said, listen, we want to make, I think it was at the time we actually wanted to make some T-shirts. And we didn't know any European suppliers. And Steve did know European suppliers. So that was then, I guess that was the relationship. was we worked through the business that Steve worked for to get some product made in Europe. And then because Steve, in his previous job, before that, he'd actually worked for Reebok. And again, he was just talking a language

we didn't understand margin for us. We just bought stuff and then we sold stuff. And that was it. We didn't know what a margin was. And, I mean, being honest, we, I think they put us in touch with an accountant because we didn't know really about how to file accounts, bookkeeping, tax rights.

all of these different things. No one teaches you any of this. We were just sort of picking it up as we went. So I'm sure every entrepreneurs had this. But I remember the day before the close of our financial year or when the accounts were due, the accountant emailed a list and they were like, right, we need all of these things. I mean, we had none of them. So we had an old table tennis table with all of our receipts for the year and we're trying

to organize everything. It was every, again, you just don't, you're not taught these things. So for us working with those two and their experience was, incredibly helpful. I imagine that they were looking at you. Like, how old was Paul and Steve at that time? How old were those guys? Paul probably would have been in his late 50s.

Steve would have been in his 40s. Okay, so these guys way older than you could be old enough to be your parents. I'm thinking they probably looked at you guys, at you and Lewis, is like, oh, these are really cool young guys. I want to help them out. Like, this is a cool little business that they're starting. I have to imagine that they never imagined it could be. something huge. They were probably just wanted to be helpful because you guys were young and

enthusiastic. Yeah, yeah, and at the time they were doing their own things. But there was a point where I remember Steve talking to Steve, and the thing is that Steve was really good at, that we had no experience of. He was very good with people. So he understood how to run businesses. He understood about how to structure businesses. And he came in and he did, I think he did a day a month. And again, I'd never known about this. We were paying him. a day rate. Again, you don't know how these things worked. You basically hired him as a consultant. We hired him as a consultant and he did one day a month for us. And I think we upped it to a day a week. And then there was a point where I remember saying to him, I asked him to come on as like an MD,

so not quite a CEO, but just someone to support the day to do and run the business. And managing director. Yeah. That's when he then came on full time. And what we essentially did was he ran what we called the back end of the business, so operations. logistics, you know, basically everything that wasn't brand or product to market him. I'm curious, I mean, I'd have to ask Steve this question, I guess, but from your perspective, what would make a guy in his late 40s or maybe early 50s, I don't know, however old he was at the time, stopped doing what he was doing and join you guys full time? I mean, that's kind of risky, right?

I mean, he must have seen potential for this to be bigger, right? how did you make it interesting for him? Like he, of course, he was going to get equity in the business. And how did you figure out how to make that work? And what did you even know about like equity splits? And by the way, I'm asking you all of this not to say, oh, my gosh, how, you know, you were so naive. It's more like the people listening to this episode, because a lot of them are in their 20s and early 30s, maybe even teenagers. are listening right now, they're asking this question.

They're like, wow, how did he know what to do at that time? Because I don't know what to do. Yeah, I think we were definitely lucky. So when Steve came on full time, we did give him equity. So I think that was important to him. And I think that probably gave him that level of comfort that you wouldn't get if you didn't have any equity whatsoever. The day rate would have been whatever, whatever it was.

But then obviously he moved on to a salary. I won't share what the salary was. but I remember he was by far the most well-paid person, not only in the business, but I'd ever heard of. Because he had to be. Yeah. Like we'd never, I'd never heard of people that were earning that sort of money. But he, you know, he deserved it, right?

The value he brought to our business was absolutely worth it. So it was funny for me to go from this perspective of, oh, wow, I didn't realize people earned that much money to, oh, well, he can earn that much money because he's going to really help grow our business in a way that he's far more. valuable than the cost that he will incur. And you were still the CEO, basically. Yeah, so I was the CEO, but then at that point, it was very much just me and Lewis doing

everything. Yeah, so I wouldn't really call it a CEO job. It was just, we were just running the business, basically. But it sounds like, I mean, it sounds like by hiring Steve, you were essentially hiring a mentor. It's almost like you, I mean, you kind of hired your own body. hired your boss. You basically said, okay, it's my business, but I want to hire, I need somebody to kind of show me the ropes here. I need you to help me figure this out. As much as he taught us, I think he showed us so much more because I've found that it's one thing having someone

sit down and go, Ben, you need to think about this like this. Watching someone work for me is even to this day, it's really valuable. I genuinely think I learn more from watching than I do from people tell him because it was the way he interacted with people, the way that he thought about things. And that as a young 20-something with zero experience was huge for us. What were some of the first things that Steve did when he joined? I mean, because at this point, you still have a very limited line of products. Given that he had come from Reebok and apparel, was he saying, okay, guys, we have to hire now, we have to hire a designer and we have to think about a whole line of apparel we want to sell.

Yeah, so exactly that. So the first thing that we did was we split the business straight down the middle and we had front end and back end. So it was brand and market on the one end and then call it like a very early build of a product or a supply chain team, maybe. Now, this was the period where we doubled down on events even more. So then we traveled a lot. We did events in Ohio, California, Cologne,

Melbourne, the UK. At that point, we probably had at least probably like 10 employees. So there was a group of us that would go and just basically sell the product in person to, in the same way that we did that first body power event. You know, when Steve joined, I would think given his experience, I would think one of the things he would have said is, all right, guys, let's get serious now. Let's go and just go and just raise a bunch of money and just scale quickly.

Because what happens is a business does very well, but they can't keep up with orders. They can't scale because they know the cash. And that's a huge problem. When you don't have the cash, when you've got lots of orders, you can also tank a business. So how did it happen that you didn't actually need outside cash? Well, I guess because we were and we are a cash-generative business, we sell products at a high-marked. margin and we have the cash come in before we distribute it and we certainly did then. So we didn't need the cash and being honest, again, I didn't know that raising money was a thing. I'd never heard

have known anyone that had raised money until probably my, well into my early, if not mid-20s. We're from a very industrial part of the West Midlands. It's not London or New York. We'd never, we just didn't know that that was a thing beyond, I don't even think we had an overdraft on the bank, maybe for many years into building the business. Now, obviously, no, I now know that there are many incredibly smart people that can build businesses in different ways. But that was the only way that we knew how at the time. You got to make a profit from the start, basically. And reinvest everything, don't take any money out and just really focus on growing the business.

And again, just I guess to show our naivity, the first trip we ever did to the US with Jim Schart, we flew to the Arnold event in Columbus, Ohio. I think it was December. I'd never been to Columbus, Ohio before. alone in the winter. We didn't even check the weather. So I just went with a t-shirt and track suit sort of thing. I remember landing, looking out the window and seeing all the snow. And I remember they said on the plane, on the tannoy, the temperature. And I remember I just, I had no idea what that was in Celsius, but I knew it was freezing. We didn't have any clothes that were good enough for an Ohio winter.

But we just had a great time selling the product and being with the community, being with going into the gyms. We were just having the time of our life. So when you started to go to these trade shows in the U.S., for example, I mean, you were small potatoes, tiny compared to the brands that were probably at some of these shows. But was it, how did people respond? I mean, were people like, oh, you're from the UK? Like, what are you?

Or because these YouTubers already had, let's say, a global appeal, or did people know who you were when you'd go to the shows? That was the most surprising thing. We landed in Ohio and again, you think no one would know. But again, I think the thing to remember is these trade shows are and were filled with real fans of the industry. So it wasn't like we were landing. It's like people who go to a Star Trek convention.

Like they know every character. Yeah, sorry, keep going. So we landed into Ohio and you sort of think would anyone know? And you're right. I think it was the, it was a combination of because we, we were big on social media at that point through the YouTubers and the YouTubers were there with us. So then again, three of the, I think three of the five were from the States anyway. They had big America, a bigger US following.

It gave us a legitimacy very, very quickly, which I think was great. And again, because no one else at that point was doing what we were doing, albeit it wasn't massively technically advanced, but we were speaking to an audience that no one else was speaking to. I think we then had that legitimacy quite quickly in the US. So, all right, let's talk about products because, you know, one of the things, and you may be familiar with this story, but years ago we had Chip Wilson who started Lou Lemon on the show. And he really, he kind of was a pioneer of this fabric that they would end up using, this like stretchy fabric that, you know, worked really well. Many women felt like it made them look more flattering. at that point, you know, you were still, it was like mainly cottons that you were using and, you know, just the tracksuits and the t-shirts.

When did you start to have conversations internally like, hey, let's think about like performance material and let's think about, you know, sort of doing something a little bit more innovative? I think one of the things that I really admire about what Chip did at Lulu was, I think I could probably close my eyes and you could hand me a product and I could tell you that it was a product of theirs. I think that's so impressive and inspiring. Yeah. I would say the first piece of sort of performance apparel that we made would have been our first seamless product. And we were trying to work out how could we make the best physique accentuating T-shirt? So it was all about making your shoulders look bigger and your waist look narrower.

And seamless means it's made with synthetic, mainly synthetic materials. Yeah, yeah, so but and then it's it's knitted in a tube. So rather than having flat, I guess, flat fabric that you then sew together, it's knitted into a tube as well. So it creates a really, I guess, physique hugging fit, but you can also knit designs into the product itself. And that was a big moment for us when we found out about that because we could knit in, uh, almost like a darker color over the chest, over the shoulders for a man. And then we've realized that it makes, essentially it makes your shoulders look wider and your waist look narrower. And that I think that's where some of the early product principles for JimShart really were born about building the best gymware that we can, but ultimately a really physique accentuating fit.

And did you have, I mean, at that point, and on staff in like a staff position, somebody who was a designer? Or not yet? Were you still mainly basically working with the designers that the manufacturers had on their staff? No, not really. that the point where we brought in a design team, it's actually quite funny, it looked bad on me, but the point that we built a design team

was, it was a few years in we, we thought we wanted to sell, we wanted to expand and we wanted to sell women's product as well as men's. Because again, the company in the early days was literally built in our image. It was lifting wear for young men to make your physique look better, basically.

And we wanted to make women's wear. And I thought, I'll give it a go. How hard can it be? We did our first women's range and it was terrible. It was absolutely terrible. No one wanted it. It looked terrible. It fitted terrible. It just didn't work. And it was at that point where we realized that if we're going to build, if we're going to do this properly, we need a design team and we need genuine designers who will, you know, think about how a women's range should look. So by the end of 2016, you guys had done almost $13 million in sales. You've got a little over 50 employees. You're real now, you know, still a small business, right? But still, like, you're starting to get attention at that point. Like, there's media attention. There's interest. Like, what is this UK brand that, you know, started in Birmingham? Who is this kid who started it? Tell me a little bit about, like, the attention that you started to get around this. Because, you know, all of a sudden one day you're a student at Aston University. And then, you know, a year later,

there's like an article in the Sunday Times about you. Jim Shark had a lot of attention because of it being a very public brand. I personally didn't really get too much attention, which was really helpful to me because it meant I could literally focus all my energy on running the business. That only really changed probably five years ago. That year, a couple of things happened. Lewis left, your co-founder. He left and started his own clothing company.

And was that, was he just burned out? was there a split? Was there tension or friction? Or was he just kind of like, I did this, I'm done. I want to go do my own thing. Yeah. So Lewis actually left the business in terms of his active involvement in the business. It was around 2015. We were doing it, it was somewhere between 10 and 20 million in revenue. So Lewis actually left the day to day of the business then. And yeah, I must admit that, I found that really hard. And I know he found it hard too. But that that was tough because it felt like at that point we were what, four, call it four, five years in. And really taking off.

Yeah, yeah, and we'd travel the world. We'd work together every minute of every day. So that was tough for me. But what was the reason he gave you? I mean, did you say, hey, why are you, why are leaving? Oh, yeah. I mean, we had plenty of conversations around it. Essentially, I think we just had different visions for where the business,

the way that we were running the business. And we had a disagreement. And again, I think it was a tough period for both of us. I was really disappointed. and I think the thing that a lot of people forget about is when things like this happen, the business still has to carry on. So you're going through this difficult period, but you still have to run the business. You still have to, at that point, we, again, probably had 20 or 30 staff.

You have to look after them. You have to do what's right for the business. And that was a really tough time for, I think, for both of us. And again, at that point, the business, we were growing during that period. So we were having to, it's hard enough to run a business that's growing that quickly, but to have that going on at the same time is, again, it's really tough. When we come back in just a moment, how Ben becomes a better leader by building his own apprenticeship program, but why he still earns the nickname Hurricane Ben.

Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2015, and even though Jim Shark is now a multi-million dollar business, there's trouble at the top. Ben and his partner Lewis are not getting along. Yeah, there's definitely tension. Absolutely. And at that point, I guess the only thing for us to do was go our separate ways. I mean, the only thing I could liken it to would probably be some sort of, it's like a business divorce, isn't it? And it went on for a while.

It took a long time for us to sort of iron out all the details and work out what it looks like in this sort of new chapter. Yeah, and obviously Lewis is not here. This is not a documentary show. It's a one-person interview. And it's not in no way does this, is this meant to reflect badly at him or on you. I'm sure both of you guys have perspectives on what happened. But I'm just curious, can you kind of give me a basic outline of which direction you kind of wanted to head in and which direction he wanted to head in? Because, again, probably both equally valid, right?

So what was the differences, the broad differences in vision? There was definitely a point of, I think, and you're right that I don't think one was necessarily right or one was necessarily wrong. I think they were just different. My perspective was very much like I was really happy to roll the dice time and time again and just keep growing and growing and growing the business and to bring in more people, more management types at the time and build the business from that perspective, whereas I think Lewis was a lot more, he really wanted it to be centered around us and the business act in a slightly different way.

And then I think that was the early tension. And then, again, without going too much into the detail, then there was a series of disagreements between us. And there was one of us that I think had to to move on in order to put the business first. And I think we, we then had to do that. Did your, I mean, do you guys, are you in touch today? Or was that sort of also the end of your personal relationship? No, no. That was the end of our personal relationship there, which, which I think is a shame, but it is what it is ultimately. So, all right. So now you'd mentioned earlier, like when you feel Lou Lemon or, you know, other brands, you could just know what they are without even opening your eyes. Did you start to think about, hey, I want, this is what I want Jim Shark to be.

I want us to be that too. We didn't consciously think about it, but I think it naturally started to build. And I think that, again, for us, what we've done is we've really tried to focus on building the best gym wear in the world. It's all around gym wear. So we're not trying to make product for, again, at this point, for sport. ball or running or yeah it was all around the gym because that that was and is our passion so and we'd always found that the product that performed the best was that physique accentuating product both for men's and women's at this point and that's that was our real sort of bull's eye and that's

what we just continued to double down on right because gym i guess like if you went to the gym in the U.S., right? I'm thinking most guys would be wearing Nike or Adidas, right? Maybe under armor, but also like people playing basketball or, you know, or tennis or running would also wear those. And in your mind, we could, you're thinking like, we're the brand for the gym. Like if people want to run and wear it, great. But like Lulu Lemon became a yoga brand or aloe, we want to be the gym brand. Exactly that. We want to be the brand that people wear when they're in the gym. And this is like, and direct to consumer, I mean, you are, you just like hit that wave, right? Because direct to consumer is a, was a model that all of a sudden, you know, in around 2012, just begins to explode at least in the U.S.

And then probably in the UK to some extent as well, the advantage is the, if you have high volume, your profit margins are much higher than if you, if you're, you've got a bunch of brick and mortar stores because you don't have those expenses. Yeah, and we could take that profit and reinvest it heavily, both into the product, but also into brand and market as well. So you go from like $12.5 million, $13 million pounds in sales in 2016 to $100 million in 2018, which is an amazing leap, right? I mean, the year-over-year growth is just meteoric. And Steve, by this point, Steve Hewitt is fully the CEO.

Yeah. But I'm curious, how did you were and I think still are the majority shareholder, majority owner. So all those young people who started with you, they knew that you had started the company, but there was a CEO. And so how did that work? I mean, did people come to you with questions and things that they wanted to do? Or would everybody go to Steve and say, hey, this is what? what we want to do and what do you think. Yeah, well, they do both.

And I think that was the point where it was really clear to me how important mine and Steve's relationship was and how aligned we were. Because if people didn't get the answer they wanted from Steve, then they would come to me or the opposite way around. So they'd sort of try and play almost like mom-off dad sort of thing. Yeah. So our relationship was really important.

Obviously, we'd speak every day. And when Steve was CEO, it was a great period for me, because I had that period. I think he was there for probably about five years. years, maybe even longer. And I had a period of accelerated learning in departments in our business, knowing that I could basically fail and I'd had a team around me that could help clean up after me. And it sort of felt like being able to do an exam, not get the result that you wanted, and then just do the exam again, because I could literally just try, fail, try, fail,

knowing that this team, I'd built this team around me to support me. So interesting. I mean, when Steve becomes, when you hire Steve and he kind of, eventually runs the business, you become head of brand. You do that for a while and then there's somebody who's better at it. And so you bring that person on to run it. And then you jump into, what's the next thing you jump into? I think I did product. So it was all product design, development, all that sort of stuff. And then it was more on the market inside of things, all that sort of stuff. So more the quantifiable side of marketing for a bit. And then after that, It was in sort of tech development website.

So you really kind of built your own apprenticeship model. Like you would jump from one thing to the next and stay there for a year, six months or nine months, and kind of learn on the job how to do all those different jobs. Yeah. And it was amazing because I would, you know, I'd be in factories with the development of the product, then I'd be designing with the design or spending time with the designers. I'd be, obviously, at every event still, working with developers and how to, you know, improve our website and email partners for CRM and things like that.

I just had, yeah, exactly that. And like a turbocharged apprenticeship at a high level in the business. Tell me a little bit about, again, you, I mean, you still are super young and now you're very experienced, which is awesome. But as you're sort of building the brand, right, and building the company, Just inadvertently by accident, you have to also become a leader of people. Did you always feel like you had those qualities as a kid? Or is it something you had to learn how to develop as you got older?

No, no. For me, I definitely had to learn. As a kid, always very shy, very introverted. I learned a lot of that through watching Steve. And to be honest, through feedback, through feedback through the business, I've had to completely change the way I work now from 10 years ago when I was in my, you know, early 20s. I've had to completely change. I remember we did, I'd never heard of it before.

We'd moved into our third, our first proper office. We built a team at this point. We probably had, I don't know, I call it 30 maybe, maybe 40 people working out of the office. And we did a 360 feedback, which, I mean, I'm sure you know what it is. But for those that don't, it's basically where you have feedback from a group of people. people that you work closely with. Yeah. And I had this feedback and I read it and I could not believe how bad it was.

The bottom line, I think someone described me as Hurricane Ben because it was, I would come in, I'd see a design, I wouldn't like it. And then I'd basically just say, that's terrible, start again sort of thing. And people, you know, basically I could be rude to people. I was very abrupt and just frankly not very good at working in groups. That had a real big impact on me. Now, I didn't actually, I would have been about 24, 25. So this is, I guess, a good five or six years into the business.

And that was a big moment for me because I realized that I really had to change if I was going to work well in gym shop. How did you cope with being so young and meeting with older people? And did you ever feel intimidated or have a sense of like imposter syndrome? I don't think I ever did. That's not to say that I wasn't nervous, but I never had a feeling of imposter syndrome because, I mean, there was a point where I'd basically done every job,

whether it's packing orders or customer support or product design or I'd sort of done everything. So I think when I was working with other people, I always felt really comfortable, not necessarily because they knew more than I did. They were more experienced and smarter in many ways, but I always just saw it as an opportunity to learn. So, all right, you guys are, you know, he hit a funding like 170 million pounds in sales by, you know, 2019.

And 2020, you get to the pandemic. And we'll talk about what happens during the pandemic because in virtually every case that we've studied, the apparel brands did really well, right? People were at home. They weren't wearing office clothing. They were wearing, you know, what is known as ethical. leisure wear. That year, you also had a private equity firm acquire a 21% stake in the brand, General Atlantic. The deal valued the brand at this point at $1.3 billion.

And I imagine it was payday, basically, for shareholders. People who had shares in the company could liquidate at that point and make some money, significant money. Yeah. And for me, it was that. closing of a chapter from B and A, from almost like that that startup period and then really know how do we become a true serious business at that point. And you retained or I guess you even increased your shares at that point, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that was my point for really,

I guess, committing to our business. You didn't take anything off the table for you at that point? No, so my, I can't remember the exact numbers, but I increased my shareholding through that event. all my focus was on how can I work, I guess with General Atlantic as our new partner as, you know, in terms of building Jim Shark into a really globally iconic brand. And that, I think everything up until that point for me was very instinctive and opportunistic and it was just living almost each week and each month as it came. That was the moment where I genuinely thought, right, I really want to build this into something big. And I mean, they're obviously, I'd say they're a huge private equity firm, massive.

And they bring experience. And did you have a board at that point, by the way? No, no. So the board, we actually agreed to build a board after that deal. So before that, we hadn't had a board. It was just essentially me, Paul, Steve, running the business together. You come back to become the CEO in 2021. I'd say come back because you had done it when you were a much smaller business, right?

It's a tiny business. Steve transitions to executive chair at that point. And 2021 now, you know, you are, you know, nine years into this business, basically. I mean, it's really kind of started in 2012 as a supplement site. So you had the experience. You were ready to go. I mean, is that how you felt like, okay, I can do this now? No, no.

So I didn't really feel ready. So when Steve came on, Steve always said to me that it wasn't, we always knew it wasn't a forever thing for Steve. We were actually working in Hong Kong at the time and we'd sort of come to the end of the trip and he sort of turned to me and he said, listen, Ben, I think I've taken this as far as I can and I'm, you know, I'm sort of ready to step down. He then went on and he said,

I think we need a new CEO. And I remember thinking, oh God, this is, this is going to be hard work. I don't know who I'm going to find. I need to obviously find someone that I trust. I don't even know how to do this. And then he went on and he said, and I think the next CEO should be you.

And to be honest, I didn't say anything at that point. I actually didn't really, I just said, well, I just said, I'll think about it. You didn't want this? You weren't trying to pursue this? No, not at that point. Absolutely not. It wasn't important to you to be the CEO. It just wasn't something that I was thinking about at all.

I mean, I thought about it the whole flight at home, but it wasn't immediate. It certainly wasn't the second he told me, I grabbed it and thought, this is for me. I took a while to really get comfortable with it. Then there was, you know, a transition sort of handover period of probably the best part of six months. Something else happens, which is in the pandemic, right, everyone was assuming that brick and mortar retail was really going to be dead. And that e-commerce was going to be the only channel. Of course, that's not what happened. And you also or you guys also thought, hey, we actually, because you would only done direct to consumer at that point.

You should get into retail. You should be in retail shops. You should, you know, own your own stores and then do wholesale as well. I mean, the biggest, your biggest sales channel was the direct-to-consumer channel. Still, I still is today, I think, right? Yeah, absolutely. By far, yeah. But how many brick-and-mortar stores do you have today?

Today, we have three in London, Manchester. I think we're at five. So we've got Amsterdam, three in London, and one in Manchester. And we're just in the process of opening two in New York. So we're growing at a considered rate in terms of stores. What I don't want to do is I don't just want to open thousands overnight. I want to do it in a really thoughtful way. Well, here's what's interesting to me.

I mean, there has been a little bit of a correction in direct-to-consumer, right, in recent years. Because what people assumed was the future has become much, much harder, right? Just getting people's attention is harder. Like when you started out with YouTubers in 2012, 2013, it was like, it's like, shooting fish in a barrel, right? It was like all of it. You had this amazing, it was an amazing time period to capture people's attention. Today, there are tens, hundreds of thousands of influencers, micro-influencers. It's really challenging to get eyeballs, right? And so it's hard. You've got to keep it fresh and keep it active. How do you guys maintain that energy when there's so

much competition, so much more competition out there. Yeah, so the way that there's certainly that we see it is what we don't want to do is we don't want to become overly broad and then essentially almost bland in a way. It's really important to me that we've retained a really narrow focus. So the easiest thing for us to do would be to double or triple the size of our range and start selling basketball wear and fashion wear and soccer and everything. everything, that's not interesting to us. What we want to do is retain a really considered position in the gym. Like, great brands are built around great products and a great product positioning.

So that's what we're really focused on. So building the best gym wearing the world. And then by doing that, it allows us to work with the best lifters, whether it's Samson, I mean, Chris Bumstead, Ryan Terry, all the best lifters wear Jim Shark. And that's really, really important to me. And it's really funny. I was working in Denver about 12 months ago. And I sort of finished work.

I just went to a local gym. I think it was in any time fitness. And I went to the back. I went, you know, by the dumbbells. And there was three girls that were in the squat rack. And they were all like hats on, headphones on. They had notepads. They were writing down there.

I think they were deadlifting. They were writing down their lifts. And they were the people in the gym that knew what they were doing. and every single one of them was in Jim Shark. You know, I mean, it's amazing, right? You think about starting out in 2012 selling drop ship supplements, and then, you know, by 2015 hitting 12 million sales, and today, you know, you know, exceeding 650 million, 700 million sales.

And most of your sales today come from, still come from the UK. I know the U.S. So the U.S. The US is now the majority of the business. And also where the most growth potential is. Oh, absolutely, yeah. And here, I mean, here you are now, you know, overseeing a multi-billion-dollar brand. And I think you've got over 900 employees now.

And you're, are you 32 now? 33. 33? Although I feel a bit older, given how last 10 years have been. No, I mean, for sure. You've tons of experience, right? So you have the experience of people 20 years older than you just because you started so young and didn't know what you were doing and learned it. And so I imagine you're in this for a long time.

I mean, do you imagine running this business in 10 years in 20 years from now? I felt like I got the best job in the world. I absolutely love what I do. I love the job. And all the brands I admire really stood the test of time. They're not five years old. they're 50 years old or they're 70 years old. And so for me, the focus is on essentially running the business as long as it makes

sense for me to do so. When you think about everything that's happened to you, I mean, you did in, of course, this conversation mentioned Locke that, you know, it was Steve and Paul who you met at the gym and that they actually were the right people at the right time and the right place. How much of where you got to, how much of this business, how much of everything that's happened, do you, do you attribute to just luck and chance and fortune, you know, good fortune? And how much do you think had to do with the grind that you put into it? Yeah, there's definitely a lot of its look and a lot of its time.

And so like we said, social media, Shopify, fitness uptrend, bodybuilding uptrend in, more people going to the gym than ever. So there was an element of time in there. With that said, as we've built the business, lots of other people have recognized the same opportunities and maybe not had immediately the same outcome. So I think there's also an element of we took the risk. We took lots of risk. So to this day, we still take risks. And I think the commitment to the long term of our business and the ability and appetite to make those decisions has made a big difference as well. So I mean, I wouldn't want to put a percentage on it, but it would be,

there would definitely be a good chunk of luck and time in. But then with that, I think you have to take advantage of that as well. That's Ben Francis, co-founder of Jim Shark. Is your grandfather still around? The grandfather started the furnace business? Yes, he is. He is. And he's still working, fully enough.

He was literally working last week. And he sent me a picture of a furnace that we actually worked on together when I was, well, 20 years ago when I was 14. What does he think about this? I mean, he was an entrepreneur. He is. And here you are. And has he ever... He loves it.

He absolutely. loves it. I mean, we, like I said, I still see him a fair bit. We'll go out on bikes together. We'll go to car shows once a year and things like that. So, no, he absolutely loves it. He's blown away. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app, so you never miss a new episode of the show. And please sign up for my newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtina and Bluie. It was ed. edited by Neva Grant with research help from Alex Chung.

Our audio engineers are Patrick Murray and Robert Rodriguez. Our production staff also includes Catherine Seifer, Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Chris Messini, Carrie Thompson, Andrea Bruce Ramele Wood, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This and don't stop the podcast just yet. Because right now, you're about to hear an amazing small business story that you don't want to miss. This segment is presented by American Express with a very. The business platinum membership, the best, just got even better. And this week's story begins in 2015 when Lauren Dudley-Stevens and her sister joined their parents for a freezing cold adventure.

Our parents had just picked up the hobby of boating, and they would go out on Long Island Sound, and it was always cold no matter what time of the year out on the water. Back then, Lauren worked in fashion PR. She flew around the world and dressed celebrities in red carpet looks from luxury designers, like, like Gucci. But she dreamed of going into business for herself, ideally with her mom and her sister khaki. They just hadn't landed on the right idea yet until that day on the boat when her mom happened to think out loud. My mom said, you know, I just wish that I could have a cute fleece that I could wear out on the boat and then go to dinner in. And that moment for all of us was, oh, wait, that is a good idea. How many women would actually love this product?

They knew that young moms would. At the time, Lauren was expecting her first baby, and Kaki had just had one of her own. It bothered them how hard it was to find washable, durable clothes that fit into their full lives. I just want to feel put together every day, even though I also want to be comfortable in my momhood, but also going to work every day. Lauren started to take the idea seriously. She looked into sourcing material and found a coming.

company that makes fleece from plastic bottles that wash onto beaches. When we knew we could get a recycled fabric and make it stylish, we just thought, okay, this has to happen. So Lauren and her sister drew up a business plan for a direct-to-consumer fleece clothing line called Dudley Stevens, a combination of Lauren's maiden name and her married name. And they pitched it to a successful businessman, someone they knew and admired, their dad. We did not go to large investors and have. millions of dollars invested. It was a very small family investment at the outset. We put a number

together and he agreed and then we just dove in full steam ahead. They chose a manufacturer in Greenpoint Brooklyn, built a website and launched the business out of Lauren's basement. It turned out to be a pretty good bet. Within six months, they made their initial investment back. Not that success came easy. In the early years, Lauren and Kaki did everything themselves, printing the shipping labels, running the website, answering emails, all while juggling child care. I'm not sure how we did all that. I think, as any mom listening would relate to, there's nothing like having a child that makes you efficient. The turning point came when the company brought in a hundred thousand dollars in a single day. And it was actually on my birthday. So I met my husband for dinner and I just was on a

total cloud nine. Like, so excited, scared because we had to figure out how to fulfill all of those orders. It was like, oh, we're a legit company now. Today, Dudley Stevens is closing in on $50 million in sales. They just celebrated 10 years in business. And they're close to another milestone they're proud of, recycling their 10 millionth plastic bottle. It's funny that we're like nearing in on 10 million plastic water bottles and returning 10 years old. I was like, can we hit it by the end of the year. I don't know if we will, but we're close to it. And that's our small business spotlight presented by American Express. To build a business like no other, you need a card like no other. There's nothing like business platinum.