Published on the 4th of December 2016, the 20th anniversary edition of the Sunday Times Virgin Fast Track 100 league table ranks Britain’s private companies with the fastest-growing sales.
The No 1 company in 2016 is online retailer Gymshark, a fitness apparel lifestyle brand which has used social media to build its audience, and grow sales to £12.8M in 2016. Gymshark was founded in 2012 by Ben Francis, who was still only in his teens at the time. The company is based in Worcestershire, a county in the west midlands of England. Their current staff count is at 53 employees and their annual sales growth over the past 3 years is 193%.
Similarly to Nike's strategy, the brand uses a host of popular athletes who are established in the fitness industry as influencers. Their brand ambassadors are known as 'Gymshark athletes' and have a combined social media following of 20 million users.
Gymshark has managed to build a strong global following by creating consistent inspirational content which tells the unique stories about each of their athletes fitness journeys. In addition to the brands efforts to document the stories about their ambassadors, each of the 'Gymshark athletes' also use their own social media channels to promote the brand by providing useful fitness tutorials.
One of their star athletes, Steve Cook has a following of over 1 million Instagram followers, and was the central figure in Gymshark's latest promotional video which I stumbled across by chance via a youtube ad. Kudos to Noel Mack for a job well done on the short film, and to Esther Turner for a superb cover of Adele's Hometown glory.
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