Most founders who build a company to eight figures in revenue want to run it. Hyrum Cook spent nine years doing exactly that at Adanola, the Manchester activewear label he started in 2015 — and then, in the middle of the fastest growth the company had ever seen, he gave the job to someone else.
A gap in the leggings market
Adanola launched in 2015, reportedly co-founded by Cook and his brother Josh, selling leggings into a market Cook saw as split between purely technical gym wear and everyday fashion, with little in between. The brand’s Ultimate Leggings became its signature product, with more than a million pairs sold, and its customer base grew alongside a run of celebrity wearers — Kendall Jenner, Kaia Gerber, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Veneda Carter among them.
By the year to March 2024, Adanola’s Companies House accounts showed revenue had more than doubled to £57.1 million, up from £27.9 million the year before, with pre-tax profit of £18.9 million. Cook had been CEO the entire time.
Hiring the person who scaled his rival
In April 2024, Adanola announced that Niran Chana would take over as chief executive, effective June 20, 2024. Chana’s résumé was specific and pointed: as chief commercial officer at Gymshark — Adanola’s most obvious UK rival in the activewear category — he had helped grow that company’s revenue from roughly £5 million to £500 million, and had been involved in the 2020 deal in which General Atlantic bought a stake in Gymshark at a valuation above £1 billion.
Cook’s own explanation of the hire was blunt about why he wanted exactly that experience: “Niran’s been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.”
He was equally direct about what he was keeping for himself. “Stepping into a founder role, I will work very closely with Niran and the wider team and focus on the things that enabled me to found Adanola in the first place, including brand, product, culture, and community,” Cook said of the move. He did not frame it as retirement or an exit — Adanola’s own trade-press coverage of the appointment described it as a handover of operational control, not of ownership or involvement.
It is a specific kind of decision: a founder, still growing fast and still in his thirties, concluding that the skill set that built the company was not the skill set needed to scale it past nine figures — and choosing to bring in someone whose only credential was having done that exact job at a direct competitor.
What happened after he let go
The year after Chana took over, to March 2025, Adanola’s revenue grew 48% to £84.5 million. Gross profit rose 42% to £57.6 million, even as the gross margin slipped to 68.1% from 71.1% — the kind of trade-off that shows up when a company is spending harder to fund growth. Net profit rose to £16.58 million, up from £14.2 million the year before.
Adanola brought in PwC in February 2025 to find outside investors, and in August 2025 the Los Angeles-based private equity firm STORY3 Capital Partners took what the companies called a “significant minority investment,” reportedly valuing Adanola at approximately $530 million (around £400 million). The deal closed days before those FY25 numbers were filed with Companies House. Vogue Business, covering the leadership change the year before, had already put the underlying question to readers directly: why would a fast-growing, founder-run brand’s own founder choose to hand over the wheel?
The accounts suggest an answer that has less to do with sentiment than with capacity. Nine years in, Cook was still the person best placed to shape what Adanola was — the product, the brand, the culture he’d built it around. He was not, by his own account, the person best placed to run the operational machine at £84 million and rising. Deciding those are two different jobs, and that the second one might be better done by someone else, is the part of this story that is actually a decision rather than a resume line.
Related founders
- Ben Francis Sold 21% of Gymshark. Now He Wants It Back. — the rival brand Niran Chana left, and the founder who stepped out of the CEO seat once himself before returning to it.
- How Dagne Dover’s Founders Chose Patient Capital Over VC — a different DTC brand that made the opposite call on outside capital from day one.
- Founder Burnout: What the Research Actually Shows — what the data says about the cost of staying in the top job past the point it still fits.
Adanola’s 2015 founding by Hyrum Cook, reportedly with his brother Josh, and its Ultimate Leggings and celebrity-wearer details are per Adanola’s and STORY3 Capital Partners’ own August 2025 investment announcement, syndicated via PR Newswire and covered by trade outlets including FashionUnited and SGB Media. The FY2024 revenue (£57.1 million, more than doubling from £27.9 million) and pre-tax profit (£18.9 million) figures are from Adanola’s Companies House filing, as reported by BusinessCloud and FashionNetwork. Niran Chana’s April 2024 appointment as CEO effective June 20, 2024, his Gymshark background scaling revenue from roughly £5 million to £500 million and his role in Gymshark’s 2020 General Atlantic deal, and Cook’s “been there, done that, bought the T-shirt” and “stepping into a founder role” quotes, are per trade-press coverage of the announcement, including Drapers and Retail Week. Vogue Business covered the same handover under the headline “Adanola has a new CEO. Why is its star founder handing over?” The FY2025 revenue (£84.5 million, up 48%), gross profit (£57.6 million, margin down to 68.1% from 71.1%) and net profit (£16.58 million, up from £14.2 million) are from Adanola’s Companies House filing of September 23, 2025, as reported by FashionNetwork. The February 2025 PwC mandate and the August 2025 STORY3 Capital Partners minority investment at an approximate $530 million valuation are per Adanola’s own announcement and coverage by TheIndustry.fashion, Retail Bulletin and FinSMEs. No figure in this piece is drawn from an unattributed estimate.
