Fitness is going the digital way

Fitness Enthusiasts – How about a phone/tablet/desktop as your work-out buddy?

These are crazy times and crazy things are happening. One big emerging trend is about fitness going the digital way. And India’s fitness and wellness industry leader – CureFit, is committing to this trend.  

In an unexpected move in late May 2020, CureFit decided to show its 100% commitment to the digital way by cutting substantial part of its assets delivering the fitness solutions the old school way – aka fitness centres + trainers.

For a company which built itself on the back of re-imagining the good old fitness centres with oodles of technology, this was indeed a drastic move. Interestingly the company had raised a whopping USD 110 Mn just a few days before the lock-down. So, this gravitation towards digital was clearly not for the want of money. It appears to be a choice and not a compulsion due to COVID19!

As stated by Mukesh Bansal, the co-founder of CureFit, the company’s overarching vision of reaching 100 million consumers over 10 years was based on 2 fundamental aspects – leveraging deep tech and solid on ground network. They tech-ed up the good old fitness centres and made them cool – the infrastructure, the ambience, the trainers, the work outs, the celebs et al. It is not for nothing that their membership plans were selling like hot cakes.

 ‘The only human interaction happens is during the session’/‘the digital interaction is still minimal’ – this is how the leadership team described their tech backed business model in Jan 2020 – not too far back in time. The same articled stated that Cult wanted to scale up their centres from 180 to 800 by the end of 2020. They invested heavily into training their trainers and had a dedicated training centre as well as an app only for the trainers.

But, come COVID 19 and the company made a conscious choice of sacrificing one of their two primary vision drivers – solid on-ground network. From minimal digital interaction to only digital interaction – the change in plans is nothing short of drastic.

I have tremendous respect for the leadership team of Cure Fit. First, what they have achieved so far is truly phenomenal and our country deserve to have one such sports & fitness company. And second, it takes guts and self-assurance to come out in open and talk about the layoffs just a day after the company was making headlines in the social media for the wrong reasons. I do not recall seeing any other entrepreneur do that – so kudos to Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori.

So, can fitness truly be delivered digitally? CureFit believes it can be done. While their vision remains the same, one of primary drivers has changed – ‘solid on ground network’ is aptly replaced with ‘virtual sessions’. As things stand today, they are going all-in with the ‘the digital way’.

Whether the digital delivery will become the new normal in the world of fitness? – only time will tell! But, considering the awesome stuff CureFit has done in re-imagining the erstwhile fitness centres, one thing is for sure – there will be no dearth of investment and effort in going the digital way.