Gymshark opens Dubai store and doubles down on 'gym brand' identity, eyeing IRL events and streaming as next growth frontier

to Cognition for supporting the [music] show. Our next guest is Null from Gym Shark. Let's bring him in from the root room waiting room. How you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for staying up late. Right. Are you in Dubai? Is that right?

I'm in I'm in Dubai, but I'm on British Times though, so this is fine for me. I'm good, man. I'm good. Uh, how's the day been so far, Melo?

We we're just wrapping up here now, right? So, it's 22 midnight right now here in Dubai. And my plan was to do this with the store in the background, but there's still so many people in the store tearing t-shirts of hangers. You wouldn't have heard a word I was saying. So, yeah, man. It's been wild.

That's crazy.

Wild. Uh, when do you actually close this the the retail store?

This store closes in 20 minutes.

Okay. Okay.

Okay. So, did you do it 24 hours? Like, did you start did you open at midnight last night or when did you actually open?

No, it was it opened. You know what? I should know that. Devil's in the details, right? But now I don't know what time the store actually opened this morning, but I only arrived I only got into the bike like 10:00 a.m. So, I'm not sure. So, that's going to be my

Where did you So, did you start start the day back in the UK?

Yeah. Started the day in the did the red eyee last night from the UK and landed here. They call they call Black Friday over here, the Dubai Super Sale. So, they do it a little bit differently to the way we do at home. And it's uh Yeah, it's it's it's wild. There's there's literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of people walking around Dubai Mall outside right now, which is nuts.

Wow.

Uh what's the shape of the business uh these days? like what what what categories do you uh like how how do you segment out the business and and sort of understand what you sell?

Well, the the the key difference the key differentiator to understand about Gym Shark is there's lots of sports brands out there, right? There's been a few brands in recent years. I think Lulu kicked the door down for the yoga brands and then bunch of other brands came in after that.

We're the really unique thing about us is we're not any of those things. We're a gym brand, right? And in the same way Lulu said to people, hey, you shouldn't wear sports clothes to do yoga. You should wear specific yoga wear to do yoga. We're trying to introduce people to the idea that actually you should wear specific gym clothes to the gym. So our brand platform is we do gym and we think we do that better than anybody else out there.

Yeah.

What's the what's it what was your interview process like? Did you have to like show off your one rep max or anything? What what was the process?

No. Do you know what it's a common misconception that that you have to be some huge lifting person to come and work at Gym Shark, but you really don't. However, one thing I would say is a lot of people fall in love with it once they started Gym Shark and then they find themselves doing all sorts of crazy marathons for charity and lifting events and bodybuilding and all this crazy stuff. So, it's a great environment, steel, sharp and steel and all that.

Uh what about the geographical uh distribution? I mean, obviously a global brand, but like how global uh have you focused on any particular markets? Has Middle East been particularly important as a growth area? Where what's growing fastest? What's the most interesting thing happening uh geographically for Gym Shark?

So, we ship to like 130 countries, something like that. Um through several different Shopify stores. The UAE has been a real has been a real new thing for us. It's been going for about 18 months. Were you guys went international super early? You also worked with like I like you you from from my understanding thinking back like a decade ago, you guys like did influencer marketing probably better than any other brand and did it at a scale that no one had really done it before. I'm assuming you were working with like 10,000 plus influencers at any given point. Like it seemed like you guys were just everywhere. Did that force you guys to go international earlier than a lot of other brands? Yeah, I had a really interesting moment once where I was sitting in a border room doing some work and an intern knocked on the door. I was on my own and she said, "Um, no, I can ask you a question. When did Gym Shark enter the US and it kind of stopped me for a second? I had to stand there and think about it and I said,

"We never sort of entered the US. That seems to be a thing that old old school businesses did."

We were we shipped to wherever people wanted to buy it from from day one of Gym Shark. So, we were technically global from the from the RIP, but you're right, we were very very early to influence the marketing. A lot of people credit us as some of the real early pioneers of that. But actually where you were slightly wrong was the point on 10,000 influencers. That was kind of the opposite of what we did. While a lot of people got into influence marketing early and just spread bet and hit as many people as they could, anybody with a few followers. Yeah. We we decided to sort of handcraft this like select group of what we call Gym Shark athletes who were like the the biggest names in the fitness industry, the really really revered ones. So what might have felt like a bit of a roadblock on social media to you was probably more depth as opposed to width if that makes sense.

Yeah. Just working with the biggest names in in the category. And in terms of 2025 now, take me uh through what's working on the marketing side, what strategy, what area has been the most exciting uh this year for Gym Shark as a whole?

To be honest, it's what I said a minute ago. It's it's less about, you know, it's not there's a particular channel that's ripping right now or there's this there's a new version in Fluency or it's Tik Tok or anything like that. It's finding our lane and sticking to it, right? And being relentless about the fact we make gymwear. that's what we were doing and we're better than anybody else at it, right? We noticed a little while ago everybody started to sort of spread really wide and start to try and hit a lot of different lifestyle and golf and surfing and all these different things. And you know, we there was a moment there where we were tempted to go that way as well. And then we sort of reminded ourselves who we were. We doubled down on the fact that we were the gym brand. We launched our brand platform, We Do Gym, and people have taken to it incredibly incredibly well. There was a there was an article I read on LinkedIn the other day that said the world doesn't need more bland brands. It need more brands that stand for something and are willing to have enemies. And I think that is exactly what we did. not enemies per se, but we're willing to say, "Hey, if you don't rock with us, that's absolutely fine. There's a million other brands out there that are probably for you, but if you want great gym stuff, you should come to Gym Shark."

How how is gym culture evolving? I feel like the story of the last couple years was this like hybrid hybrid athlete movement. Uh we don't do a lot of running. We probably should. We hit the We hit the gym as a team every single morning. We got to get uh get into doing doing some more cardio. But how has that kind of impacted the product strategy if at all?

We've got we've got about a 500 people run club this Sunday in Dubai. So get me a green jacket. You boys are happy to uh I'll happily have you host you down here. We'll all run together. Uh yeah, you're right. So the first thing I'd say is the culture of like resistance training and quote unquote sort of traditional gym work has really really grown in the past few years. So you teach talk to any of the big equipment providers and they're telling you that they're going into some of the big gym chains in the US. They're removing steppers. They're moving cross trainers by the bowl for and they're putting squat racks in. Right. A little while ago, squat racks looked like a medieval torture device to some people if they didn't know how to use it. And now people are really learning how useful real resistance training is. But you're absolutely right. The rise of the hybrid athlete is a is it's a wild it's like it's a real step forward in people's understanding of fitness. So previously you saw a big guy you're like he's a he's a big guy. He lifts weights but he can't run. You saw a guy who weighed you know 120 pounds. You're like he can probably run but I doubt he can lift weights. And now the two things are merging massively. I ran the London Marathon last year and I had guys coming past me at like 230 pounds lean with a ton of muscle mass and I was just like, man, that is so unfair. Yeah. And they're [laughter] going past me as well and and they got 100 pounds on me, which I thought was wildly unfair. But yeah, this hybrid thing, this this this you can still carry muscle and you can be a runner and this and that and that. Do you know what I mean? Like it's it's a real new development and we're leaning into that pretty heavily. Uh, how are you thinking about competing with some of the older more like legacy brands in the space specifically in in becoming like that household name breaking through across everything? Are you focused on just owning the next generation or do you eventually want to go and and uh, you know, get to such saturation that you become a household name even with the older folks? How are you thinking about the different demographics that you're going after? I'll be honest, saturation and household names aren't household name isn't something we put at the top of our Maslo's hierarchy of needs, right? Becoming the best version of us is what we do. If what comes with that is household name status and market saturation and that kind of stuff, amazing. If it doesn't, no problem. But we know we're going to be the best gym brand out there. So, we're never going to beat some of the big players from your country or from Germany, you know who I'm talking about, at being them. But what we can do is win at being us.

Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, what about 2026? Are there any uh upcoming marketing or growth strategies that you're excited about potentially exploring next year?

I personally we we don't have a huge plan for this yet. I love streamers right now. I'm like streamers are doing a lot and I I think that's if that feels like influencer marketing to me in the early days when it was kind of untapped and we dominated early.

I like seeing what streamers are doing. Um there's a there's something that we are doing that we are very good at is these IRL experiences. Like our last event in London had over 15,000 people come out to it. That was two days.

There was there was there was stock for sale, but it was stuff they could buy on the website. There was a few exclusives. There was their favorite Gym Shark athletes, the group of people I talked to you about earlier on. They could hang out and lift together. We done them in Miami. Again, the last Miami one, I think we had 13 and a half thousand people over two days. So, those are just wild. And the the the it's almost like a it's almost like a rock landing in a lake. the the the the the ripples that sends out across the fitness industry, across all of social media, across Tik Tok, everything is absolutely nuts. And that's not us. That's that's that's consumers coming along, creating their own Tik Toks, taking selfies with their own favorite influencers, athletes, creating their own content, and it's spreading out into the world. So, yeah, that works really, really well for us. We always say that Gym Shark is an online brand that will go offline.

Yeah. Yeah. In the chat, they're saying people yearn for IRL events, and I couldn't agree more.

How uh how are you guys thinking about the intersection of AI and and commerce? Are people discovering Gym Shark in in different LLMs yet? It feels like a really tough channel from a brand standpoint because right now you don't you don't even have the ability to do that great of like imagery and and uh just like showing off products in the way that you might want to on on your personal site. But uh what does that look like today and how are you kind of forecasting out?

Yeah, you're right. I think that like literally AI is such a buzz word that absolutely everybody is using and and I tend I tend to try and steer clear of talking about them when everybody else is talking about them. It's a my my thinking about stuff like this is a little bit buffet esque be brave when others are uh scared and be scared when others are brave.

But you're right AI results AI search is absolutely huge. We already do pretty well on that front because there is such an organic ground swell of information on Gym Shark on Tik Tok on Reddit on you know a lot of places scraping for information. Exactly. So, we do quite well, but you're right. I'm not going to give away the secret source now, but we are well, it's not my department, but somebody else at Gym Shark is working really hard on making sure that we do even better on that front going forwards.

Yep. Makes sense. Uh well, uh thank you for taking the time out of uh a very very busy day. Where are you, how long are you going to be in Dubai? You're doing an event and then you're going back to the UK or you doing a world tour?

Yeah, we're launch we're launching our second Dubai store on Tuesday. So, we got a bunch of stuff leading up to it. Like I said, we have a really big run club in Jira Golf Estates on Sunday morning. We have our conditioning club. We're doing a run club inside the Mall of Emirates, which is another mall because it's that big. You can do a 5K run inside the mall. I know that's the real That's real Dubai stuff that we open our store on Tuesday. Uh and then I get out of here and I'm back to the UK.

Nice. What uh when you when you say experiential retail, is it running focused? Do you have full like squat racks in there? Like what is what does experiential mean in the context of Gym Shark?

It it depends on the uh it depends on the format of the store. Like we can scale it down and up. Like sometimes it's just we have a bunch of personal trainers come up. We're doing pull-up competitions. We're doing run clubs and all that kind of stuff. Our latest store that we've just announced, the date isn't out there yet, but our latest flagship store, our first ever US flagship store is launching real soon in New York uh on on Bond Street opposite K. And that has I mean I can't reveal it yet, but that has a whole two floors of experiential. So anyway, keep your eyes peeled and you'll see what I mean when I say we can scale it from small stuff to really really big stuff.

Amazing. Well, great great meeting you. Thanks for coming on the show. Uh fantastic to hear your approach to all this. It uh I love I love the focus and and uh just the intensity makes a lot of