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A company can offer next-day delivery, lab-tested products and tens of thousands of glowing reviews. Then along comes a single Instagram story. The Dalibor Cicman case shows that customer experience no longer ends at the checkout, and that sometimes a brand’s most visible touchpoint can be its founder.
What happened
In September, GymBeam’s founder and majority owner Dalibor Cicman was on a business trip to India, where, in his own words, he was filming a vlog about local entrepreneurship. During his stay in Mumbai, he visited Dharavi, one of the best-known slums in the world.
Public outrage centred on three Instagram stories. The first showed a barefoot local boy with two outstretched hands in front of him wearing luxury watches, captioned in English with a line about genuine Patek Philippes worth over $100,000. The second featured a man sitting on a scooter, which Cicman tagged as Trebišov, a town in eastern Slovakia. Critics read this as comparing the Indian slum to the impoverished Roma settlements in the east of the country. The third was taken at the five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel, where Cicman was raising a glass with others, under the caption “from Slum to 5*”.
Calls to boycott GymBeam spread across social media, and critical comments targeted not only Cicman’s personal profile but also the company’s accounts. The backlash even reached a Forbes post promoting an upcoming event with the entrepreneur.
Two versions of the same hand
Cicman deleted the stories and issued an explanation. In an Instagram comment, he said it was a misunderstanding and that the hand in the photo wasn’t his but belonged to a resident of the slum. In a statement the company sent to the Czech tabloid Blesk, he described it differently: the hand belonged to a local guide wearing a replica Patek Philippe, pictured next to Cicman’s own, while he himself was wearing a watch by a lesser-known brand with a black strap.
So the two accounts differ in one detail. The first says the hand in the photo isn’t his, the second that one of the hands is. On top of that, the original caption spoke of genuine watches, while the explanation refers to a replica. Whether the caption was meant ironically can’t be verified from publicly available sources. To be clear and fair that we don’t know exactly how the photo came about, and we have no way of confirming or disproving Cicman’s explanation.
Why this is a CX story, not just tabloid fodder
The founder is a touchpoint
Most CX maps stop at the website, delivery, returns and the customer service line. GymBeam is strong in all of these areas. In 2025, it reported revenue of €232 million excluding VAT and served 2.68 million active customers, an excellent result that deserves recognition. But when a founder is a prominent face of the brand, their personal social media becomes part of the customer’s experience of that brand. Customers don’t distinguish between a story posted by the company and one posted by its boss.
One reaction shows what this can look like in practice. A commenter wrote that after seeing the images, she removed GymBeam products from her basket, and her comment received hundreds of likes. It’s an individual reaction, not a measurable trend. But it shows that a purchase can be decided by something that never happens on the website at all.
The brand as identity
Fitness and healthy living aren’t just a product category. They’re a community and a self-image. Global research backs this up: according to this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer, brands act as markers of identity and belonging, and consumers are less willing to build relationships with brands that feel unlike them. An earlier Edelman survey from 2019 found that 81% of consumers say being able to trust a brand is important when they buy.
People don’t just buy a product from a fitness brand. They buy a sense of belonging to a certain community. And when the brand’s own boss disrupts that feeling, it doesn’t damage the product, it damages the customer’s relationship with the brand. It undermines the story the customer identified with.
An explanation is not an apology
This is perhaps the most valuable lesson of the whole case. Cicman later also commented on X. According to Podnikatel.cz, he wrote that he was sorry about how the post came across to people who hadn’t noticed it wasn’t his hand or his watch.
From a service recovery perspective, this is a textbook conditional apology: responsibility shifts to those who “didn’t notice”. Anyone who has worked in customer support knows the line “we’re sorry you felt that way”. The customer hears it as “the problem is you”.
What’s more, the explanation focused on the watches, while the criticism was about the framing as a whole: Trebišov, and the contrast between the slum and the luxury hotel. Influencer Iki Ngatse summed it up by saying the watches were the least of it. In CX terms, the company resolved a ticket the customer never raised.
The brand stays silent, only the boss speaks
According to Closer (SME), The Slovak Spectator and the daily Pravda, GymBeam as a company did not issue a separate official statement on its social channels. Podnikatel.cz reports that the company shared a statement in its stories about the missing context, but we were unable to verify this. When Blesk asked the company for comment, it sent a statement in which only Cicman spoke, on his own behalf. From a customer experience standpoint, this is risky. The criticism spilled over onto the company’s accounts, yet customers who commented under the brand’s posts received no response from the brand itself. Some commenters expect an apology, while others argue that neither deleting the posts nor the follow-up explanation will change the original impression.
The face of the brand steps back from the home stage
A few days after the controversy, Cicman announced that October’s Forbes event in Bratislava would be his last public appearance in Slovak. According to Emefka.sk, he explained that GymBeam is increasingly focused on foreign markets and expects the Czech Republic and Slovakia to soon account for less than 10% of revenue. The announcement drew some positive reactions, but judging by the discussion beneath it, critical ones prevailed.
It’s important to stress that Cicman doesn’t link his decision to the controversy, and the available sources don’t show that the two are connected. For CX, though, something else is interesting: customers notice timing. Whatever the reason, the home audience the brand grew up with is reading the announcement in the context of the past week. Customer perception isn’t shaped by what a company intended, but by the story in which the message arrives.
What we don’t know yet
- Business impact. We have no data on whether the controversy has affected sales, customer churn or traffic. Calls for a boycott exist, but their real effect is as yet unknown.
- The circumstances of the photo. We’re relying on Cicman’s statements, which differ in detail and can’t be independently verified.
- The company’s response. According to Closer (SME), The Slovak Spectator and the daily Pravda, GymBeam as a company did not issue a separate official statement on its social channels. Podnikatel.cz reports that the company shared a statement in its stories about the missing context, but we were unable to verify this. It isn’t known whether GymBeam is planning further communication or a change of approach.
- The link to his stepping back from the home stage. Cicman cites the focus on foreign markets. He hasn’t confirmed any link to the controversy, and none can be established.
X Pulse asked GymBeam for comment. We had not received a response by the time of publication.
Lessons for other brands
GymBeam didn’t slip up on product or service. Yet within a few days, it was facing calls for a boycott over something that has nothing to do with protein or delivery. Here are five takeaways any company can take to heart.
Your founder is part of the customer experience, whether you like it or not. You can have a finely tuned checkout, lightning-fast delivery and the most accommodating customer support on the market. But all it takes is one evening, one story and a few careless seconds, and people start seeing your brand through the founder’s lens. If the boss is the face of the company, their social media belongs on the CX map just as naturally as the online shop.
When customers feel hurt, they don’t want to hear that they’re wrong. They want to hear that you’ve listened.Explanations have their place, but only after acknowledgement. In a crisis, an apology that begins with people “not noticing” something often just adds fuel to the fire.
Fight the fire where it’s actually burning. Judging by most reactions, what bothered people wasn’t really whose watch it was. It was that other people’s real lives had become a backdrop for content. Correcting a detail in a crisis while staying silent on the substance gives the impression you haven’t understood what the problem is.
Without data, every crisis is just a feeling. Track sentiment, customer support enquiries, newsletter unsubscribes and NPS. Sometimes you’ll find that a social media storm hasn’t registered in sales at all. Other times you’ll discover that people are leaving quietly, without a single comment. And that’s much worse news.
You can’t write values into a slogan. Customers piece them together from small things, such as how you talk to them, about them, and about people who will never be your customers.
Over twelve years, GymBeam has built one of the strongest e-commerce brands in the region. Whether this affair fades into a forgotten episode or becomes a case study in marketing schools will likely depend less on whose hand was in the photo, and more on how the company talks to its customers now.
Sources: CNN Prima News, Blesk.cz, Podnikatel.cz, Antiyoutuber.cz (MAFRA), SME.sk (Closer, The Slovak Spectator), Pravda.sk, Emefka.sk, Edelman Trust Barometer (2019, 2026)
Edited by: Jana Rouček | As of 29 September 2026
