The same day Gymshark announced its best year ever, it fired a third of its staff as well.
With a record revenue of £607.3 million and a mass redundancy announcement, both landing on the exact same day.
This not a company which is falling apart, it is actually a company in the middle of a very expensive experiment, and nobody yet knows how it ends.
Here is the breakdown of that story.
So, Gymshark spent its entire life online, with no physical stores at all, right up until 2022. Then it changed course completely and started pouring money into flagship shops in London, New York and Dubai, and this is the kind of investment that costs real money for years before it pays anything back, IF it ever does.
Profit has fallen for three straight years while revenue keeps climbing, and nobody at Gymshark can tell you yet whether the bricks were worth it.
This week, we found another UK company that took a remarkably similar gamble, giving something up now in the hope of a bigger payoff later, and already has its answer.
Depop used to take ten percent of every sale, but right this year, it tore that model out completely and did something that sounds backwards until you see how it played out: it stopped charging sellers anything at all, and started charging buyers instead.
Most people just assumed the platform would empty out without an obvious cut for itself, but instead, listings jumped from 30 to 45% within weeks, and then eBay joined the conversation and looked at what was left standing and paid $1.4 billion for it!
Now isn’t that the same kind of risk Gymshark is taking right now?
Depop's version just happened to reach its conclusion years sooner.
Read the full breakdown of how Depop makes money now, and how Gymshark is investing in bricks.
Also on EP+ this week:
→ ClearScore gives its core product away entirely free and just used that same trick to buy its way into mortgages, doubling profit in the process.
→ There's a small, mostly invisible network of growth equity funds quietly deciding which UK scale-ups get the cheque that takes them from big to huge, and we mapped who's really behind it.
→ ESG reporting sounds like something only a corporation has to worry about. Most early-stage UK founders will hit it sooner than they think.
→ Nobody teaches first-time founders how to actually run a board meeting, so most of them learn by getting quietly outmanoeuvred in one.
→ The Autumn Budget is only weeks away, and it's shaping up to be the first real test of whether the UK's promises to founders survive contact with the Treasury.
→ Funding Radar's back, and this week the big names are doing the leading, not the early-stage rounds.
→ UK insurance technology is having a genuinely good year while fintech funding stalls around it, and almost nobody outside the sector has noticed.
→ One network of female-led angel investment quietly built an entire funding boom, and there's one company that turned out to be the breakout winner.
→ Redundancy law doesn't pause just because you're a ten-person startup, and most founders find that out mid-process rather than before it.
The wider ecosystem ran the same experiment this week, only with government money
The government committed to £150 million to scale up startups in the North of England, and a separate £210 million fund launched for the South East.
Molten Ventures raised €203 million to back UK and European growth-stage tech. All three are versions of what Gymshark and Depop just did in miniature, spending now on something unproven, in the hope it compounds later.
Medly AI, a UCL spinout, raised £6 million this week, a live example of a policy shift we've covered before: universities letting founders keep more of what they built, instead of the institution taking the bigger share.
One pattern we noticed
Nobody this week has played it safe.
Depop's gamble has already paid off, but Gymshark's hasn't yet.
The government's regional funds and Molten's growth-stage round won't have an answer for years.
The real difference isn't who took a risk this week, because everyone did. It's about the one who's already been proven right, and who's still waiting to find out.
One number
3 - It is the number of consecutive years Gymshark's profit has fallen while it invests in physical stores, even as revenue hits a record of £607.3 million.
Question of the week
If you had to put your own money down, would you back Depop's quick, decisive turnaround or Gymshark's slower, multi-year investment in bricks?
Let us know your answer at [email protected]. We read every one of them, and yours might end up in next week's brief.
Sources: Depop figures from Depop's own Help Centre and developer documentation, Etsy's 2025 Form ARS, eBay's Q2 2026 Form 10-Q, and Vinted Group's 2025 annual results. Gymshark figures from Glossy, Modern Retail and Gymshark's FY2024 results. ClearScore figures from ClearScore Group's FY2025 results and UKTN. External figures from Dealroom (UK £150m Northern startup fund), EU-Startups (Molten Ventures), the British Business Bank (South East £210m fund), and UCL (Medly AI).
