Adanola’s affordable leggings are chasing Lululemon
The gym-to-coffee shop womenswear brand from Manchester needs to stretch carefully
When Adanola recruited Kendall Jenner, the US model and media personality, to endorse its leggings and sweatshirts this year, it showed how far the UK athleisure brand has come. This was a formal deal with a bona fide celebrity, not a scattering of Instagram posts by paid influencers.
Kourtney Kardashian, Jenner’s sister, was photographed wearing a sample Adanola tracksuit in the early days of the Manchester brand, eight years ago. But Adanola, known for its affordable clothing in muted colours, is now bigger and more professional. The company has been developing fast under Hyrum Cook, its founder.
Adanola’s revenues are likely to exceed £100mn this year; it has become the latest British athleisure brand to make a financial mark in the global industry after Gymshark, Sweaty Betty and others. The company was valued at $530mn in August with an investment from Story3, a Los Angeles-based private equity fund.
The industry is experiencing turbulence after expanding rapidly during and after the pandemic. Shares in the market leader Lululemon have fallen as consumers have cut back spending, while upmarket rivals such as Alo Yoga and Vuori have gained more attention. Sweaty Betty, the UK brand owned by Wolverine Worldwide, has restructured amid a drop in sales.
But Adanola is on a growth trajectory, helped by its Ultimate Leggings, which Cook launched in 2020 for women stuck at home in the pandemic. They were its breakthrough and remain its best-selling product: it has sold 1.5mn pairs, many in its popular coffee-bean shade. At £40, they are less than half the price of Lululemon’s comparable Wunder Train high-rise tights.
The challenge for Adanola is to grow sustainably in a fickle industry and keep the delicate balance between fashion and function. It aims to be an “everyday uniform” that women wear from gym to coffee shop and beyond. Alongside its leggings, it is known for Varsity sweatshirts with the brand (or just Ada) emblazoned across the chest, as if it were a US college.
Cook is himself an alumnus of Dragons’ Den. He appeared on the BBC investment show with his brother Josh in 2015, securing a £50,000 investment from the judge Deborah Meaden in their social media photo booth company Zeven Media. That went into liquidation, but he was undeterred by this failure. The lesson was “Give it a go, go all in, and if it doesn’t work, try again,” he says.
Early on, Cook saw an opportunity for Adanola in the blurring line between gymwear and streetwear. The name came from his personal blog, which in turn was a merger of the names of two friends. It was both intriguing and meaningless, allowing the brand to develop broadly.
That proved extremely valuable. Cook is 32 and has controlled Adanola since 2018, having first worked on it with Josh. This year’s annual report records that he sold intellectual property registrations to the company for £50mn, a “valuation determined by the parties involved”. The transaction happened a day before capital gains taxes were raised in the 2024 budget. Cook declined to comment.
Adanola’s sales quadrupled in 2023 and Cook last year appointed Niran Chana, former chief commercial officer of Gymshark, as chief executive to oversee its growth. The company is based in a former clothing warehouse in central Manchester, once a textile manufacturing city known as Cottonopolis. Although it designs clothes there, they are made around the world.
Manchester has experienced the rise and fall of fashion brands including Boohoo, Missguided, and PrettyLittleThing. But Chana says the city remains a supportive place for start-ups, citing the advice and encouragement provided by local companies including Represent and Nadine Merabi. “Manchester people are just nice, they want to help.”
Chana has made Adanola’s supply chain more robust, adding contract factories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam and Sri Lanka to those in China and India. It will now distribute through a third-party logistics centre in the US, as well as a UK one. America accounts for only about 10 per cent of sales, but the share is growing.
Adanola knows the danger of becoming fashionable in a hurry and then losing sales. “We’re not a trend-oriented, fashion-led business,” Chana insists. For now, the brand remains on the rise. The trick is not to overstretch.