Retail as a Proving Ground, Not a Vanity Project: The Rhone and Gymshark Approach

If you're a DTC brand eyeing physical retail, the first decision isn't where to open a store. It's whether you actually need one yet and how you'll know. The smartest DTC brand retail expansion strategy treats every square foot as a test to pass, not a milestone to announce. Rhone and Gymshark, two apparel brands that grew up online, have both built their retail footprints this way: prove it small, prove it with data, then build.

Brands that skip straight to leases and flagship stores tend to learn the hard way that a store isn't a marketing stunt, but a fixed cost that runs whether or not customers show up. Below is how Rhone and Gymshark de-risked that bet, what happened to brands that didn't, and what it means for your own retail expansion plan.

Why Treat Gyms and Pop-Ups as a Retail Test, Not a Retail Bet?

A gym partnership or a pop-up lets a brand collect real customer data without signing a five- or ten-year lease. Rhone did exactly this with Equinox: after three years of wholesaling into the gym chain, it opened shop-within-shop pop-ups inside 11 Equinox locations, stocking its full menswear line instead of the handful of items Equinox typically carries per brand.

The results were the point. Cortney Ansel, Rhone's SVP of sales, put it plainly: "A pop-up concept allows us an opportunity to know our customers better by location. We can use it to figure out where a standalone store might make sense". Items sold through Equinox saw a 70% sell-through rate, well above what Rhone saw at wholesale partners like REI and Bloomingdale's, because customers were already in a health-and-wellness buying mindset.

Gymshark ran the same play with events instead of gyms. Before opening its first two permanent U.S. stores, it tested the New York market with pop-ups in 2017, 2024, and 2025, plus a 7,500-person community event called Lift:NYC. Neither brand signed a lease until a low-commitment format had already told them customers would show up.

How Do Rhone and Gymshark Decide Where to Open a Real Store?

Both brands let existing demand, not gut feel or available real estate, pick the market first. Rhone CEO Nate Checketts described it this way: "We're really trying to go to markets first and then find the right locations within those markets". The brand identifies where it already has a concentration of customers, then goes looking for street-level or mall space inside that footprint, a sequence that only works if digital sales data already shows where demand lives.

Gymshark applies the same logic through a community-first lens. Rather than opening wherever foot traffic looks good, the brand opened its U.S. headquarters in NYC's Soho before its stores, and used its data platform, built with Deloitte, to understand where its community was concentrated and what "hyper-local" product those customers actually wanted. Hannah Mercer, Gymshark's global GM of wholesale, retail and franchise, was direct about the pace: "We're not after a quick return, in terms of revenue growth": the goal, she said, is to be "a 100-year-old brand," not to blitz-scale a store count for a press release.

That patience is the real strategy. Both brands treat store count as a lagging indicator of digital density, not a growth lever to pull on its own.

What Happens When Brands Skip the Test and Build First?

Brands that lease first and validate later tend to end up paying twice: once to open the stores, and again to close them. The pattern shows up across the DTC category over the past few years, and it's worth naming specifically, because it's the failure mode a disciplined retail expansion strategy is built to avoid.

None of this means physical retail is a bad idea. It means retail is unforgiving of guesswork. Store leases don't flex the way an ad budget does, and once the pandemic-era rent concessions and cheap DTC funding dried up, brands that had scaled store count on optimism rather than evidence were left holding the most expensive line item on their P&L.

What Does a Disciplined DTC Brand Retail Expansion Strategy Look Like in Practice?

A sound DTC brand retail expansion strategy starts with a test you can walk away from, not a lease you're stuck with. Whether you're weighing your first store or your fifth, the same retail expansion strategy questions apply. Concretely, that means:

• Borrow foot traffic before you build it. A gym partnership, a hosted pop-up, or a wholesale shop-in-shop gives you real sell-through data with none of the downside of a multi-year lease.
• Let digital density draw the shortlist. Look at where your online customer base is already concentrated before you look at available real estate, the market comes first, the address comes second.
• Set a real bar before you sign anything. Rhone's 70% sell-through at Equinox is a number, not a feeling. Decide in advance what sell-through, foot traffic, or payback period would justify a permanent store, and what would tell you to wait.
• Cost the whole store, not just the rent. Staffing, merchandising, and regional marketing are part of the unit economics from day one, not line items you'll figure out after signing.
• Scale to your team's readiness, not to a press cycle. Gymshark's "100-year-old brand" framing is a pace-setting device as much as a mission statement. It's permission to open the next store only when the last one is actually working.

This is the same discipline that separates a healthy scale-up from a brand that outgrows its own operations, the kind of gap our Scale work with growing consumer brands is built to close. If you're weighing the jump from ecommerce into brick-and-mortar, our team has also written about what that transition from ecommerce to retail actually requires operationally, beyond the storefront itself.

Common Questions on DTC Retail Expansion

What's a low-commitment way to test retail before signing a lease? Gym, studio, or fitness-club partnerships and short-term pop-ups let a brand gather real customer and sell-through data in a live retail setting without committing to a long-term lease. Rhone used Equinox pop-ups this way for years before opening standalone stores.

How do you know if a location is ready for a permanent store? Look for a sell-through rate, foot traffic pattern, or digital sales concentration that clears a bar you set in advance, not just "it feels busy." Rhone's 70% Equinox sell-through and Gymshark's market-first NYC data are both examples of a pre-set bar, not a retroactive justification.

Why do so many DTC brands end up closing stores after fast expansion? Store leases are fixed costs that don't flex with demand the way digital ad spend does. When brands scale store count based on funding or momentum rather than validated local demand, store operations become the most expensive line on the P&L, and the first thing to cut when growth slows.

Retail can absolutely be part of a healthy growth story. But under any real DTC brand retail expansion strategy, it earns that place the same way any other channel does: by proving itself first, on the smallest scale that gives you a real answer.