- Icon Fitness is likely one of the largest producers of train tools.
- The firm elevated gross sales by 600% in 2020 and is eyeing an IPO.
- “We’re really the innovators of the digital-fitness house,” Icon’s SVP of selling advised Insider.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Before there was Peloton, there was Icon Fitness, and the greater than 40-year-old firm is intent on making its health legacy identified to the plenty.
Icon — greatest identified for merchandise like NordicTrack, ProForm, and Freemotion — has lengthy been one of many largest exercise-equipment producers. But the corporate says what units it aside within the fast-growing digital-fitness period is iFit, Icon’s patented embedded expertise system that connects wearable units and tools to a cloud-based app the place customers can monitor their progress in actual time.
While this description matches how practically each digital-fitness firm operates in 2021, Icon was among the many first to develop the expertise when it debuted iFit in 2000.
Rather than merely monitoring real-time well being vitals like coronary heart fee, iFit additionally permits instructors to routinely alter power, pace, and resistance throughout streamed group courses or particular person exercises in accordance with a rider’s health stage — no fussing with a dial required.
“We’re really the innovators of the digital-fitness house,” Colleen Logan, Icon’s senior vice chairman of selling, advised Insider, including that iFit helped Icon create the idea of “interactive health,” which Logan described as a stage up from linked health.
“Interactive health implies that along with streaming the video and the audio channel from our content material, we really stream an invisible channel that interacts with our tools and will increase pace or decreases the pace or adjusts incline, decline, and resistance in good sync with our content material,” she mentioned.
According to Mark Watterson, the president of iFit, Icon streams exercise courses to 1 million paid subscribers throughout greater than 50 nations. Its attain has continued to develop because it appears to be like to develop partnerships with major companies like Planet Fitness, which Icon teamed up with earlier this yr to assist energy the gymnasium chain’s new digital platform.
iFit’s expertise has additionally turn into concerned in what Bloomberg just lately described as Peloton’s “patent wars,” a sequence of authorized disputes over copyright and mental property with opponents like Icon and Echelon. In February, a decide dominated in favor of Peloton in a patent-infringement lawsuit filed by Icon in opposition to Peloton’s “auto-follow” function on its Bike Plus fashions. In a separate lawsuit filed in November, Peloton alleged Icon stole firm commerce secrets and techniques.
“We have been doing it for a very long time, and we have been innovators and leaders for a very long time. And we defend our mental property,” Logan mentioned in reference to the authorized battles.
Icon Fitness
The way forward for interactive health
Like Peloton, Icon additionally reaped the advantages of the at-home-fitness growth introduced on by the pandemic, which prompted gross sales to extend by 600% yr over yr in 2020. Now, because it considers an preliminary public providing, it is estimated to be valued at $7 billion.
According to Logan, Icon’s product portfolio is designed to succeed in all kinds of shoppers at completely different value factors. She described NordicTrack as the corporate’s premium house product, ProForm as its mass-market model, and Freemotion as its luxurious home-workout tools. Meanwhile, an iFit subscription — which retails at $40 a month — can be utilized throughout all of its merchandise.
Icon declined to touch upon the potential for an IPO. But Watterson mentioned he anticipated Icon — which was already rising at a triple-digit share fee earlier than the coronavirus outbreak — to proceed to develop at the same clip because it was earlier than the pandemic as soon as the outbreak subsides.
The health firm just lately started experimenting with new types of content material like
meditation
and out of doors exercises streamed from iconic websites around the globe to diversify choices. One such exercise included a latest class during which Icon filmed climbers ascending Mount Everest as instructors on-site guided customers at house on the best way to simulate the expertise on treadmills or stair climbers.
“It’s an interactive expertise fully completely different than a linked expertise that possibly prospects are extra accustomed to,” Watterson mentioned.
He added: “More and extra persons are turning into extra health-centric, because the pandemic has drawn extra gentle to the necessity for total well-being and — and attempting to be sure you’re balanced inside your bodily, psychological, and emotional facet of your life.”
