Fashion & apparel stores

Gymshark built a gym-wear empire without traditional advertising. the athlete is the store.

Official homepage: https://www.gymshark.com In 2012, a 19-year-old pizza delivery driver in Birmingham was screen-printing workout tees in his parents' garage between shifts. Ben Francis had no fashion background, no retail connections, and no money for ads. What he had was a hunch: the fitness world was about to stop taking its cues from bodybuilders on magazine covers and start taking them from the YouTubers in its recommended feed — people it watched before its own workouts, whose opinions carried the weight of friendship rather than sponsorship. Fourteen years on, that hunch clears well over half a billion pounds a year. And the strange thing is how little of it came from the retail playbook at all. The Sponsorships That Weren't Really Sponsorshi …