When Krissy Cela’s women’s athleisure brand Oner Active launched in September 2020 she sold all 20,000 items in less than ten minutes. But there was little time to celebrate. As well as dealing with would-be customers who were disappointed to miss out, she was soon confronted with an onslaught of complaints about the quality of the clothes.
“People were getting ripped products, logos were peeling off, bras were fraying after being washed once. It was a shit-show,” says a straight-talking Cela, now 30, speaking to The Times in her chic east London office. “Looking back I want to give myself a hug because I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.”
While Cela had started a successful fitness app, EvolveYou, which includes workout videos and diet advice, it was her first foray into manufacturing. “It was naivety. I was 24 when I had the vision for Oner Active and I had no prior experience in design, materials, fabrication,” she says.
To educate herself, Cela repeatedly visited her supplier in Turkey. “I was like, ‘You’re going to tell me everything I need to know about seamless production.’ And I became unhealthily obsessed with product fabrications, blends, what works, what doesn’t. If you want to be the best at this, you’ve got to know this stuff, inside and out.”
Fortunately for Cela, her social media followers, she has 3.3 million on Instagram and 1.2 million on TikTok, gave her a second chance and the next collection flew. In the first year the company had sales of £8.7 million; in its second sales more than doubled to hit £18.9 million. Turnover hit £80.8 million in 2024 — just its fourth full year — with a profit of nearly £8.5 million.
This growth trajectory is continuing in 2025: figures shared with The Times show sales for the first quarter of this year reached £26.2 million. The promise of the brand has attracted some heavy hitters to join Cela on the journey. Among them is Zach Duane, a seasoned fashion executive who previously ran Victoria Beckham and joined Oner Active as chief executive in December 2023.
By that stage he had been advising Cela for more than a year as a mentor, having been introduced by a former colleague. Cela laughs as she describes how Duane, 52, initially wasn’t interested in meeting her. “He was like, ‘I don’t want to work with an influencer-slash-celebrity. And what is this brand anyway?’” she laughs. He eventually agreed to a coffee, where Cela says they “connected in a way that I’ve not really connected with anyone in my life before. It sounds bizarre, but he’s almost like a father figure. I feel very much he’s in my corner but equally he tells me when I need to shut up.”
At this point Duane pops his head around the door of Cela’s office, which has a baby bouncer and play mat in front of her desk for when her son, Arlo, five months old, joins her at the office. Duane says he was captured by Cela’s “visceral” energy. “I’ve worked with lots of female founders in my career and you just get a sense that something big’s about to happen. I can’t describe it, but it was just really obvious to me that Krissy was a businesswoman first and that her life on social [media] was just a means to an end.”
He initially became involved as “a board adviser, mentor and consultant” working with the senior team to help create a more formal structure and a longer term strategy. Even so, taking the chief executive role 18 months later, he says, “was a baptism of fire” especially when Cela broke the news she was pregnant and moving to Los Angeles soon afterwards.
“He was like, ‘What are you talking about? You’ve just hired me and now you’re moving. Was this your whole plan?’ And I was like, ‘Actually, it really wasn’t. I just fell in love,’” smiles Cela. She is engaged to Victor Alcantara, a talent manager whose agency is based in LA.
As it transpired, the timing worked out well, says Duane. “One of the benefits of [her move] was that I was forced to accelerate building my relationships with the team here. Most of our senior employees have worked at the company since it was founded, so these are individuals who’ve spent a lot of time with Krissy, and then here I am, a middle-aged man, suddenly their new boss.”
It’s an important self-reflection from Duane. Many of the 71 employees working at Oner Active, most of whom are women, will be inspired by Cela’s work ethic and unconventional route to success. She arrived in the UK from Albania aged five with her parents and brother, having been smuggled into France in a banana lorry. They were granted asylum in the UK, something for which Cela says she’ll be eternally grateful. “I never would have had the opportunities I have had if I stayed in Albania. No way would I have achieved this.”
For most of her childhood, she was the underdog. She grew up in what she describes as “the asylum section” of Welwyn Garden City in Hertfordshire. “Welwyn isn’t as diverse as somewhere like London, where you have different cultures, different backgrounds. It wasn’t particularly welcoming.”
Cela’s parents found work, her father as a lorry driver, her mum working jobs in Sainsbury’s and as an office cleaner, and Cela’s first job was washing up in a local coffee shop, aged 14. This was followed by a receptionist job at a hairdressers, and waitressing in an Italian restaurant. Cela was working there, and juggling a law degree, when she started an Instagram account aged 18 to document her fitness journey. She started working out initially to help rebuild her confidence after a boyfriend cheated on her. “I was very intrigued as to why the men went over to the dumbbells and the women were all on the crosstrainers,” says Cela.
• I got fed up of men at gyms — so I’m starting my own for women
“This was 11 years ago; even Women’s Health [the magazine] wasn’t talking much about strength training. It was all about very high intensity [exercise] and looking as tiny as you can,” says Cela. As her muscles appeared, her confidence grew too, as did her followers. “I went from posting things for jokes and giggles to having 600,000 followers in one year and people being like, ‘Hey, we want you to train us!’ I didn’t have a qualification so I got my level two personal trainer qualification.”
Still, the demand for her expertise outstripped the hours in the day, so she teamed up with Jack Bullimore, her boyfriend at the time, to create Tone and Sculpt in 2019. It started as PDFs that Cela created on the laptop she bought with her student loan, with Bullimore creating the website and operations on the back end.
Cela says she had been hoping it would make “maybe £400 and pay for a holiday”. They sold £10,000 worth of the PDFs in the first few weeks and made £1 million in sales in the first 22 months. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m rich!’” She and Bullimore spent £500,000 on a house and reinvested the rest into the business to make more PDFs and other content, run events and develop an app. It was renamed EvolveYou in 2022 and today employs 30 people. It had sales of £8.6 million last year and Bullimore still runs it, though Cela hints that it’s up for sale.
She was also working as an “athlete” influencer for Gymshark, the athleisure unicorn started by Ben Francis, when she realised there was a gap in the market to make striking activewear for women that performs well under pressure. “I could never find the right fit for me. It was always loose at the waistband, or tight at the legs, and then I didn’t like the patterns and the colour options: black, white, navy.” Oner Active’s gym sets come in colours including “tropical blue”, “orchid purple” and “muscle mommy red”.
She was also struck by the fact that many modern purveyors of women’s gym gear, including Gymshark, Adanola and Dfyne, are run by men. “I’m the customer. And I’ve been on the whole journey. I’ve been a beginner, I’ve been pregnant, I’ve been getting my postpartum body back in shape. I’ve been every customer you can imagine.”
She started Oner Active with the Austrian entrepreneurs David and Lukas Kurzmann and Thomas Mark, the co-founders of Women’s Best, a women’s supplements business, after working with them as an influencer. Cela is “majority shareholder” and the brothers “split the rest between them”.
One of the main benefits of the partnership is that the Kurzmanns have a distribution centre and warehouse in Austria that they were already using for their supplements business. “They had the infrastructure and I had the vision. Combined it created magic. I don’t think one could have done it without the other,” says Cela.
