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🪩 Volume 127 | March 11, 2026

 

Gymshark leggings. That either triggers you (if you at all were floating around the fitness space in 2014-2016) or launches some question marks in your brain. 

 

Either way, stay with me.

 

I have never owned a single pair of Gymshark leggings. Not-a-one. And yet, I spent an embarrassing amount of time in 2015/2016 watching YouTube fitness girlies “Day in the Life” vlogs, most of which totally flaunted Gymshark (Nikki Blakketter, Amanda Bucci… yeah lol). 

 

So I knew the Gymshark brand before I ever visited their website, and I knew it because their community sold it for them. 

 

LAST WEEK: We talked about service brands that scaled cautiously. THIS WEEK: We’re staying in that same financial discipline lane, but this story has a different flavor :) 

 

The below brands didn’t have investors breathing down their necks… they had something scarier: momentum. They had money coming in, they were building some serious buzz, and customers were POURING through the door. The pressure to scale came from success itself. 

 

I speak from personal experience when I say community building is one of THE MOST overlooked brand growth tactic. Welcome to Week 2. 

 

 

 

 

Here's what nobody tells you about bootstrapping: discipline alone doesn't get you there. The brands that have “made it” without outside money were scrappy and they were beloved. (And perhaps you can identify, here). They built communities of people who felt personally invested in their success. And that community did the work most brands pay for.

 

When your customers are evangelical, you don't need to buy growth. You just have to keep deserving it.

 

This week: three product brands who stayed bootstrapped until they had the leverage—and what their community-first approach made possible.

 

In 2012, Ben Francis was a 19-year-old in the UK, annoyed that gym clothes didn't fit right, and taught himself to sew with a machine he bought for £1,000. His grandmother—a curtain maker—helped him figure it out. Like all wild and cuhrazy growth stories, he and co-founder Lewis Morgan started selling apparel out of a garage.

 

Then came BodyPower 2013: Europe's biggest bodybuilding expo. Francis emptied the company bank account to rent a booth. Their Luxe Tracksuit went viral on the floor. Within 30 minutes of going online that day: £30,000 in sales.

 

What actually built the brand, though, is that they seeded product to fitness influencers (and some of the first to do so). These were ACTUAL gym people with actual communities who actually wore the stuff and talked about it on YouTube. 

 

The hauls, the "come to the gym with me" vlogs. They did this all while growing entirely on their own dime for the first eight years.

 

By 2020, Gymshark hit unicorn status. Then they took outside investment—from a position of total leverage, on their own terms, with Ben Francis still owning the majority of the company.

 

The lesson isn't "never take money." It's: sequence it right. Build the community, prove the product and come to the table with power.

 

For your business: You don't need to go viral. You need five people in your market who love what you do enough to talk about it. Give them something worth talking about. 

 

 

Sara Blakely started Spanx in 2000 with $5,000 of her own savings and not a single fashion connection. She wrote her own patent and cold-called hosiery mills until one finally said yes. She drove to Neiman Marcus and asked for 10 minutes with a buyer… and demonstrated the product in the bathroom, on herself.

 

Nobody in the fashion industry took her seriously. So she went around them entirely.

And women—regular women who tried it, loved it, and couldn't stop telling people—became the entire distribution network.

 

Spanx became synonymous with an entire category (think Kleenex, think Band-Aid) because the product solved a real problem and women told other women. That's it. That's the whole strategy.

 

She didn't take outside investment until 2012—12 years in—when Oprah had already called it a favorite thing twice, the brand was in every major retailer, and Sara was already the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. Skims has Spanx to thank for proving the market existed lol. And so does every shapewear brand that came after.

 

For your business: Who are your Oprahs? Who has the trust of the exact customer you want? A local blogger, a neighborhood regular, a gym owner, a stylist? One real endorsement from a trusted voice beats 100 paid impressions every single time.

 

Funny enough, the first time I ever used Mailchimp was at a fitness supplement company —felt immediately like something anyone could figure out, which was kind of the whole point. These days I still recommend it, just not for everyone, it's the move when a client is managing email themselves and doesn't need a ton of integration layers. Simple, effective, not trying to be something it's not.

 

Okay, origin story time! 😀 Mailchimp was built in 2001 by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius—two web designers running a small agency in Atlanta—because Chestnut's sister had just lost her hair salon and Kurzius's father's bakery had gone under. They literally built it so small businesses could stay in touch with their most loyal customers via email. (Everybody say it with me: “Awwwwww!”)

 

When VCs came knocking—and they came knocking a LOT—Chestnut said no every time. His words: "I didn't want to take orders from some nerdy MBA VC to become a copycat. I wanted to build it my own way." They were specifically scared that outside pressure would push them toward enterprise clients and away from the small business owners they were built for.

 

In 2009 they launched a free plan—a calculated, data-backed move—and in ONE year their user base went from 85,000 to 450,000. Profits jumped 650%. The community of small business owners who loved Mailchimp grew it organically, because the brand felt exactly like them: bootstrapped, a little quirky, rooting for the underdog.

 

In 2021, they sold to Intuit for $12 billion (I remember this email!!!)—the largest bootstrapped exit in internet history. Ben and Dan owned most of it.

 

For your business: You don't have to serve everyone. Mailchimp epically succeeded because it was unambiguously, unapologetically for small businesses. The more specific your "who," the more that person feels seen—and the more they tell people like them. Niche is not a limitation. It's a magnet.

 

Gymshark, Spanx & Mailchimp. Three totally different products. Three totally different categories. One shared mechanic:

 

 

Community isn't the soft, fuzzy, "nice to have" part of your marketing strategy. For these brands, it WAS the strategy. It's what made staying bootstrapped financially possible in the first place. And it's what made their eventual exits—or expansions—happen on their terms, not someone else's.

 

Most of us don't hear about a brand until it already has traction. Now you know how they got it. :) 

 

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💰 HI!!! This issue is supported by Samantha Smith Tax Advisory Co. The brands above built their communities and the revenue followed. When profit gets real, so do the tax implications—and that's exactly where Samantha comes in. She's offering Funnel Cake readers a free 15-minute tax consult. Get guidance and feel a bit more clear about where things stand for tax season: Grab your spot here. [Paid partner. Opinions are my own.]

 

It’s been a little TOO quiet in the brand world lately… actually perhaps this is because I’ve spent a lot less time on social media LOL. So when I was wracking my brain on what I could toss here today that would bring this whole thang together, I went to LinkedIn (why? Lol? Idk?)

 

LinkedIn did NOT disappoint because the third post down in my feed was by none other than Jordan Nathan, Founder & CEO of Caraway (yes, THOSE kitchen products). 

 

 

I have a pan. I love the pan. And today, they just dropped their Mixing Bowl Set, Stainless Steel Strainers, and Lid Organizer. The comments are doing what you’d expect from a brand that’s spent years building a community that trusts them completely…

THIS is what community-first looks like at launch time. Caraway = non toxic cookware done beautifully. They built a CULT following of people who genuinely believed in what they were making, and now every drop lands because the trust is there. (Graza is soooooo good at this too, btw).