Gymshark x HowNow

Gymshark is a fitness apparel & accessories brand, manufacturer and online retailer based in the United Kingdom, supported by millions of highly engaged social media followers and customers in 131 countries. In 2020 Gymshark was named as named Britain’s fastest-growing fashion brand, as two-year international sales figures grew by 115.7%.

While the brand is growing at speed, Gymshark People Development Manager Adam Davies is focused on delivering effective onboarding to new employees, helping people develop business-critical skills, and ensuring the organisation is compliant. After all, people are at their core as “…a family of like-minded individuals working to bring our respective visions to life.”

Gymshark faced the challenge of scaling their onboarding experience in a way that was consistent and easily repeatable. They were growing at such a speed, it meant knowledge was fragmented and information silos were affecting the productivity of teams as well as the ramp-up time of new starters.

Whether it was in Slack conversations, email threads, Google Docs, or their own separate knowledge bases, there was no central place where they could go to find what they needed. That’s where HowNow entered the picture…

It all started with a demo, one in which Adam realised he’d found a kindred spirit in our brand. ‘This all feels very Gymshark’ he told us, as he realised HowNow not only had the features but the user experience to click with their people. With driving adoption and demonstrating value from day one vitally important, this was a key consideration.

Adam assembled a group of Learning Champions across the business, and they became our pilot audience as we tested use cases, refined our communications and gathered feedback.

When you talk about driving adoption, it doesn’t get better than employees using your platform before you’ve finished training them on it. That’s exactly what happened when our CEO Nelson headed up to sunny Birmingham to give a warm welcome and co-facilitate internal demos and town-hall training for different user groups. Most people were creating Nuggets and sharing knowledge before the training had even ended, with new use cases being introduced the more people used it.

What happened after we left? Does this case study have a happy ending? You’ll be pleased to know it does! By creating knowledge nuggets in HowNow, sharing resources became a habit and a learning culture developed at Gymshark.

Just under 14,500 pieces of content have been viewed and just over 13,500 completed, with an impressive 70% user-generated content. Information is no longer siloed, it’s shared, celebrated and available for everyone to find.

Adding all this knowledge into one shared platform made life easier for onboarders, who not only found the consistent resources they needed but were able to recognise who shared them and connect with their colleagues.