The Story Behind GORNATION: From a Freezing Park to 140 Countries

My name is Phil, and I started GORNATION in a park that had no lights.

It was the end of 2015. My training partner Daniel and I were doing pull-ups in the dark, in the rain, sometimes in snow, in a park in Münster where nobody else showed up in winter. Between sets, with hands too cold to hold the bar properly, we talked about building something. A brand for calisthenics. Not another team logo, not another group in a scene that spent more energy on rivalry than on the sport. Something that would belong to everyone doing this.

Ten years later, GORNATION ships to more than 140 countries and 30 people work on it full time. This is the whole story, the failures included, because those are the parts that actually explain how we got here.

2015: The Calendar That Lost Us Everything

Our first idea was a calisthenics calendar for 2016.

We had no experience, no money, and no plan beyond enthusiasm. We wrote to athletes we admired, Vadym Oleynik, Melanie Driessen, Philippe Scofield and asked if they would send us photos. They did. We built a calendar out of it, put up a basic website, and started selling.

We made every mistake available to us. Production costs exploded. We launched too late in the year, which is a fatal thing to do with a calendar. We had no idea how to sell. We lost a significant amount of money and an entire year of work.

In March 2016, Daniel told me he was out. He didn't have the time the project needed, and we both knew it needed a lot of it. I was a student who hated his degree, which meant I had endless hours and nothing better to do with them. We separated with a small broken heart, and I carried GORNATION on alone.

I always knew it would be worth it. Always.

The Gorilla and the Shirt That Started It

The logo came to me in a single night.

We needed something that didn't look like the big group logos at the time, not Baristi, not Barstarzz. What came out was a silhouette: a wide upper back tapering into a narrow waist. The back of a calisthenics athlete. It was drawn quickly and it never changed.

GORNATION means GORilla NATION. We named the brand after our favorite animal, but not for the reason most brands use gorillas. Everyone else uses them for aggression and brutality. That's not what a gorilla is. A gorilla is social, strong, and peaceful and the way it moves has more in common with calisthenics than almost any other animal. That was the fit.

Then came the shirt. I found a t-shirt printer near my hometown with a specialised printing method, one we still use today. He gave me his expertise for free. His team, who normally printed for large corporations, gave 100% for a 20-year-old with no revenue. Together with Daniel I had designed the "Never Give Up Only Pull Up" shirt and picked the exact fabric to print it on.

I could not have placed that first order without my school friends. They pre-ordered shirts they had never seen, based on nothing but trust, and that gave me the security to buy the first batch. Teams like Main Calisthenics from Germany and the Goal Trainers from the Netherlands let me print their team apparel.

Then I started seeing the shirt on people I had watched on YouTube. Ivan Markioli. Hannibal For King. Melanie Driessen. For my 20-year-old self that was everything. Honestly, it still is.

2016 was mostly giving shirts away, spending money on ads, connecting with athletes, and reinvesting every cent. I made no profit at all. 2017 had to be different.

2017: The Year Two People Changed Everything

On New Year's Eve going into 2017, a friend of mine, another Daniel, said something I still repeat to myself: "Philipp, stop thinking small. Start thinking BIG."

Weeks later, two people joined and the trajectory changed permanently.

My girlfriend Lissi brought structure to something that had none. Within weeks we had a working tax setup. She ended the small-business registration I had been hiding behind and turned GORNATION into a real company. Then she picked up the phone, called the organizers of FIBO, the largest fitness expo in the world and connected us with Barzflex from Austria, who ran the calisthenics competition that year. Thanks to Floh from Barzflex, we got a small corner of the calisthenics booth at FIBO 2017. I did not think that was possible that fast. From there, invitations to other expos and competitions followed.

Henning, my old classmate from school, joined just before FIBO as Head of Design. He built our visual identity, shot and edited the best calisthenics videos I knew personally, and spent every free hour of his life on it.

By the end of 2017, we sometimes did more revenue in a single day than in two months combined before those two joined the team.

2018: The Office at the Train Station

Until 2018, every order left from an apartment.

That year we got our first real space: a small office and warehouse in one room next to Münster's main station. It was not glamorous. The building had rough edges, and so did the neighborhood after dark. But the location was practical, the post office was around the corner, and anyone visiting could walk over from the platform. More importantly, it was ours. That room is where GORNATION stopped feeling like a side project.

We bought a heat transfer press and started finishing shirts and hoodies ourselves, in-house. And we hired our first people, friends on part-time contracts and working-student roles, a few hours a week. Before that, everything had been built by volunteers: people who thought the mission was worth their free time and helped with marketing, design, or events for nothing. 2018 also brought our first piece of equipment: the Performance Wrist Wraps.

Wrist wraps mattered in calisthenics, and the ones on the market didn't work for it. Ours had no velcro, so you could adjust the tension mid-set without taking them off. That sounds like a small detail. It is exactly the kind of detail the sport was missing everywhere. Those wraps are still in our range today, eight years later.

2019 - 2020: Learning How to Build Equipment

Here is something worth being honest about: we were slow with equipment. Deliberately, and also because we were not good at it yet.

In 2015, when I started training, decent calisthenics equipment barely existed. There were no proper resistance bands for the sport. People were building their own parallettes out of pipes because nothing on the market was worth buying. That gap was the reason to build equipment at all and it was also the reason it took time to build it properly. After the Wrist Wraps came Workout Grips and Elbow Sleeves in early 2019, then the Premium Resistance Bands in mid-2019. Then March 2020 happened.

FIBO was cancelled. The office closed. A team that had trained together every single day suddenly worked apart for months. That was harder than any supply chain problem, we had built the company around being in one room.

What we did have was a Door Anchor, launched in March 2020, right when the entire world lost access to its gyms. Premium Liquid Chalk followed in July. And in September 2020 we finally shipped the Premium Parallettes - Active, Pro and Max - the product category that had been missing from the market since the day I started training.

2021 - 2023: Building Things That Don't Break

We spent two years developing a dip belt that never made it to market. The idea was a velcro-based belt that could be adjusted precisely to each athlete. It didn't work the way we imagined, and after two years of development we stopped. That's a lot of time and money to write off.

So we changed the target. Our sponsored athletes kept destroying their dip belts, a new one every few months, ripped seams, bent hardware. We decided to build the most durable dip belt we could make instead of the cleverest one: stainless steel, high-grade nylon, reinforced stitching. In lab testing it held up to 1,000 kg without deforming.

The Premium Dip Belt launched in January 2021, together with the Workout Rings Set. From there the range grew the way it should have from the start, driven by the community asking for it:

• Elite Weight Vest 10 kg: June 2022
  

• Premium Dip Bars: February 2023
  

• Static Bar: July 2023
  

• Elite Weight Vest 20 kg: August 2023
  

Not everything arrived intact. One shipment of 1,000 pairs of wrist wraps came in with a manufacturing fault, and the whole team sat in the office reworking them by hand. A pallet of Parallettes got wet in transit, and we had to throw a large part of the order away because the wood had mould. Those are the days nobody posts about. They are also the days that taught us what to check before a container leaves.

2024 - 2026: A Pull Up Station and a Real Building

In November 2024, we launched the Premium Pull Up Station, the biggest product we have ever built, and one that took the brand from accessories into full training setups.

In 2025, GORNATION turned ten years old.

Today we are around 30 people working from almost 500 m² at Wienburgstraße in Münster, a space we just expanded again, a few days before this article was written. We have developed over 250 products since 2015. The community is roughly 400,000 people across more than 140 countries.

And in August 2026, on holiday in the south of France, I saw a stranger wearing a GORNATION tank top.

Not in a gym. Not in a calisthenics park. Just a person on the street, someone I had never met, wearing something we made. It took over ten years of designing and selling clothing before that happened for the first time. I had been waiting for that moment since 2016.

The Only Real Reason We're Still Here

People ask what separates us from the brands we started against in 2016. I've thought about it honestly, and the answer is unimpressive: We didn't quit.

There were people with far more capital. People with far more experience. People with better designs than ours. We were told calisthenics wouldn't grow. We were told the sport doesn't need equipment, because you train with your own bodyweight. We were told it doesn't need clothing, because everyone trains shirtless anyway. We kept going anyway. That's it. That, and a team that shows up every day and gives 100%.

Two people deserve to be named here. Frederik was our first model in spring 2016,  before there was a company to be a model for. Ten years later he runs our entire product division. Daniel Terechow joined design in 2021 and has shaped how the brand looks for over five years.

I don't have contact with the Daniel I started with anymore. But GORNATION doesn't exist without those cold nights in that park, and it never will.

Never Give Up Only Pull Up

The slogan was never marketing. It's the actual mechanism.

If you want a first pull up, you don't get it through talent or a clever plan. You get it by showing up for weeks and months without visible progress and not losing hope. Business works identically. Every winner runs into problems. The only thing that separates outcomes is whether you keep going. That's why the sentence fit in March 2016, when Daniel left and I was alone with a failed calendar. And it's why it still fits in 2026, at a scale I couldn't have imagined then.

Our goal has not changed: to connect one million people through calisthenics, measurably. We're not there yet. We're going to keep going until we are.

To everyone who pre-ordered a shirt they'd never seen, who wore the logo before anyone knew it, who sent us a photo from a park somewhere in the world, thank you for building this nation with us.

Never Give Up Only Pull Up.

Phil :)