From Pizza Delivery Boy To Fitness Tycoon

From pizza delivery boy to fitness tycoon, how a young businessman built a billion-dollar sportswear empire for the #goals generation.

- Finlay Renwick

When he was 14, Ben Francis did work experience at his grandfather’s company, which lined industrial furnaces with ceramic and brick. Staring into a cement mixer, he saw a future he would rather avoid: 12-hour days of toil and sweat, the promise of a permanently aching back.

“Seeing the sacrifices my grandfather made for his business made me feel comfortable with the concept of financial risk at quite a young age,” says Francis. “It also taught me that I didn’t want to be putting fibre over bricks in a warehouse for the rest of my life.”

Fifteen years and a GBP1 billion-plus valuation later, Francis is founder, majority shareholder and chief marketing officer of Birmingham-based Gymshark, one of Britain’s fastest-growing businesses, a venture capital ‘unicorn’ and sportswear ‘disruptor’.

“I think we’re building one of the biggest brands in the world here,” he says in the boardroom of the firm’s Solihull office, fixing me with an unblinking Silicon Valley gaze. “By hook or by crook, I want to be one of the biggest and best.”

Gymshark was founded in 2012, when Francis was 19. A self-proclaimed very average student, he discovered an aptitude for IT and the gym at sixth form college. The hands-on, problem-solving nature of computers and lifting heavy weights appealed. “I made four apps and six different websites, all around fitness,” he says. “The seventh was Gymshark.”