Most DTC brand playbooks start with a media buy. Pick a platform, set a budget, test creative, scale what works. Adanola did not do that. For the better part of a decade, founder Hyrum Cook treated the brand itself as the primary distribution channel. The result: revenue of £57.1M and pre-tax profit of £18.9M for the financial year to 31 March 2024, reported by Drapers and confirmed via Companies House filings. Then in August 2025, US private equity firm STORY3 Capital Partners took a minority stake valuing the business at approximately $530M.
That is not a paid-ads story. It is a brand-building story. And the lessons it contains for operator-founders at £10K to £100K per month are more practical than most people give it credit for.
A Brand Named After a Blog
Before Adanola was a company, it was Hyrum Cook's personal blog. He had been running it for six years. When he and his brother Josh needed a name for their activewear venture in 2015, they chose the blog's name. That detail matters more than it sounds. It means the brand was never a product in search of an audience. It came from a person who had already spent years thinking about aesthetics, fitness, and culture in public.
Their route to Adanola was not clean. The brothers had previously co-founded Zeven Media, a digital agency that secured a £50,000 investment from Deborah Meaden on Dragon's Den, then went into liquidation. What they took from that failure was a sharper sense of what they actually cared about. Hyrum said in an early interview that the switch came from a belief that you cannot build something meaningful when you are split across two things you are not fully committed to. Adanola became the only thing.
They positioned the brand in a gap they had spotted: affordable, minimal activewear that worked outside the gym. Not performance sportswear. Not fashion at a luxury price point. Clothes for the version of your day that goes from a workout to a coffee to picking up groceries without needing to change. The tagline they landed on was Everybody's Everyday Uniform. That framing did a lot of work before a single ad was placed.
The Content Engine That Scaled Before Paid Kicked In
The conventional view of influencer marketing is that it is a paid channel. You identify creators, negotiate fees, deliver product, measure attributed revenue. Adanola used a different version of this, particularly in the early years. The approach was closer to gifting and seeding: getting product into the hands of people whose audiences were aligned with where the brand wanted to sit culturally. This is earned reach, not bought reach, and the distinction matters for your margin and your brand positioning.
UGC as a structural asset
Adanola embedded community content directly into its product pages. Customers could submit their own styling photos, and those appeared on the site. This is not decorative. It closes a gap in the purchase decision: a shopper who can see how someone with a similar body type or lifestyle wears the product is more likely to convert than one who only sees a professional campaign image. It also generates a continuous feed of authentic content without ongoing production spend.
The brand built its social presence on the same logic. Rather than using its own channels to broadcast polished content, it surfaced what the community was already making. That approach creates a feedback loop. Customers who see their content used by the brand feel a sense of ownership over it. That feeling converts into repeat purchases, word of mouth, and more content generation. The brand becomes something people participate in, not just something they buy.
The TikTok moment that confirmed the model
During the pandemic, the Ultimate Leggings at £39.99 became a viral product. Influencers wearing them on social media, combined with a locked-down audience spending significantly more time on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, created a surge in demand Adanola had not manufactured through paid media. Cook has described it as a product that arrived at the right moment, but also acknowledged that five years of positioning, community building, and product development created the conditions for that moment to land the way it did. The brand had already sold over 1.5 million pairs of the Ultimate Leggings by the time the STORY3 deal was announced.
This mirrors what Liquid Death did in the US drinks market: build a cultural identity so clearly defined that organic reach does the work paid media cannot. The brand becomes the story. Customers become the distribution.
Founder Visibility Without Founder Dependency
Hyrum Cook was CEO of Adanola for nearly nine years. During that time, he was the creative and brand lead, the face behind product decisions, and the person keeping the brand's identity consistent as it scaled. But he was not, by most accounts, a loudly visible founder in the way some DTC founders use personal social media as their primary growth channel. The visibility was structural. It ran through product choices, aesthetic decisions, and the community experience the brand created, rather than through daily Instagram stories or talking-head video content.
This is worth examining carefully, because it runs against a common assumption in the creator brand space. The assumption is that founder-led content means the founder is constantly producing content. What Adanola shows is that founder-led content can mean the founder's point of view is expressed consistently through every customer touchpoint, and that community members then amplify that point of view in their own voice. The founder shapes the lens. The community creates the volume.
When Cook transitioned to Chief Brand Officer in mid-2024 and brought in Niran Chana as CEO, the decision reflected something important. Drapers reported that Chana had previously been Chief Commercial Officer at Gymshark, where he played a central role in the brand's 2020 deal with General Atlantic at a £1 billion valuation and drove the growth of its womenswear category. Cook's own comment at the time was direct. He said Chana had been there, done that, and learned from the experience. The operational infrastructure of scaling needed a different set of skills to the brand-building phase that had got Adanola to £57M. Cook moved toward the areas where his edge was clearest: brand, product, and community.
The Numbers Tell a Specific Story
Revenue doubling year on year from £27.87M to £57.11M is unusual. Pre-tax profit growing to £18.9M in the same period, more than double the prior year's figure, is rarer still. Most DTC brands that scale at this speed do so by spending aggressively on acquisition, which compresses margin. Adanola's margin profile suggests that did not happen here, at least not at scale, during this period.
The brand was also ranked seventh on the Sunday Times list of Britain's 100 fastest-growing private companies. It won Pureplay of the Year at the Drapers Awards in 2023, 2024, and 2025, three consecutive years. Those are not vanity metrics. The award is voted on by industry professionals and reflects both commercial performance and brand credibility. When STORY3 Capital Partners took their minority stake at a $530M valuation, as reported by Drapers, STORY3's managing partner noted that Adanola had built uniquely strong and authentic relationships with consumers, the kind of brand asset that capital alone cannot manufacture.
What Operator-Founders Can Take From This
Three principles apply directly to a brand at the £10K to £100K per month stage. First, treat your brand as a distribution channel before you treat your ad account as one. Adanola spent years getting the positioning, product, and aesthetic clear enough that the product could carry itself through customer-created content. Most founders run the order the other way and wonder why the paid spend never seems to compound.
Second, embed community in the product experience, not next to it. Adanola's UGC on product pages is the same idea as putting reviews above the fold. It closes the trust gap at the point of decision rather than asking the buyer to leave the page to evaluate someone else's experience. That structural choice is more useful than a Facebook ad framework most weeks.
Third, when bringing in operational leadership, match the appointment to the stage. The Chana hire was specific: someone who had run the playbook the next stage of growth would require, rather than someone with a general operating background. The hiring decision matched the operational problem the next stage of growth would generate, not the problem the brand had already solved.
For operator-founders thinking through what their own version of the Brand Operating System looks like, the GRWTH MODE breakdown of the Brand Operating System framework is the place to start. For a structured way of working through the early build, the free Productisation Blueprint covers positioning, audience definition, and content architecture in detail.
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