Introduction

Gymshark’s Mobile Creative Director James Chorley and Senior Designer Luke Matthews laid down a completely new challenge for 10 of our students – to create a new digital product an important and key audience for their apparel – Personal Instructors. This is the challenge that the students were set…

The Challenge

Creating ongoing relationships between a brand and its audience has never been so important. Gymshark is a fitness apparel & accessories brand, manufacturer and online retailer has a mission to ‘unite the conditioning community’. To deliver on this goal Gymshark wants to explore how digital technology can be used to enhance its relationship with one of its key audiences or users – personal trainers.

Gym goers traditionally met their personal trainers through joining gyms, however, it is becoming more usual to find them through social media. Trainers often communicate and send out fitness plans with their clients using social media, and their fees are often paid for using Paypal. With the recent global pandemic and increase of personal trainers using social and digital platforms to support their clients, there is an opportunity to support trainers in their aspiration to keep the world healthy..

For Gymshark, this move from focusing on retail to supporting their community is an important step in building their successful brand and diversifying what they offer their tech savvy and ‘social native’ audience. There are a number of technology and sports companies that have successfully this ‘middleware’ space with various products and initiatives over the last decade from Nike Training Club and Strava to Fitbit and Peloton.

The Ask

In a nutshell – how might Gymshark help personal trainers with creating and marketing workouts, plans & guidance to support our community with their fitness goals? Gymshark has a growing and loyal customer or ‘fans’ base from gym goers, personal trainers and athletes who are serious about their fitness. Gymshark focuses on its 18-30 year old market, many of whom live and breathe the gym, have a good ‘fitness IQ’ – they know what they are doing and how to use the equipment – and are very active on social media.

Background

Gymshark was founded in 2012 by teenager Ben Francis and a group of his high-school friends. Gymshark has grown from a screen printing operation in a garage, into one of the fastest growing and most recognisable brands in fitness with a reported worth £1 billion.

Ben and his friends created their products because there was a lack of clothing designed specifically for gym use. After exhibiting his range of specially designed gym apparel at the BodyPower Expo in Birmingham his website was inundated with orders.

Until now, Gymshark has focused on one single channel for selling its products – its website. Gymshark has also made a virtue of marketing its products through social influencers and has a roster of athletes who wear its apparel for ‘conditioning’ rather than for competition.

The Deliverables

• A presentation explaining your development, conceptual solution and user testing which will include:
• An infomercial video to show how it works across one or a number of use cases.
• A working demonstration or prototype, coded or demoed using an authoring tool such as Adobe XD or Proto.io as Adobe XD

The Results

Once students understood the challenge that they were creating a business to business application rather than something that was consumer facing they quickly made progress. Some focused some on brand communication whilst others deep-dived into digital product design to creating compelling new brand experiences.