> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Ben Francis Gymshark Story Nobody Quite Tells - URL: https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/the-ben-francis-gymshark-story-nobody-quite-tells/ - Published: 2026-09-14T10:00:01.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-14T10:00:04.000Z - Description: The Ben Francis Gymshark story is less about the billion-dollar valuation and more about the founder behind it: a teenager, a sewing machine, a garage, and the decision to keep going when the first order was worth just £2. - Author: Sharoni Banerjee - Tags: Founder Stories --- There was a nineteen-year-old boy, on £5 an hour, delivering Pizza Hut orders on a moped most evenings instead of sitting at his lectures at Aston University and when he'd saved enough, he didn't spend it on rent; he went and bought a secondhand sewing machine, and asked his grandmother, a curtain maker, to teach him how to use it, at a kitchen table in the family garage in Bromsgrove. Fourteen years later, that same man is trying to buy back a slice of the company he built at that very table - from the private equity firm he sold it to in the first place, on his own terms this time. His name is Ben Francis, and the name of the company is Gymshark, and this is the Ben Francis Gymshark story that doesn't usually get told this way, which is less about a business than about a person learning, in public, what he was actually capable of. We've written about [*how Gymshark actually makes money*](https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/how-does-gymshark-make-money-the-garage-brand-betting-big-on-bricks/) last week, covering the direct-to-consumer engine, the store rollout, and the dropshipping site that came before any of it, but this Ben Francis Gymshark piece is about the person who built it and also about what it actually felt like to get there. It didn't exactly start well, he and school friend Lewis Morgan began by dropshipping supplements they never touched, taking a small cut on stock shipped from someone else's warehouse. It took them a whole six weeks to land a single order, for £2, most people would have called that a sign to stop. > *"In the early days, I would wake up and look at all the orders that had come in, and generally, there weren't too many."* — **Ben Francis, to Entrepreneur, October 2025** Ben did not stop; since he couldn't find gym clothes that fit the way he wanted, he decided to make his own with nothing but a screen printer, sewing machine,and his grandmother showing him where to start. He spent the best part of that year hand-cutting and hand-printing stringers in that garage, still working the Pizza Hut shift, and still trying to make it to his lectures. Then he and Morgan did something that looks reckless on paper and brave in hindsight: they put everything Gymshark had into a single stand at the BodyPower Expo in Birmingham in 2013, mind you, with no safety net and no guarantee. We've told the numbers behind that day in full in the piece last week, but what matters here is that it worked, and that it could easily not have worked at all. > *"It's definitely about not being afraid of failure and having the confidence and the ability to learn."* — **Ben Francis, to Entrepreneur, October 2025** By 2016, revenue had passed £250,000, and both founders left university to run Gymshark full-time from an office that would later outgrow itself into Solihull. That same year, Morgan sold his stake and moved on to other things. Francis kept building alone, which is where a lot of founder stories would stop paying attention to the person and start paying attention to the numbers. This one won't, as Gymshark kept a stand at BodyPower Expo every year until 2017, long after the exposure stopped mattering, which says something about how hard that first leap of faith was to let go of. Because in 2017, at the age of 25, Francis did something most people in his position would never do, he looked honestly at himself and decided he wasn't the right person to run the company yet and then he went to hand the chief executive job to Steve Hewitt and moved into a Chief Brand Officer role instead, staying inside a founder-led business that was still entirely his, just not from the top. > *"CEO was not the right role for me when I was in my early 20s."* — **Ben Francis, to CNBC Make It, 2023** That's not a small thing to admit at 25, that too in public, about a company with your name all over it. Four years later, in August 2021, he took the job back - older, and by every account since, better suited to it. The Ben Francis Gymshark comeback wasn't really loud, since it was just him, but he was fully ready this time. The General Atlantic deal landed the following year's headlines - the Gymshark valuation that put the business over £1 billion, the unicorn status, and the only second British company to get there without outside money first. It's right at this moment that most Ben Francis Gymshark coverage treats as the finish line, and we have already covered all about it, but what Francis really said about it, on his own blog, was smaller, but much more real: > *"I gave Lewis a call, and he explained that he wanted to move on and do other things... The new shareholding is now 21% with General Atlantic, I own 70%, and my brother Joe will also have 1% of the business, as he was employee number one."* — **Ben Francis, via his personal blog, benfrancis.com** Around that same milestone, he put the whole distance into words better than anyone writing about him ever could: > *"It was only eight years ago, pretty much to the day, that I was hand-sewing, hand-making, and hand-printing products... To go from that to a billion-dollar brand is just insane. I'm actually now realising just how far we've come."* — **Ben Francis, quoted in Platinum Business Magazine** That's the throughline of the whole Ben Francis Gymshark story worth holding onto, not the valuation. The distance from a kitchen table in Bromsgrove to that sentence. Which brings us to now to this year, Francis is reportedly in talks to buy back part of that same General Atlantic stake, even as reports suggest the current Gymshark valuation sits below its 2020 peak. No terms are confirmed yet, but if you read against everything above, it looks less like a man trying to undo a mistake and more like a founder closing a loop he opened himself and finishing this chapter the way he started the last one, on his own terms. > *"I think it's all on paper. I think people assume that there's some bank balance with my name on somewhere that has billions in, which is just completely untrue."* — **Ben Francis, on The SuperPower podcast with Gian Power** Ben Francis net worth headlines put a number on him every few months, in the billions, and that quote undercuts every one of them without him raising his voice. He was appointed MBE in 2023 for services to business, built inside an athleisure category; his own team grew almost by accident through what would later be called **influencer marketing**, sending free kit to gym-goers on YouTube before there was a name for it. If you ask what he's actually proud of, the Ben Francis net worth figure doesn't seem to be it, the hand-sewn stringers probably are. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/05/a4/05a4a052-18ab-4836-8924-ec8b322c371c/content/images/2026/09/Ben-Francis-net-worth.png.png) Gymshark BodyPower Expo ## What we'd still like to ask What we'd actually want to hear from Francis is what changed in how he works, not just why he stepped back in 2017\. Handing over the CEO job is one decision, but what did he do differently once he took it back in 2021? Whether the way he leads now looks anything like the way the 25-year-old who walked away used to, or whether those four years taught him to run the place in a way he couldn't have managed at the time. We welcome additional context, corrections, or first-hand perspectives from anyone with relevant knowledge of the story. Reach our editorial team at[*editorial@entrepreneurplus.co.uk*](mailto:editorial@entrepreneurplus.co.uk)*.* --- **Sources*: Entrepreneur.com; CNBC Make It; Platinum Business Magazine; Companies House officer records, Gymshark Ltd; General Atlantic, press release, August 2020; Financial Times, via SGI Europe, Retail Week and Retail Gazette, July 2026; Ben Francis, personal blog, benfrancis.com; Yahoo Finance, on comments made on The SuperPower podcast; EP+, "How Does Gymshark Make Money? The Garage Brand Betting Big on Bricks."*