The butterfly effect
Social media marketing thought leader Elfried Samba is a globe-trotting megastar in his field, with hundreds of thousands of followers on LinkedIn and a reputation for scaling brand communities.
Speaker, consultant, podcaster, creator and CEO of the Butterfly Effect creative agency, Elfried hails from the Congo but now takes 50 or more flights every year, meeting clients and spreading his unique word across the globe. Having helped take the activewear and accessories brand Gymshark from 1.5m followers to over 20m, Elfried’s name is synonymous with social media success.
“I moved to the UK when I was 14,” he said. “It wasn’t safe to be in the Congo because there was a war on, so we moved to South Africa first which also became unsafe, and then to the UK where we started our lives from scratch.
“We didn’t know anybody, nobody knew us, and I wanted to make sure I made the most of my golden ticket. Not a lot of people get the opportunity to leave a war-torn country and then come to the UK to make something of yourself.”
Arriving in Walsall, Elfried quickly realised that he wasn’t good enough at science to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. It wasn’t until he reached sixth form college when he caught his first glimpse of the ideas that have come to encapsulate his career.
“I watched this video from Steve Jobs,” he said. “It was about the iPhone release, and it blew my mind. I was so fascinated by the concept of storytelling in business and taking very complicated products and articulating what they were in a way that other people could understand and desire.
“I was also intrigued by the Mark Zuckerberg story. You’ve got a 21-year-old saying no to Yahoo when they offer him a billion dollars, wearing t-shirts and flip-flops. It didn’t look like the gatekeeping world of Sir Alan Sugar and that space.”
With these sources of fascination and inspiration fuelling him, Elfried went to the University of Wolverhampton to study a degree in marketing management. Visiting lecturer Gary Lennon “lit a fire under” Elfried when he expressed a deep interest in Facebook, which encouraged Elfried to focus his dissertation on the potential of social media marketing.
Elfried said: “I did well across my other module scores, which meant I didn’t have to get as high a dissertation mark as I otherwise would have, so I just worked on what I was passionate about. I felt that small-to-medium-sized businesses would be able to dethrone larger competitors by leveraging social media effectively.
“Later, when I was at Gymshark, that was me bringing those ideas I explored at university to life and making them happen.
“At Butterfly Effect we’re reshaping the world, so how can I not be energised by that?”
So every time I do a talk now, I always reference and discuss that journey at Wolverhampton being the catalyst for my entrepreneurship.”
Studying at the University of Wolverhampton was life-changing for Elfried, and one of the first times where he “felt like I wasn’t crazy”. It takes a unique approach and perhaps even a unique mind to steam as far ahead in an industry as Elfried has, and his degree enabled him to explore a previously tethered part of his brain.
“I was home-taught first, and at school it took me a while to adapt to conventional thinking and academia,” he said. “Later at Wolverhampton, people like Gary Lennon made me feel seen because I thought a bit differently and outside the box. That allowed me to build my confidence.
“I graduated from Wolverhampton with a first-class degree, so the all-nighters were worth it. The funny thing is that it took me 29 interviews before I got a job! It wasn’t because I was incapable; it was more because people were saying I wasn’t going to stay with them for long, or because they didn’t believe in my vision of where the world was going.”
After a few years of marketing agency work, Elfried took a role with the fitness brand Gymshark as a social media executive, rising in just four short years to become the global head of social content.
“I think that everyone I spoke to before I reached that point needed transitioning to my ideas about using social media for better leverage,” Elfried said. “At Gymshark, it was the opposite. They were ahead of me. They were practitioners.
“A lot of the people at Gymshark were university dropouts who just understood naturally what to do to scale a business. My goal was to be the one who listened, understood what made the brand special, and then leveraged my thinking around systems and processes.”
Elfried learned countless lessons while he worked at Gymshark, and emphasises the importance of using time wisely. He says that expertise doesn’t come from 10,000 hours, like the famed adage suggests, but from 10,000 iterations, and that the impact of your actions is of more value than the effort they require.
By using social media to create a sense of intimacy between consumers and a corporate business, ensuring that as it grows the company “still feels small”, Elfried watched Gymshark’s prominence increase until one day in 2022 the brand was praised on an earnings call between two of the biggest names in social media marketing.
“Gymshark was like a bubble, where we were all furiously ambitious and nothing was ever good enough,” Elfried said. “When I joined, we put a new ambassador programme in and a new strategy, and that went from being 5% of the business to about 80% – then a year later, we were mentioned by Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandsberg among non-bluechip and public companies that had leveraged and made the most of the Meta ad platform.
“There were 70 million brands on the platform, and our little company in Redditch was mentioned at that scale! That changed me. I was like, something is happening here. This is not going to be a conventional path. Let’s keep moving and see where we can go.”
In 2022, Elfried decided to leave Gymshark and put all his focus into his own cofounded venture: the creative agency Butterfly Effect. Four years since the company’s inception and having worked with brands as reputable and large as Netflix, McDonald’s, and Bumble, it would be easy to assume that the business has already achieved the success he craves.
“No, no, it’s a 25-year journey,” he counters. “I just believe I found the formula that will work on different businesses, but I want to test my theory to see if it applies in multiple industries and multiple places.
“I love (the renowned hip hop group) Wu-Tang Clan, where there’s nine artists unified by the same sound, and that’s my vision: nine unicorns by the time I’m 55.”
Seeking nine unicorns – privately owned startup companies worth $1bn or more – in 25 years would be laughable if it came from most people’s mouths, but Elfried isn’t “most people”.
Elfried came to the UK as an asylum seeker in 2005, but in 2026 he might be in London one day and the Middle East the next. He works with and meets clients around the world in places as varied as Japan, Silicon Valley in the US and Portugal, with companies as monumental as Adobe, Fifa, and Hewlett-Packard (HP).
“I’m used to working and I often don’t even see it as work,” Elfried said. “Sometimes I sleep on my friends’ sofas. Sometimes I won’t know where I’m going until the day of. Sometimes I’ll be having sleepless nights and telling myself no, you can’t sleep because you have to wake up early.
“Like today, I have a pitch with HP about the Moons to Mars project, because they build the equipment that astronauts and space stations use. How do we tell that story?
“At Butterfly Effect we’re reshaping the world, so how can I not be energised by that? If I wasn’t, I’d be in the wrong field, right? And that’s how I’ve always been.”
