Gym King is a brand that lives and breathes its ethos of Nothing Beats Belief. It is a performance-led fitness apparel brand with a strong cultural following that has outgrown many competitors, despite contending with larger budgets.

Working closely with Gym King over five years, Journey Further observed a shift in how demand was forming in the category. Traditional marketing models, specifically the predictable funnel from awareness to conversion, were becoming less reliable. Consumer decision-making was becoming increasingly non-linear within fragmented digital environments.

The issue was that traditional performance metrics (impressions, engagement, conversion rates) were capturing funnel progression, but failed to fully explain the conditions that enabled growth. Many brands were highly visible, but not growing proportionally, while some lower-visibility competitors gained stronger momentum.

Journey Further and Gym King analysed how different signals interacted to shape demand, focusing on understanding what was actually driving growth in the new discovery environment.

Rather than simply recommending increased investment, Journey Further worked collaboratively with Gym King to prove the commercial case, demonstrating that strengthening Discovery conditions, specifically signals indicating the brand could be found, would enable demand to compound. This gave the Gym King team the confidence to approach media investments not as isolated tactical changes, but as a broader brand growth strategy. 

Carving space in the UK’s £5.5bn athleisure market began with identifying white space and recognising that the brand’s audiences were constantly ‘on’: whether chasing the latest style trends or pursuing their next high-intensity workouts.

To effectively capture them across multiple moments and contexts, our media strategy included core channels like Meta, TikTok, YouTube and DOOH, but also layered underutilised platforms like Snapchat, where competitors were largely absent. 

Moving beyond high-intent conversion campaigns, this strategic, discovery-centered shift marked two important firsts for the Gym King brand:

• A heavyweight awareness campaign using a blend of online and offline channels to reach new potential customers.
• The brand taking its first steps into offline DOOH activity, activating across multiple cities in relevant placements near gyms and urban hubs.

The approach was identified by the Relative Discovery Score (RDS). The RDS provides a proprietary understanding of how demand forms in environments shaped by algorithms, fragmented attention, and non-linear journeys.

Using Journey Further’s proprietary Relative Discovery Score (RDS) index, we assessed that Gym King’s base score in August was 20.19, compared to the sector lead sitting at 100. This score unpacks the three interconnected conditions that determine growth:

• Presence – the probability of the brand being found in discovery environments like search, social, and recommendation systems.

• Interpretation – the clarity with which the brand is understood and categorised once encountered.

Momentum – the reinforcement signals indicating consumer choice and compounding demand through traffic share, engagement, and behavioural signals.

This score highlighted a clear opportunity to prioritise Presence, so work focused on increasing the probability of encountering the brand, because even with strong Interpretation and Momentum signals, growth potential remained constrained if Presence was low.

Following Gym King’s overall RDS score rose from 20.19 in August to a peak of 29.28 in October. The brand’s Presence score increased significantly between August and October, rising from 7.39 to 26.4.Interpretation and Momentum signals remained stable and strong throughout this period.

Strengthening Gym King’s discoverability accelerated commercial growth. 

• The most pronounced shift occurred between August and September, when revenue growth increased from 3% to 42% year-on-year. 
• This accelerated further in October, resulting in the strongest growth of the period, with revenue increasing 89% year-on-year.

Operating in an established sector valued at £5.5 billion (with a direct competitor market portion of £930 million), the brand managed to shift its share of search (proxy for market share) against established sector competitors by +0.67% from Q1 to Q4 2025. Critically, this shift against competitors was achieved during the retail sector’s toughest fourth quarter, demonstrating the true effectiveness and strategic power of the awareness-focused media activity.

This partnership confirms the shift in modern marketing: traditional visibility no longer guarantees demand. By collaboratively strengthening the conditions for discovery, ensuring the Gym King brand was consistently found, understood and chosen, we developed a framework that not only improved performance metrics, but also showed how brands can position themselves for long-term growth.