Why Gymshark's First Public Gym Is in Miami, Not London
Every outlet that covered the Gymshark news last week ran some version of the same headline. Retail Gazette went with "Gymshark moves beyond retail to open first-ever gym in Miami." Athletech framed it as a bold pivot. Men's Fitness reached for "the next era of community-driven fitness." Drapers, FashionNetwork, Retail TouchPoints — basically the same story in each case, almost all carrying the same Ben Francis quote about the community having been "crying out for it" for thirteen years. The consistent frame was that Gymshark, a British online apparel brand, is finally moving into physical fitness.
I think that framing misses most of what's actually interesting about the announcement, because Miami isn't Gymshark's first gym, and the reasons the first public one is in the US rather than the UK are more specific — and more useful to understand — than "our community has been asking for it."
Solihull has been there all along
Gymshark has been operating a facility called the Gymshark Lifting Club out of its Solihull headquarters since 2019. It's a £5 million, 55,000 square foot space that Gymshark itself describes as housing "a state-of-the-art gym, 100-person auditorium, research and development factory and photography studios." Access is restricted to employees and close associates, which is why the press release can fairly call Miami the first public gym. But the product architecture — down to the name — is lifted directly from a facility that's been operating for seven years, and the detail that keeps drawing me back in is that Solihull was built with photography studios integrated from day one. That's a design choice that makes much more sense for a content production facility with training equipment attached than for a gym with a photo studio as an amenity. If you've spent seven years operating a content-production-and-training hybrid internally and then open an externally facing version of the same format in the most photogenic fitness neighborhood in the most content-productive US market, the new facility is hard to read as primarily a gym. It reads more naturally as the externalization of a content operation Gymshark has been running privately for most of its scale-up.
The question that actually bothered me, the more I looked at this, was the geography of the "first public" one. If Gymshark's own framing is taken at face value — a gym built for the community, long demanded by the community, finally delivered — then the first public version of the Lifting Club should be in London, or Manchester, or somewhere close enough to Solihull that the existing community infrastructure transfers without effort. The brand is British, Solihull is British, and the bulk of the community Gymshark built its reputation around lives closer to London than to Miami. LIFT is Gymshark's recurring pop-up event series — part fitness festival, part athlete meet-and-greet, part branded community gathering — and LIFT London, the UK flagship edition, routinely features 60+ sponsored athletes and tens of thousands of attendees. But the first public gym isn't going to any of those places. It's going to Miami, 4,400 miles from HQ, in a country where Gymshark doesn't currently operate a gym of any kind. "Our community has been crying out for it" doesn't explain that choice, which means the choice is being driven by something Gymshark hasn't explicitly named in the press release.
The US numbers
Gymshark reported its FY25 results in March, covering the year ending July 31, 2025, and I think the results explain most of the decision. Top-line revenue hit £646 million, up about 6% on the prior year — a company record, and also a clear deceleration from FY24's 9% growth. Pre-tax profit dropped to £7 million from £11.9 million, a 41% single-year fall and the fourth consecutive year of declining profit at a business that's grown revenue every year since it was founded in 2012. Ben Francis addressed this directly in the FY25 release:
"Our profits are lower than they have been in previous years, but this is intentional. We are really investing in the long-term of our brand."
A year ago, the same margin compression was being described in Gymshark's filings as the cost of "continuing to invest heavily in omnichannel expansion and digital infrastructure," which is softer language for the same thing. The move from corporate-filings phrasing to "this is intentional, we're investing in the long-term of the brand" is worth noticing in its own right, because it reflects how much more public the strategic shift has become over the past twelve months — and, I think, how much more confident Francis has become about explaining it.
The regional breakdown for FY25 has not been published in the coverage I can find, so the most recent geographic detail available is from FY24, but that split is where the picture becomes specific. UK revenue in FY24 grew 22%, from £111.7m to £136.4m. Europe grew 12.6% to £145.7m. The US, which accounts for roughly 37% of revenue and is comfortably the largest single market in the business, went from £250.4m to £251m — effectively flat, and in the market carrying more than a third of total revenue. Unless FY25's unreleased regional numbers represent a dramatic reversal, the flat market is also the one doing most of the work of producing the record-revenue headline, which means the strategic pressure on it to start moving again is disproportionate to its share of the business.
Ben Francis has been describing the response to that situation publicly for more than a year. In a December 2024 Retail Gazette interview about the opening of a second UK store, he laid out the broader strategy:
"We see a big opportunity for Gymshark to be an omnichannel brand around the world... Globally iconic brands don't just exist online. They exist in all of the different facets of the market and that's what we now need to do. Go from being an online brand to a true omnichannel and a global brand."
What makes that quote worth paying attention to isn't the strategic content — "we need to be omnichannel" is something most apparel CEOs could say on a conference call without anyone reacting — but the fact that it's being said by the CEO of a company that General Atlantic invested in at a £1 billion valuation in 2020, specifically because (in General Atlantic's own words) Gymshark was "online only, direct-to-consumer… without the baggage of physical stores and complex distribution channels." The omnichannel pivot is a near-complete rewriting of the thesis on which the PE money arrived, and the thesis rewrites of that scale tend to happen because the original thesis has stopped producing the returns it was supposed to.
Dubai gave them the proof
The piece of evidence that I think matters most here isn't in any of the Miami coverage. It's in a September 2025 Retail Gazette interview with Noel Mack, Gymshark's Chief Brand Officer, where he's discussing the Dubai Mall store the brand opened as its first permanent retail location outside the UK. The relevant quote:
"The moment people could experience Gymshark IRL, our business there tripled overnight."
I can't verify that multiple from outside the company, and "tripled overnight" in an executive's mouth deserves some skeptical discount by default. My read, though, is that the claim is broadly accurate, for a few reasons. Mack is saying it casually to a trade publication that wasn't likely to fact-check it, which is the context in which executives tend to understate rather than exaggerate numbers. The quote is being used to justify physical-retail capex, not to tell a growth story to investors, so there's less obvious incentive to inflate it. And Dubai was Gymshark's first real test of physical presence outside the UK — whatever happened there was always going to be the reference data point on which the rest of the retail strategy got built. If it actually did triple online sales in-market, that explains a lot. If it merely doubled them, that probably also explains a lot.
Once you take the Dubai claim seriously, Miami stops looking puzzling and starts looking like the obvious next move. Gymshark has run LIFT Miami multiple times, drawing 20,000+ attendees, at Mana Wynwood — the same neighborhood where the gym lease was quietly signed in July 2025, according to Commercial Observer. That's a nine-month gap between the lease and the public announcement, which is the kind of timeline you see when a brand is staging a coordinated PR moment around a decision that was already made. Wynwood is also a fairly particular neighborhood to have chosen. It's dense with commissioned street art, it already houses a cluster of hardcore bodybuilding and boutique fitness spaces that align with Gymshark's core demographic, and it's the kind of environment whose built backdrop does unpaid marketing work every time a member posts from inside the facility.
All of which is where the Solihull precedent becomes the argument, not a footnote. Gymshark itself describes the Miami facility as "part training facility, part content hub, part community destination," and the middle descriptor is what I keep coming back to. A company openly self-describing a site as a content hub is being more or less explicit about what the space is optimizing for, and the template they're externalizing to Miami is the one they've spent seven years refining internally at Solihull. Framed that way, the employee-only gym at HQ was less a perk than a quietly running R&D exercise, and the Miami facility is the version of that R&D that finally gets deployed at scale in the market that most urgently needs it to work.
The rollout is visible in the event calendar
What I've become most confident about is that Miami isn't a one-off, in part because Gymshark has effectively published its rollout roadmap already, if you're willing to read the LIFT event calendar that way. LIFT has run so far in Miami, New York, London, Los Angeles, and Manchester. In the FY25 results release, Francis summarized the year's openings in a single line:
"We have opened stores in Dubai, Manchester, Amsterdam, Long Island in the US and, most recently, our first ever US flagship store in New York."
Five cities in one fiscal year. The New York flagship in that list is a three-floor, 13,000 square foot space on Bond Street with a third floor dedicated to "panel talks, athlete meet-and-greets, live podcasts and Q&A sessions" — a format that's meaningfully different from Miami's full-gym version, but plainly cut from the same strategic cloth. Germany got its first Gymshark store via two retail partners in February 2026. In the same FY25 release, Francis also flagged an undisclosed "secret project" for imminent announcement, which turned out to be the Miami gym five weeks later. Whatever the internal pace is, it's cadenced rather than opportunistic, and it maps onto the LIFT city list too cleanly for that to be coincidence.
If I had to bet on the next gym, Los Angeles is the most obvious candidate. LIFT:LA ran at Gold's Gym Venice Beach in 2023. The US is the market with the flat-line growth problem. A bi-coastal US content footprint — New York as the retail/community anchor, Miami and LA as gyms on the respective coasts — is roughly the shape the US strategy starts taking once you sketch the existing moves on a map. Dubai is the international candidate I'd watch most closely, almost for self-evident reasons: Gymshark already has retail there, it's the market that produced the tripling claim, and a second Lifting Club is an easier proposal to defend to a board if the first one is hitting its internal content-production targets. The UK will probably get a public version of Solihull at some point, but I don't think that's urgent — Solihull is already there, and the UK community is already effectively served by it.
The last piece I want to flag, reluctantly because it's more speculative than the rest of this, is the IPO context. Gymshark had informational IPO discussions in 2021 that cooled when the window closed in 2022, and the topic hasn't returned loudly to the press since. The company is still 21% owned by a PE firm that bought in at a £1bn valuation five-plus years ago, which means an exit conversation is at some point coming whether or not Gymshark wants it to. An apparel company exits at apparel multiples; a vertically integrated, omnichannel, globally present fitness brand with US retail, US gyms, Middle East retail, European retail, and a proprietary content-production facility stamped with its own name exits at something that looks more like platform multiples. I don't think Miami is being opened as an S-1 line item — that would overstate the cynicism here — but the S-1, whenever it's eventually written, will read differently because of it. The velocity of the last eighteen months is consistent with a company quietly positioning itself for a story it'll eventually need to tell to public markets, and I think that's worth flagging even if it can't be proven from outside.
What ran in every outlet last week was Gymshark's preferred framing, delivered through a press release that most of the trade press understandably reproduced. I think the announcement is better understood as the activation of a long-prepared plan, pushed into motion by a P&L problem that the US market has been producing for at least two years. Solihull has been running the integrated content-and-gym format inside the company since 2019. Dubai has already produced real-world evidence that physical presence lifts online sales materially in the same market. The LIFT event calendar has effectively been publishing the rollout schedule for anyone who cared to read it as one. Miami is the most visible move in that rollout so far, and given the pace of the last eighteen months, it probably won't be the most visible move in it for very long.