Gymshark Earns Process Improvement of 37x Using Alteryx

Founded in a garage back in 2012 by a group of high-school friends as a sports and fitness apparel company, Gymshark has now become one of the fastest-growing and most recognizable brand names in fitness. “We could never find the clothes we wanted to wear to the gym,” says Ben Francis, Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at Gymshark. “So we bought a screen-printer and a sewing machine and started to hand-make the clothes.”

“We are a completely direct-to-consumer and community first business. We don’t put our product through any retail stores and we run our business through channels like social media, live events, our website and through our app. So we knew that by having all these customer touchpoints, we would have a massive amount of data to sort through.”

“We needed more speed to get the right data where it belonged and it was a very manual process,” says Gemma Hulbert, Chief Data Officer at Gymshark. “With so many sources of data coming in from various touchpoints, we wanted to streamline the process in a user-friendly and code-free way. This was so we could get a holistic view of our customer to recommend the products we think best matched what they were looking for.”

When it came to finding a solution, Gymshark knew what specifics were important to them. “We wanted to ease the manual pains we were having by using something that could automate our processes quickly, and give us unlimited access to our data,” Hulbert says.

“We’re using Alteryx to pull all of the raw data from our customer touchpoints, centralize it into our analytics database, and tap into insights on what’s happening across different channels and get a complete view of our customer,” Hulbert says. “We are then able to target those customers with customized products based on what we think would best suit their needs.”

With multiple marketing initiatives to tackle, Gymshark rolled out their use of Alteryx in multiple ways, including:

• Location planning for pop-up events: This process would previously take 14 days to understand best locations for events based on customer activity, their spend and gender splits. Using Alteryx, Gymshark can now compare 5 different locations in 5 minutes for a process improvement of 37x.
• Affiliate marketing analysis: Tracking success of affiliates that advertise on Instagram across 131 countries (Gymshark’s primary source of marketing in 2018). Gymshark needed to ensure they were paying their affiliates the correct amount and analyze which products were performing well and which weren’t, calculating revenue, where customers were located and if they were returning customers. This is now a fully automated process that originally took days in Excel and SAS.
• Weekly sales summary reporting: Analyzing best performing products and markets, previously took 1 day per week, now full automated.

“Alteryx has not only saved us time but has also allowed us to recruit for new individuals that don’t have to have those specific skills in coding or data mining techniques,” Hulbert says. “It can be people who can take the current skillsets they have and be able to investigate data and have a deep understanding of it, almost like a hybrid individual that can add business value by having a nice blend of skills. We’ve been able to expand faster because we are able to find these individuals easier, rather than having to find people with very specific skillsets.”

“New hires are now able to come in and hit the ground running right away with Alteryx, even though they aren’t data analysts. We are able to create apps that empower our employees to be able to learn new skills using the Platform.”

So what's next? Gymshark will continue to harness the power of data and analytics to make informed business decisions and solve complex problems. “We want to have greater visibility into our data performance,” Hubert says. “Alteryx will take us in the direction of being able to deliver very competitive solutions that our competitors will struggle to implement at the speed we can.”

“We have a huge opportunity to use data to problem-solve within the business,” Francis adds. “Since we’ve implemented Alteryx, the speed at which our teams can produce results is rapid, and I think it’s a testimony to the flexibility and power of the Platform.”