Client Case Studies

When Gymshark prepared to open the doors of their first ever bricks-and-mortar store on Regent Street, the stakes couldn't have been higher. Brought in seven months before launch, my remit was to architect the entire fitness and community proposition for a brand making its first step from digital phenomenon to physical destination. That meant examining everything — the fixed fitness infrastructure, the flexible training and event space, and how to align with both internal and external events teams to ensure the store would become more than a place to shop; it would become a genuine community home. I spent significant time embedded at Gymshark HQ, studying the brand from the inside out, understanding its culture and identity deeply enough to translate it into a world-class, human-led experience. From that foundation, I established the Gymshark Run Club and built key collaborations in the months before the doors even opened, so that community momentum was already building before launch day.

Central to delivering that vision was assembling the right team. I recruited and hired the full complement of full and part-time coaches to staff the personal training space, the fitness studio, and the events programme — then put them through an extensive training package that developed both the products we would deliver and a deep fluency in the Gymshark Way. A defining element of that training was a dedicated module delivered by Ben Wadham and triple amputee Mark Ormrod, who coached the team in how to train the adaptive athlete. This was not a token addition — it was a foundational commitment that whoever walked through the door, regardless of ability, was fully part of the community and would be met with expertise, dignity, and inclusion. The result was a team capable of creating something genuinely extraordinary: a community experience whose halo effect radiated well beyond the four walls of Regent Street and across London. The programming was as ambitious as it was diverse — charity collaborations, youth group initiatives, in-store competitions, and a landmark Store versus Store functional fitness competition that brought Regent Street alive with energy. In recognition of coaches and personal trainers as cornerstones of community wellbeing, we also delivered a dedicated two-day Mental Health First Aid qualification event — an acknowledgement that great coaching goes far beyond physical performance.

What makes this body of work particularly remarkable is a detail that deserves to stand on its own: every single experience, session, workshop, and event delivered to the Gymshark community was completely free. In a flagship location on one of the world's most iconic retail streets, at a scale requiring a full professional coaching team and a relentless programme of activity, the commitment was always to give, not to gate. That philosophy — community before commerce — is perhaps the clearest expression of what the Gymshark Regent Street store was always meant to be.

The journey of F45 Surbiton began long before a single member walked through the door. As Founder and Head Coach, my involvement started at the very beginning — site selection, overseeing the internal build, and immersing myself in the F45 model to understand not just how to operate it, but how to elevate it. Before opening, I ran free community classes in Surbiton, a deliberate and considered approach to softly introducing the brand to the local area, building genuine relationships and early trust rather than relying on conventional marketing. By the time the studio opened, the community wasn't starting from scratch — it already had roots. Coaches were carefully recruited and hired with the same standards in mind, and from the outset the team was developed well beyond the expectations of the F45 framework, through workshops and training programmes designed to build something far more significant than a functional gym: a community with genuine depth, cohesion, and purpose.

The results spoke with remarkable speed. Within just six months of opening, F45 Surbiton was recognised as the leading community studio across the entire European network — a network spanning 108 studios. That recognition wasn't accidental. It was the product of a relentless commitment to people over programme, to creating an environment where members felt genuinely seen, supported, and part of something worth showing up for. The coaching team played a central role in that culture, and their quality was independently validated on a significant scale — under my leadership as Head Coach, the studio's instructor team was ranked in the top five across all Classpass-listed studios and gyms globally, a field of more than 7,000 organisations.

What F45 Surbiton demonstrated is that the model you operate within matters far less than the culture you build around it. The F45 framework provided the structure, but the community — its warmth, its ambition, its inclusivity — was something we created from the ground up, one session, one workshop, and one relationship at a time. In a landscape where fitness studios are plentiful and loyalty is hard-won, Surbiton became proof that when you invest deeply in people, the results are extraordinary.