Clothing retail is in bad shape but Gymshark is fighting fit. The secret? Data, says CDO Gemma Hulbert

A data-driven culture based on self-service analytics has helped the fitness firm stay fast on its feet

The clothing business has been hard hit by the pandemic. People like to try before they buy and with shops closed the industry is in the doldrums. Adding to the pain, supply chains have been disrupted with companies forced to find new sources for materials and manufacturing.

But this is not a universal tale of woe. Gymshark, the Birmingham-based fitness apparel company, has barely been touched by the crisis, according to chief data officer Gemma Hulbert, and expects to see revenues grow by around 40 per cent this financial year.

The company, founded in 2012 by 19-year-old Ben Francis, is still growing rapidly, expanding from 150 employees in 2018 to 430 now, and there has been little drop off in demand from its 2.7 million active customers, predominantly in the US, to whom it sells direct.

Selling online with no bricks and mortar to worry about is certainly one factor; having a strong brand and operating in a well-defined niche is another; but a lot of Gymshark's ability to weather stormy seas is down to its agility, and particularly its respect for data, said Hulbert.

"We've shifted to utilise data a lot more in recent years so that we can really understand our customers and our community from an analytics perspective," she said.

Working out from home

Because Gymshark sells direct, it is able to collect a lot of data on end-users' preferences and can quickly alter promotions, offers or where products are placed on the website. The company is strong on community building too, providing apps and workout planners and encouraging a sharing of experience, which means it has been able to retain a presence in its customers' lives as they have moved from working out in the gym to exercising at home.

We make sure that we get invited to key meetings where decisions are made so that data is represented

The job of the 30-strong data and analytics team is to ensure that relevant data gets to whoever needs it - be that marketing, sales, designers or tech - as soon as it's required. A large part of the role is communications, and while this has become more challenging during the lockdown, the way that data has become embedded within the company's operations and culture means there is a significant pull factor.

"It's really important to keep strong communications across functions, so we make sure that we get invited to key meetings where decisions are made so that data is represented," said Hulbert.

"Working from home we still get a lot of people reaching out to us and wanting support and insights because we're very front-of-mind already, so they often seek to include us in their conversations."

Her team makes heavy use of Slack to collaborate with other parts of the business and to share ideas, while meetings have moved online.

"No doubt things will slip through because communication is more of a challenge. It's making sure that all the right people are in the room, and Zoom calls are not always as easy as face-to-face, but I do think on the whole it's been really smooth, and we're probably going to utilise working from home a lot more going forwards."

Quick delivery

Hulbert has been in post for 18 months now, arriving from veterinary charity PDSA where she used data and analytics to enhance communications with supporters and drive donations. Since then, she has helped to create a data-driven culture with self-service analytics at its core.

Gymshark had outgrown its analytics platform (SAS Enterprise Guide with some SPSS Modeller and other tools thrown in).

"It was really difficult to consolidate all the data we capture and for the business to remain agile. It was just very slow and long-winded to get to just answers to simple questions, so we wanted to really streamline the process and maximise the potential some other tools that we use, like BI," she said.

Ultimately the company settled on the Alteryx data and analytics platform, which was selected for its ability to integrate multiple data sources (the main cause of the previous logjams), the built-in data cleaning and processing capabilities and the fit with the firm's BI and visualisation tools.

"We've built a really strong foundation and it's enabled a lot of good access to data and essentially driven a lot of insights and change," Hulbert said. "We're now really fast in how we can deliver."

The self-service element has been particularly important, removing analytics from its silo and making it available to all as an underlying platform for company-wide decision-making. It has also opened the doors of the data unit to a different kind of person.

A big challenge has been just driving that culture and actually making sure people understand how to utilise data

"It has enabled us to recruit people that aren't super technical or code experts but who are really creative problem solvers. They could jump into Alteryx and produce really fantastic work and really get in insight into the business in such a short period of time"

The next year or two will see Hulbert and her colleagues - perhaps from the comfort of their own homes - consolidating their gains and pushing the self-service side further still, getting business people to create their own apps and solve their own problems.

"It's continuing with the momentum. A big challenge has been just driving that culture and actually making sure people understand how to utilise data. We've got to a really good place but actually, there's still a lot more work we can do to continue expanding on that."