Inside the Corporate Race to Secure the At-Home Fitness Bag (not the one holding your sweaty gym clothes)

Tuesday is #WhatTheBusinessIs Day at Butter.ATL. Today’s interesting money story: The emerging corporate race to stick you for your at-home fitness paper.

Did the pandemic ruin your gym routine? If so, you’re not alone.

Mega corporations are paying close attention to fitness trends. And lately, consumers are being forced to purchase in-store what was once accessible at the gym.

Weights and jump ropes are flying off the shelf, doubling fitness equipment profits to more than $2.3 billion (C​NBC​). Treadmill sales are up 135%, “while sales of stationary bikes almost tripled.”

The anxiety of contracting COVID-19 may have initially lowered our collective fear of gaining weight. But as months etched on and the pandemic lingered, the desire to work out soon became a demand.

Big brands spotted gaps in fitness satisfaction and supplied avid gym-goers with at-home alternatives. As a result, virtual workouts have boomed like never before.

Our friend Umama Kibria, founder and CEO of Atlanta-based fitness web app SweatPack, recently wrote about this phenomenon for Atlanta Business Chronicle:

“Contrary to how digital fitness was positioned early in 2020,” Kibria said in her piece, “the Consumer Trends 2021 report shows that 76% of people have switched to exercising at home, which suggests that virtual on-demand fitness is here to stay.”

Gyms switched to online methods to maintain clientele, and group fitness dwindled to a nonexistent concept, but companies like Peloton and Lululemon ​are filling the void. For example, check out Mirror, Lululemon’s buzzy recent home fitness acquisition.

Also notable: Google recently acquired FitBit, even though the whole deal could be blown up since there are still antitrust issues that Google’s parent company Alphabet hasn’t worked off, and federal government regulators have always been willing to tell a quarantine thick company to “pay like you weigh.”

Even ​Apple’​ s jumping on the bandwagon with Apple Fitness+ — a sign that at home fitness is here to stay, at least in the minds of companies with money to invest.

It make sense, since The Washington Post recently reported that roughly 2.5 billion health and fitness apps were downloaded around the world in 2020, between January and November. That’s a 47% jump from the same period a year earlier.

TL;DR: If you’re interested in launching a workout accessory, app or just some signature workout merch, yeah… now might be the time.