How we are dealing with Coronavirus at Gymshark

Coronavirus has shocked the world and has changed a lot of things here at Gymshark. We are doing everything we can to maintain normal business and support both the staff and the wider Gymshark community.

I have never had as many questions as what I've had over the last few days about how Coronavirus is affecting us here at Gymshark so I thought I would answer them all here.

Right now, many things are changing in the world, and here at Gymshark it is no different, I'm currently sat writing this in Gymshark HQ and on a normal day at this time it would be absolutely rammed, but it is almost empty today. We've been working from home since the 16th of March 2020 – Boris Johnson advised us to work from home when we can so we have decided to extend our WFH plans indefinitely. We don't know when it's going to end, but at the moment the office won't be getting much busier than it is now.

Usually, at least 400 people are knocking around HQ; today, there are more like 10 people. There are a few essential roles here, but at Gymshark we are doing everything we can to abide by the social distancing rules that are being fed to us from the government because the safety of the Gymshark team is absolutely top of our priority list at the moment.

We also had to close the gym back in March. However, we still managed to provide fitness to our employees with at-home workouts from the Lifting Club Coaches via zoom. We also set weekly challenges such as a 15k steps a day, where employees would nominate one another, which was cool.

I'm working from home; the vast majority are working from home. I've actually managed to get pretty much everything I would ordinarily do but over Zoom calls and Skype's and phone calls, which is great!

Personally, albeit it a very uncertain time, I'm just not leaving the house, only going out to buy food, been on a couple of runs, walked the dog, so keeping myself physically active as well as obviously working on Gymshark, keeping my mind stimulated too. But I'm happy with everything, it's certainly hard work, it's certainly different, but I think thinking creatively, trying to think of different ways to approach and solve problems is going well for us. Overall we are supporting the Gymshark team as best we can. At the moment it's going incredibly well.

Gymshark is all about uniting the condition community, and that doesn't have to be in person but uniting people online as well. So through our social channels, we are producing a bunch of home workouts, this is something I'm practising – doing a home workout every other day. I think at times like this when the pressure is high, and there is a lot of change, uncertainty and stress in peoples lives, I think its really important that we maintain our physical health because it has a huge knock-on effect to our mental health. So, both internally in terms of the Gymshark staff but also the wider Gymshark community, we are doing everything we can to continue to promote our core brand values around uniting the conditioning community, bringing people together and promoting both physical and mental health.

During the pandemic we also set up Facebook Live home workouts, because as gyms began to close worldwide, we realised that PTs would be struggling for work so what we did was put out a post saying "if you know anyone who is a PT and is struggling, please get in touch with us, we will pay you an hourly rate", and essentially they went on our Facebook and created global live stream workouts so that our community could keep fit from home. It was an incredible idea, it wasn't my idea, but it was incredible. Personal trainers help people around the world get back into shape, and that makes such an incredible difference. They are basically the foundation of the conditioning community, so for us, it was essential that we supported these PTs globally, so thank you to all the PTs that took part. We even now continue to share home workouts via our Live Twitch channel!

At Gymshark, we are really fortunate because for the size of our business we have a relatively low amount of fixed costs, I know that might seem a bit crazy to say looking at the headquarters we have, but for our size, we do have low fixed costs. We really think we can ride out this storm, the business itself is running pretty much as usual, some new people are joining the business, which will be interesting as they will be starting remotely.

Fortunately, we are a very agile business. At the moment we've closed our London store, we had to close that 2 weeks early. It wasn't ideal, but again the priority for us is the safety of the individuals, both staff and the visitors and the athletes. Steve Cook's launch was going to be there! We have to prioritise safety at a time like this, and this was just too much uncertainty, and for us, we would rather take a hit to revenue and maintain everyone's safety. So the London store is closed, our warehouses ran by Bleckmann, has been deemed a critical part of the economy for Belgium, so these are staying open. In regards to the work we are doing in our distribution centres, the 2-metre social distancing is an absolute must; it's a complete non-negotiable. I'm delighted with the fact that in many ways, we are leading the way for safety in our distribution centres. We are just doing everything we can to prioritise the staff and Gymshark community in everything we do.

At the moment, we are actually seeing a lot of people looking at clothes that are more suited to home workouts, so we have seen an influx of people buying those sort of products. Again, we want to support you on your fitness journey at home, which is a little different from working out in gyms. So at the moment, sales are doing good, but we are aware that this could go on for another month, another four months, we genuinely don't know. Overall business is running pretty much as usual, so if you order in the UK, US, Europe and also Australia, you probably won't notice too much difference in terms of the service you are getting from Gymshark. Again, I think that is testament to just how agile we are as a business. I have spoken a lot in the past about the unique points of Gymshark, I've talked about the structure and agility, and it really takes times like this to prove it's worth. If we were a much bigger business with a bunch of stores and working with retailers, then there would be a lot more moving parts and a lot more fixed costs, which would then be much more difficult to maintain our business in times of such uncertainty and change.

So to summarise, this is not good at all; this is a pandemic. We need to be listening to the experts; we need to be listening to the WHO, we need to be listening to our governments, and doing as we're told. Here at HQ, we are not the experts, for the most part, we don't know what we're talking about, so I think we need to follow instruction and I think if we do that then long term I'm sure it will be fine. Obviously, this will affect a lot of people and a lot of people's loved ones in the Gymshark community, and that is obviously just crap on so many levels. But at times like this, in times of hardship, I think it's so important that globally, all of us as a community pull together and we support each other because it's going to be extremely tough and extremely stressful for everyone involved.

So if I can give you one piece of advice it would be to take care of yourself, take care of your loved ones, your friends and your wider community. I think it's so important that people really pull together at a time like this. And however we can help you, Gymshark is here for you. We have to pull together.

Stay at home. Stay safe. Thank you for reading, and thank you for supporting the Gymshark vision.