HYROX CGO: Douglas Gremmen

What's one of the beliefs that you have about the future of fitness that most people in the industry understand?

Longevity is a very simple concept of four simple things. Sleep more, walk, exercise more, eat well, and be surrounded by great people. In New York with Lance Armstrong, I think we had 30 million Instagram impressions. Just from that weekend alone, how can we compete with Formula One in five years?

Well, Douglas, we meet here in Palo Alto.

Yeah. It's- Look at the view. We are both from such a different place from here. So what actually brings you here in the first place?

No, absolutely. First of all, it's always been kind of a bucket list opportunity to come to Stanford. So having this opportunity now to be here in Palo Alto with some of the real thought leaders in health, wellness, and technology really, and bringing that all together here at Stanford University today with 200, 300 people that are all being at the forefront of what health and longevity, if we can call it that, what that looks like in the next five to seven years.

So yeah, that's why I'm here. Very excited to learn, meet people, open my own horizons a little bit. I'm very focused on HYROX and the physical side of fitness, but there's so much more to physical wellbeing. And yeah, we're gonna meet some very interesting people and hear some interesting panels.

Let's actually start from the last topic we were discussing about connected health. I'm always very skeptical about, in the US we speak about, we go to all these health conferences and health events, and it's always about this thing that you go there and it's some sort of really big room inside of some sort of a casino. And then you have like a thousand booths and people speaking to each other. And it always makes me wonder how is this a health-oriented event?

So you mentioned connected health. So let's start from that. How did you approach the event? How did you do the workout there? How did it function? And then also like, what was the basic comparison with everybody else, what everybody else was doing?

No, so first of all, connected health is a speaker-led summit, right? So it's very much focused around panel discussions, very little expo compared to FIBO or some of the bigger ones. But in that sense, they ask us, hey, can you guys add, can HYROX add something to the overall experience? Can you guys run a workout? I was like, okay, but what space do we have available? What do you wanna achieve?

Whatever works, works for us. And I'm like, yeah, but if I do something, I want it to be impactful and meaningful and I want really people to experience how we believe HYROX should be trained. So we talked to our equipment provider center who are based in LA and said, hey, you've got 250 square meters, about two, two and a half thousand square feet. Can we set up a mini HYROX gym and just run classes all day, run open gym and just get people exposed to the style of training?

So from Thursday and Friday, we ran probably seven or eight classes, some fully booked, 25 people, some smaller groups at 12:30 or 7:30 PM at night. But it was so interesting to see because I'm absolutely convinced that I'm living in my own bubble, right? I'm HYROX obsessed, I'm living it every day. I'm only talking about HYROX. I think everybody in the world knows about HYROX. And all of a sudden you're bringing fitness people into my little or into our little world.

And you're like, hey, how many people have done HYROX? Nobody, I'm like, okay, that's okay. Let's start the workout. You're like, that's a rower, that's a skierk, that's a non-motorized treadmill. You're like, people are like, yeah, but how do I do skierk? I'm like, oh, wow, another reflection point of that not everybody is training the way HYROX is training as an example. So it's super interesting to see how broad the fitness spectrum is, how everybody has their own preferred ways of training, how everybody looks at health in a slightly different manner, and that not everybody's exposed to the same types of workout structures.

So I think generally it was for me, just once again, an eye-opener that there's still a lot of growth potential. There's still a lot of education to be done. And there's the opportunity to give people a lot of exposure to other ways of training that are presently taking place.

And then like, just from the logistics of this, did people basically like, they come to these type of events, was everybody suited and they needed to come there and change and everything, and you facilitated all of that inside of that event?

No, but that's a really good reminder because I definitely gave the feedback to the team saying, hey, we have to think more about the end-to-end experience. We were lucky enough to be in a hotel. So people that had a room upstairs would go shower and other people felt very uncomfortable. Us, HYROX employees, we're not afraid to walk around in our shorts and t-shirts all day, but people like to dress up again, right?

So we have to accommodate that more. And I think that was the biggest barrier to participation. So that's definitely something for us to think about in the future, how do we wanna activate at these events? Do we just wanna run health assessments? And I don't mean by health assessments, standing on a in-body scan and measuring your fat percentage but could we do mini workouts, 10, 12 minutes that measures your power output, that measures your cardiovascular, that measures your aerobic capacity, right?

Can we do things that are impactful, meaningful to the participant without being such a sweaty barrier to participation? But on the other end, it was just amazing. And I think the example yesterday with some of the people that were in the room, we finished every workout with a mini relay. That means, you know, we created groups of four. It's like, hey, group one needs to get to a thousand meter on a ski yurk.

The camaraderie, the friendships, the shared suffering, all of a sudden the noise in the room was like things that people had never seen before. Like normally you go to a soul cycle, you high five each other, you do your class, you get back out. But now all of a sudden four people that don't know each other were having to reach a common goal. You go, I go, she goes, she goes. And the energy in the room was just like, it was just some other type of magic.

And people, that is what I think stayed away from many people that you can create shared experiences between people that have completely different fitness levels.

I think this is something I want to ask you about the community. Prior to that, let's go into the prehistory. Like, what were you doing before HYROX? How did you hear about HYROX?

Man, at most, there's no world before HYROX anymore, but I was very much in traditional sports marketing, right? So worked in the big sports agencies, commercializing European soccer clubs. We owned what I call a triathlon business, which was the ITU World Triathlon Series, which was a triathlon series where the elite sport came together with mass participation, right? Which means that we would organize 12, 15 events around the world where the best in the world were trying to qualify for the Olympics, but on the backend, 5,000, 10,000 people were able to participate into a triathlon series, which is a super interesting business model.

And that's also the foundation of the business model for HYROX, and we'll allude to that in a little bit. So rewind 10, 15 years, that business was sold, including its owner or founder at the time, Christian Tutske, to Ironman. Christian stayed in that corporate structure. He's an entrepreneur at heart and quickly realized that there's a massive gap in the market. Fitness is the biggest participation, organized participation sport in the world.

Running is probably the biggest participation sport. Hundreds of millions of people are running, but nobody knows who they are. They're not affiliated to a federation. They're not affiliated to a club. Every person that goes to a gym is a member of an organized organization. So he truly believed that the sport of fitness or the activity of fitness is actually missing in a sports event at the top that people can train for.

So he started conceptualizing in 2015, 2016, how can I create a fitness event that is scalable, that is challenging, but that is accessible to everybody with a very low barrier to entry, just like running has a low barrier to entry. What do you need to run? A pair of running shoes. What do you need to do HYROX? A pair of running shoes, potentially a gym membership, but you can get very far without it.

So he started conceptualizing a race format that could scale globally that was indoors. He had a lot of interesting learnings from organizing marathons. You gotta lock the city up. You gotta get permits. All the hassle of organizing a city marathon is not easy. So he was very much thinking, how can I create a global fitness concept or event concept that all I need to do is open the doors to a stadium or an expo.

I can drive in with 20 trucks, unload, set up, have 20, 30, 40,000 people participate, roll back out. And that's what he created. So he created an unbelievable scalable event solution, a sports concept that will stand the test of time. So anyway, he developed that for two years and he called a couple of guys saying, hey guys, I'm gonna run a first mini HYROX workout. Douglas, you seem like a relatively fitness obsessed guy.

Do you wanna come to the first workout? Join the first workouts. Join the first event in Hamburg. 600 athletes. I'd never been on a skier before. I'd never pushed a sled before. Christian Tutsko was judging my wall balls. Took me 14 minutes. It was absolutely hell and the rest is history.

So, and then from, you participate at your first event, what goes into from the first event to actually leading today HYROX? Like what's the journey from there?

Well, first of all, there was a nice little gap called COVID in the middle, right? And I must admit the entrepreneurial spirit of Christian and Mo, first of the two founders at the time, they kept the company afloat and in very difficult times. And they were always thinking one step ahead. I actually didn't join the company straight in 2017. I joined two years later in 2019, 2020 with the simple mission, how do we get this outside of Germany? I was in Holland at the time. So the goal was post COVID, have our first event in London and our first event in Amsterdam.

But just say one, like what do you mean get it out of Germany? How did you know that it's worth getting out of Germany? Like was the traction becoming bigger and so on? What was the key finding?

No, I think the notion of the idea and the concept, and I think that's where Christian was very thinking very much long-term ahead. He says, if I don't scale quickly, it's too easy to copy. Right, so the business model around HYROX, which is, okay, we're gonna bring fitness equipment to a hall, we're gonna run a cool format. If we don't get that out quickly and scale quickly, it's gonna be hard to get that first mover advantage.

So there was really a mindset of, we think there's enough traction in Germany. We had 700,000 at one stage, 1,750 people at some of the events pre COVID. So we believe that-

Wait, 750,000?

No, no, so our first event, 700 people, 1,500 people. So we saw at 1,500 people, we're like, okay, there's a business model here.

How many events happened until then?

Nine events before COVID.

Nine events and you're having around 1,000 people at events? How did this actually happen? Like, how did people start hearing about it?

Like we said, the infrastructure is already there. The gyms are already there. People are doing the sport, but have never participated in the sport. So we literally knocked on every gym door. We came with a little bit like a van and we unlocked the van saying, hey, let's do a mini HYROX workout. We influenced the coaches. We got in front of the members, handed out t-shirts, handed out Red Bull cans. And every day we were visiting a gym.

So basically you're saying that the initial unlock of HYROX was going from gym to gym to speak to the trainers and also the participants to actually train.

The good news about HYROX is we know the customer. We know that the customer is in the gym, right? It's like going around Central Park trying to find runners. I mean, there are people running. So can we find a way to explain to these people that, hey, we've got a really cool event coming up. And as we always spoke about the power of social media, even very early on, 750 people, let's say with an average following of 500, great photography, right?

At every event, everybody received an amazing photo package of 50, 60 photos. Everybody looks amazing in the photos. We had a special filter. Everybody looks stronger than they maybe are. They look, they're the photos that nobody has seen before, right? So the power of 750 times 50 photos, it grows very organically, very, very quickly. And that's, I think, the beauty of it. And then it's a ripple effect. 500 people influence 1,000, 1,000 people influence 2,000, 2,000 influence 4,000, 4,000 influence 8,000. And before you know it, every event was doubling year on year, which created a very accelerated growth plan.

And you're saying your task to the expansion, like what does this actually practically mean when you go to London? It's like, do you start searching for people are going to help us? Do you start searching for stadiums or how does this work?

Yes, on the upside, it is about putting an event on the calendar. That's absolutely clear.

And then how far are you putting the event? Is it like six months in or is this far?

Yeah, at the time it was more opportunistic, of course, but nowadays when we are, the goal is 150 events by the end of 27. When we think about the complexity around roadshows. So we have 12 roadshows around the world with 20 trucks. So we need to really think about logistics, efficiencies, timings between event from one country to the next country. So logistically it's gotten a lot more complicated, but when we're starting out and we're still starting out in certain new markets, we just entered in Japan.

We just entered in Brazil. We just entered in India. We're expanding in China. Very much the marketing mindset hasn't changed from three or four years ago, where it was all about knocking on gym doors. The only benefit is now five years later, 20, 30, 40 billion Instagram impressions later, we don't really have to explain what HYROX is anymore. We're able to go to a new market and have events with 10,000 people from the get-go.

Whereas in the past we would go to a new market and we had to start with 500 again and the next event would be a thousand. But now we entered in Japan and our first event was 6,000 people.

Wow.

In a country we'd never been to, we never knocked on gym doors before and all of a sudden 6,000 people showed up because the power of the brand now allows us to really open doors and unlock the community very, very quickly. People are asking us, when are you coming to Manila? When are you coming to Bangkok? When are you coming to Santiago? And I think that's really the beauty of the global brand that has been built.

And I think it shows the strength and the universality of fitness. Fitness is being perceived in every part of the world in the same manner, which is different. I mean, you come from Cyprus and look, football is big, basketball is big, but other sports are not as big. Whereas you go to Germany, it's ice hockey, but fitness is pretty much the same all over the world.

So if you go to the early days and you start this expansion plan, how did you choose the locations? Like why London? Why the first locations you went in? And what kind of, did you do any research before that? Did you follow the same plan where you basically, let's say, you said, I'm going to go to London, for example, and I'm going to start breaking down gym by gym and I'm following the same approach? Or did you find local differences across?

Yeah, I'm almost looking back and saying, were we that smart? Were we that analytic? And I would say we were very entrepreneurial. We were very bullish. Of course, we knew what the big cities and the big metropolitan areas are. And of course, we looked at gym penetration, but I wouldn't say that we've gone out with a mega McKinsey-style consulting project and all of a sudden go, oh. No, Amsterdam or Holland overachieved in a very early phase compared to the UK, compared to the US.

I mean, US, you could go theoretically, the US is the biggest fitness market in the world. Also the reason why the first country we went to was the US, but it was the hardest market to crack.

Why is that, actually?

Good question. We sometimes think it's three or four reasons. Once, if you do something in New York, it doesn't always resonate in Los Angeles, right? So it's a big country. Maybe we're naive as Europeans thinking, oh, we do something in London and everybody in Manchester knows about it. No, you do something in New York and you got to start all over again in LA and you got to start all over again in Dallas.

And there wasn't that positive flywheel effect of, I'm doing London, then I'm doing Manchester and then I'm doing Glasgow. And within three months, you've doubled, doubled, doubled. It was 500 in New York, 500 in Dallas, then 500 in LA, then a year later, we did a thousand in New York and a thousand. It just took a long time to get the momentum. So instead of growing two, 300% in a year, it took two, three years to get to that number.

Secondly, and it's not a negative, but CrossFit was very popular in the US. People know what CrossFit is and there's nothing bad about CrossFit, but we were being associated as being similar to CrossFit. And the perception is CrossFit's hard. CrossFit's not for me. CrossFit is a tough sport. I can't do HYROX. And we're like, yeah, but HYROX is more like running. You can run. So we ran up a little bit into that difficulty as well of just saying, okay, we're having to explain why we're not CrossFit and why we're different and why it's accessible to many people.

And thirdly, it's the cost of acquisition in the US. Just the cost of building a company, hiring people operationally and logistically, everything is more expensive in the US. So when you're coming with not a fund of, let's say, hey, here's 20 million, let's go and build the US. We try to build it organically, one hire at a time, one event at the time, we make a little bit of loss on that event, we go on.

So we probably didn't have the ability to go straight in and spend 10, 20, 30 million. We lost quite a bit of money the first three years, but I think looking back, if we would have grown quicker, we would have needed to spend more money.

Can we get into that? Like, what does it mean? Like, if you were losing money at the beginning, how did you know that there is going to be a certain point that this is going to work out? Like, how did you have the belief that this is going to work out at a certain point?

There were honest reflections, if you look at the US case alone, that it wasn't worth the effort, that we were very happy with the very successful economic basis of what we were achieving in Europe. You're just going as a startup, you're going through, you're looking at your P&L, you're not reaching the revenue numbers that you're looking for and you're having to hire people, fire people. You're, of course, challenging that, the shareholders are challenging it and rightfully so.

However, at the same time that the US was not growing as fast, Europe was exploding. Like, and when I meant exploding, we're not even talking about the numbers we're talking about today, but all of a sudden we saw London go from 600 to 2,000 to 4,000. 4,000 people at an event for us was a relatively economically extremely successful case. All of a sudden, Amsterdam, 4,000 people, Hamburg, 4,000 people were like, wow, can we do two days? 4,000 turned into 8,000.

So we really saw that all of a sudden the momentum was there and that 8,000 was economically so interesting that we could also cover a little bit of that slower growth that we had in the US. We were in a better position to cover the losses. And then there was that magic moment in the US where all of a sudden New York happened. You know, you have a mutual investor in Lance Armstrong who showed up to our event in New York, 5,000 people.

And after that, the world changed. Every event sold out in the US, accelerated growth, 5,000 people at every event and 5,000 became an interesting business case. Now we're talking New York went on ticket sale yesterday. We sold 42,000 tickets for a single event. London, 40,000, right? So all of a sudden we've grown in a three year period from, oh, we're happy with 4,000. Can we grow to 8,000 to now running nine days of fitness in New York, 5,000 people a day, which is bigger than New York marathon.

So the ability where, you know, the success fuels confidence allows you to then be a little bit more bullish in a market where you were struggling has really helped us go, okay, we're in it for the longterm. The ties are gonna turn, but we had to make a big ballsy move. And that was organizing events in the middle of Manhattan, outdoors, which we never do. But in order to be successful in the US, you need to make a big statement.

And it was, I would say it's an all in approach. Probably wasn't as extreme as that, but at the time it felt like that. Are we willing to invest $1 million in an event that could potentially give us a significant loss? And that turned out to be a massively positive bet and it changed the whole environment and the whole momentum in the US shifted from that moment within seconds.

You mentioned Lance Armstrong. Would you say that from a growth perspective, having very well-known folks doing HYROX did actually unlock growth or was it more that more people were growing over time and more people were sharing in between them?

That's exactly that, right? It just happens to be that influential people that have a passion for fitness or have a passion for getting better, just, you know, saw their friends raise and they saw their community raise and they said, hey, why don't I raise? And they felt like it was very close to who they are. We never paid any influencer, any former athlete, any music star or any movie star to come and participate at HYROX events.

If you have an identity of being fit, if you have the identity of wanting to run marathons, then why not do a HYROX? And just that amplified everything we did. So that weekend in London, I'm sorry, in New York with Lance Armstrong, I think we had 30 million Instagram impressions just from that weekend alone. 5,000 people plus the who's who from Peloton to Lance Armstrong to famous actors, they were all there.

They weren't there as influencers. They weren't there as brands. They were there as a consumer that loves to compete and challenge himself. And with Lance being the epitome of what performance looks like, but that is what it was about. Wasn't about Lance and HYROX. It was about Lance and Lance.

Yeah. How does it change from an event that you have 600 people joining at the first London event and maybe Amsterdam and so on. And then now you have tens of thousands of joining an event. What does the logistics of that look like? Like at the beginning, you probably have a small stadium, I'm guessing. Now it's like, you don't even fit in a stadium. So walk me through this evolution.

Well, I could say probably, and that's the beauty I think of what has evolved. I have no influence in events anymore because it's gotten way too complicated, right? I was probably the worst event organizer in our company, but I could handle 500, 1500 people. Now, if you look at our operations department in US, it grew from two people 12 months ago to now 12 people. We're not only talking about the logistics, just setting up the event experience, the race experience, which has never changed.

Like the event experience, like from start to finish, the sport hasn't changed since we started in 2017. So the way it was conceived already allowed for us to scale very quickly. The only thing is now it's like, hey, how do we enhance the customer experience, the athlete experience from entertainment to music, to F&B experiences, to hospitality, to spectator experience. And that's gotten so much bigger where all the focus in the past was, okay, how do we get people from start to finish in the best possible manner?

Like how do we now get people to stay for eight, nine hours, spend money in our shop, go and spend time with Red Bull, go spend time with our partners? How do you make this literally the coolest day of the year? Which meant we had to hire so much other types of expertise, which is why it's also much further away from my pet show at the moment. And I'm super, pretty much what I'm the most proud of is how that team has been able to scale and really elevate over time, which is a phenomenal logistical operation.

For that team, what does it look like? What kind of people do you need to have these events and what kind of talent would you say is best for it?

First of all, it starts with our founder, Christian Tutsker, right? He's been organizing mass participation events since the seventies. He's got such an eye for detail. So just, I mean, he literally is in Las Vegas this week and he'll still be moving fences around, right? He's that particular around what it is to have a great event, what is necessary to make it full proof. He's seeing obstacles or roadblocks eight steps ahead of everybody, right?

And he's very much installing that mindset into our CEO, into the head of operations, into the head of procurement. So he's constantly on top of that. So I think it's being able to build an organization on the back of his know-how that is going deeper and deeper and deeper into really specific skillsets, right? But the only thing that we're asking of our people is have an entrepreneurial mindset, right?

Be able to solve problems on the day, be able to innovate as well. Like we don't want to be dependent on Christian Tutsker. coming up with the next innovation in the sport. So we're not only challenging our people to operate at the highest excellence, we're also asking them to think outside the box and come with solutions that enhance that athlete experience. Because an athlete that's comes to an event and says, wow, that was better than last time, will come back again.

If he feels that the experience is flattening out or the same, it's gonna be harder and harder to keep that retention. It's gonna be harder and harder for him to boast about it on social. And I think that's been the beauty and I think we'll talk about it a little bit later, but from the management perspective, our best marketing was to invest in the event over and over and over again. We never invested in paid marketing.

We just said the best marketing is athletes having the best experience they can possibly have and it being a new experience every time they go.

Well, on that point, how does the event, so let's say I'm doing HYROX first time versus fifth time and either someone that just started training versus like a professional athlete, how do you ensure that the interest remains across, right? Like, does it change from a product perspective? Like you have like different structure of the activities that you do or is it because of the challenge itself that you have to finish in certain time? How do you cater for these two personnels?

First of all, it's a sport, right? So the moment you get into the sport, you're not gonna change sport that quickly. Everybody that's at the finish, at the start line has a journey, whether it's your first race or it's your fifth race, they're all gearing up six months of training, four months of training. So everybody has a purpose to get to that start line. What I always say that first time finisher, the moment they finish, they wanna go again.

Why? Because they love the experience. They struggled. They think they can get better. They think they can prepare better for the next time. They love the dopamine they got out of it. They love the emotional support and they love being with their community, right? This is the first mass participation sports event where your wife, your family, your kids can cheer you on from the start till the finish.

So for an hour and a half, you're just going through hell but you're there supported by your loved ones and your community, right? So that is the important part. It's not only about the race. It's about everything that goes around with it. And whether you're a first time athlete or a 10th time athlete, that's what's getting you out of bed in the morning. That's the reason why you go and race. You go and do it for your own personal improvement but you also do it because your identity identifies with like-minded people.

And I think that's what's creating that stickiness, right? So we talk a lot about community. I don't think HYROX is creating the community but we've created a podium for communities to come to. Gyms are creating community inside their four walls. They're creating shared experiences. They all get on the bus. They go to London. They cheer each other on. You cheer me on. I cheer you on. You had a great race.

I had a bad race. You support me. That's the beauty of what those meaningful relationships are being built on. And I think that is what is making people come back. Yes, it's the physical race, the physical journey but it's also the human touch that comes in and around challenging yourself.

There is this, we discussed earlier about the approach within gyms. And I find it very interesting because like it's, HYROX is becoming also a service for gyms and enabling the gyms to offer HYROX specific workouts and bringing that education. Can we speak a bit about that?

Yeah, I think that's coming from an events company, right? And being able to transition in becoming the biggest affiliate business in the world. Now we have 15,000 gyms that pay for our services, right? We are a service provider and it started out very, very small a couple of years ago where gyms were asking us, how can I train our athletes? How do I educate our coaches? Can we run HYROX classes?

Very basic questions. And we started thinking about saying, hey, yeah, maybe there's room for an affiliate program. So started building out an affiliate program and two years ago we decided to actually give that its own structure. So I wouldn't say we started a new company but we started a new vertical, which was HYROX 365 which focused directly on speaking to the gym owner. For me, there's a very clear difference between the direct to consumer brand and direct to consumer marketing and what we wanted to achieve as a B2B business which meant that when we started 365, we had a thousand gyms.

It was very much built on inbounds. We didn't really have a structure and all of a sudden we started thinking, okay, how can we get more gyms on board? What services do we need to provide? What type of gyms do we wanna go after? Okay, we wanna service every gym. Okay, but Anytime Fitness or LA Fitness is very different than your local CrossFit box. So what do they need? So over the past 24 months, we've been really thinking about what are the services we need to provide.

We ensure that the barrier to entry is very low for gyms. So we're charging anywhere between $100 and $130 a month which equates to potentially them getting one new member or one member stays-

$100 to $130 a month for the actual gym.

For the actual gym to pay us. It's free. And nothing is free for gyms. I mean, the economics around gyms are obviously also not as easy. I mean, I think gyms are challenging us in ROI and rightfully so, but the barrier to entry is low. It's not like gyms have to think about a massive investment. If they're smart about it, they can earn their money back very, very quickly. So we were able to get gyms on board very, very early on.

While at the same time, we're trying to build the ship. We're trying to conceptualize the services. So we started building technology services. We're trying to start building content services. We're building education services. And no matter how we're upgrading, we're not increasing the price. But all of a sudden now, gyms are coming on board not only because of the brand name, they're also coming on board because we're building meaningful services for those gyms.

And that's been so interesting to see. So at the moment we're growing by six, 7% per month. We're adding anywhere between 800 and 900 new gyms to our affiliate network. We have the goal to get to 40, 50,000 gyms by the end of 2028.

How do you accelerate that from a growth perspective, right? Like how do you accelerate the word of mouth across gyms or how do they learn about this program?

So it's two pillars, right? So independent gyms and pretty much 80% of our portfolio are independent operators. So that's a gym owner that owns a local gym box with probably 300 to 500 members, right? A lot of inbounds, why? Because their members are asking for it. Their members need access to tickets. That is the one benefit of being a member of a HYROX training club is that you have pre-registration access to ticketing.

Apparently our tickets sell out very quickly. Being a member of a training club allows you to at least have a better chance of getting a ticket. So it's a massive win for a single operator. So we're getting a lot of inbounds. So we're getting about six, 700 inbound leads a month of gyms wanting to affiliate with pretty much a 50, 60% conversion rate. It's extreme.

Is this globally?

Yeah, globally. But you also have to understand we're coming into a lot of new markets. All of a sudden we're opening up in India, we're opening up in China, we're opening up in Japan. So as the sport is growing in popularity, it's a little bit of chicken in the neck story. Do we first need the gyms and then we get the athletes or do we first get the athletes and then we get the gyms? So it's a combination of both, but in the US we've grown from 200 gyms at the end of 23 to 4,000 gyms today.

And it's also been the flywheel to get now 20, 30, 40,000 people to our events, right? So it's a really perfect combination of guaranteed revenues for us. It's our marketing generator as well, but it's also a massive win for the gym. Like the services they're getting for $130 a month. It's almost a joke, but it works so well for everybody. It's a win-win on all parts. So that's on the independent side.

Then my key challenge came or our key challenge came, what if tomorrow Planet Fitness calls and says, hey, we wanna affiliate our 4,000 locations? What products and services do we need to, and what structure do we need to have in place to build an ecosystem that we can serve 24-hour fitness, that we can serve Planet Fitness, that we can serve a basic fit? And that's literally been the challenge I've been faced with the last 12 months on how do I build technology and services that can accommodate the needs of very big organizations?

And that's where our secondary growth is now coming from because we believe we have the services ready to proactively go after gyms, to go and speak to the CEO of a big box operator and then have the services ready to go that they can execute HYROX training across 400 locations, educate 1,000 coaches. And that's been probably the most rewarding part of the journey that we're now able to go to Connected Fitness and talk to the big dogs.

And that those big dogs wanna accommodate HYROX training inside their studios in the same way they have a spinning studio and they have a bladder studio and they have a weightlifting area. They're now investing in HYROX spaces with HYROX equipment. LA Fitness is a great example. They started trialing it with their Club Studio concept which is a boutique, a little bit more of a premium segment in their portfolio of gyms called Club Studio.

So a super successful rollout of HYROX classes which meant that, hey, HYROX classes are sold out. We're getting new members because of HYROX class. And they're now thinking about, okay, how do we bring that in a scalable version into LA Fitness with 600, 700 locations? So it's just been really amazing to see how gyms are understanding that people wanna train differently. People's demands for what they expect in a gym is now HYROX style facilities and HYROX style coaching.

I'm guessing is the insight there that if I'm in a gym right now, there is people that know what they do, which is a small percentage. And then a lot of people that churn from the gym because they might not know what to do and so on. And then the actual classes are really helping the gym keep the people there. Is this the insight?

Pretty much. I think it depends from gym to gym, right? So every gym has a different focus point on how they wanna serve their customer and their member and at what price point. Generally group class or group fitness, we all see the benefits, still very female dominant, right? So it tends to still be the case that the guy puts on the headphones, goes and lifts weights and the ladies go and do a HYROX class or reformer class or whatever.

I think those two worlds are converging. The female athlete is now also doing a lot more strength training. And I think due to the introduction of HYROX, it's cool to train in a group class. Oh, I don't mind being corrected. Oh, I don't mind being challenged, right? So we're seeing a slightly different dynamic in how people are consuming fitness, but the demands are also different. And then what they're expecting from a coach is different.

I wanna sign up to a HYROX. I go to my local gym, I go to my local gym and I go to the coach saying, hey, can you get me ready in six months? That coach needs to be aware of what HYROX is. He needs to know what the movement standards are. He needs to have an experience in what it's like racing, what the psychology is around the race, what the strategy is around the race, what the mental mindset is around the race.

So all of a sudden that stickiness between the member and the gym also changes. And that's why HYROX is such a big retention play for all these big box gyms and small box gyms. Once you're in an ecosystem where you love training, you love the community, you love the equipment, you love the price point, you're not gonna change gym.

Is then the CRM of each gym a big problem? The CRM of, do you mean the...

The system that they use, for example, each gym uses some sort of different CRM to track who is joining the gym and having the user database and so on. But then this is basically siloed across different in the US and also in Europe as well. So many different softwares that the gyms are going to be using. So I'm guessing if you're over time of fitting them in technology, hooking up onto these technologies is becoming more and more and more complex.

First of all, the technology infrastructure in the fitness space is fragmented to say the least, right? There's a lot of archaic software systems. There is innovation, but there's limited innovation. It's hard to switch your billing system from one supplier to the next supplier, right? So I think generally for us, it's been very hard to understand who's doing what for what gym. Some gyms have invested heavily in mobile apps.

Other gyms have built their own apps. Some people have their own billing systems. Other ones are married to their billing systems. Other people are dependent on hardware, right? We're seeing it's a very difficult market. There are certain market leaders for sure, but it's not as seamless as we would hope. And it's probably not as member-focused as we would like to see because a member-focused mobile app is not only about the billing.

It's really about how do you extend the role of the gym inside the phone of a consumer, right? How are you guiding an athlete to the right class, to the right workout structures, to the right nutrition, to the right recovery? How are you integrating wearable data into the behavior of the gym, right? How do you make the app not just be a booking system, but how do you make the app actually enhance the vitality of an athlete?

And I think that's the next step, but it's not easy if you don't have the right database structure or if you have the right technology infrastructure. And I think that's a little bit where we're now at a moment or at a crossroads where gyms are asking themselves, how can I build a deeper relationship to my end member via digital experience?

Let's touch a bit on CrossFit and the differences there, what people are going to see different. And then I would also like to figure out what's your take on CrossFit? I believe like when I was younger, maybe like 15 years ago, they were peaking somewhere there. What happened since and how would you compare with HYROX?

It's always a really good question because I think first of all, we have to give massive credit to what CrossFit has achieved probably since 2005. It had a massive growth probably until 2012 to 13 to 14. Obviously, COVID was tough for everybody, right? So I don't think CrossFit was particularly worse hit than most other gym infrastructures. And they've struggled a little bit post-COVID in maintaining the growth that they had.

I think if you look at what is CrossFit first and foremost, it's a gym affiliate business, a gym licensing business, which means that gyms are able to license the brand name in order to stand for the methodology that CrossFit stands for, right? Your ability to put CrossFit on your front door makes it your gym stands for something that your coaches are well-educated, that members are looking for a local CrossFit box.

And that's why as a gym owner, you pay CrossFit in the past, it was $1,500 a year, now maybe slightly more three to $4,000 a year, but gyms were able to build on the back of a global brand, right? And they've done that very successfully. They probably got to here say 12, 13,000 gyms, probably closer to 10,000 gyms at the moment. But CrossFit was very much rooted in three sports or the fundamentals of three sports, which is gymnastics and powerlifting.

Those are not the sports that everybody can do. It's not a low barrier to entry, right? So CrossFit was never meant to be the sport for everybody. And I think that's where some people are getting confused because the brand name is huge. CrossFit is a phenomenal global institution. Yes, there's 10,000 gyms in the world, but probably only two to 3 million people around the world actually do CrossFit, right?

So I think that's where we have to kind of say, okay, that's what CrossFit, CrossFit does that very amazing. What CrossFit has done, and I think a lot of gyms have learned from that, they build on three very strong fundamentals, high-quality coaching, athletic coaching. You go to a CrossFit box and you become a better athlete. There's no doubt about it. They're gonna teach you stuff that you will not learn anywhere else.

Secondly, they build it around community, right? You go to a box and you're gonna find your wife, you're gonna find your best friends, you're gonna be wanting to spend time in that CrossFit box. And they introduce competition. They're the first concept of fitness that really introduced competition leaderboards, the CrossFit Open, unbelievable mass participation, 300,000 participants a year that sign up. They've done all those three components that have changed the landscape of fitness. They've actually made fitness into a sport.

How does that compare to HYROX? We first of all saw that CrossFit didn't have a mass participation event where people could actually go physically to an event and test their fitness as an organ. So we really felt, okay, let's start there. And it just turned out that we then happened to build an affiliate model on the back of that, right? Which means that, yes, we're somewhat competing with CrossFit to a certain extent.

But then again, I'm proud to say that around 1,500 CrossFit boxes around the world are also a HYROX affiliate because being a CrossFit box, you stand for the three things I just spoke about. So it's about high-quality coaching, community, and competition. CrossFit adds another layer, which is accessibility. So you add a HYROX affiliation to a CrossFit box, all of a sudden you and I go, hey, CrossFit might not be right for me, but I love those three things.

I could do HYROX classes there. And that's a great stepping stone potentially into CrossFit later on. So we really believe that we can be a door opener for members to go and train at a CrossFit box. But that's no different that we're trying to also push athletes into an F45 or into an Orange Theory or into an Anytime Fitness. Because I think as a sport, we believe the consumer can choose where they train.

And where they train is dependent on what they're looking for as an athlete, what they're looking for inside a community. And also we have to be realistic, what can they afford, right? Can they afford a $200 a month CrossFit membership? Yes, no. It would be unfair to say, hey, you can only train HYROX at CrossFit. That would not allow us to serve the market that we wanna serve. We also wanna serve the Planet Fitness member at $19 a month.

And we also wanna serve as the Peloton member that doesn't have access to a gym, but is trying to get stronger at home. So our notion has always been, we want people to train HYROX wherever it suits their needs.

It reminds me this, maybe it's a bit philosophical, but it's this lack of, like the easiest, the easier the onboarding, the more the usage across people. So for example, if you see Pickleball or Paddle, because it's very easy to start. And if you start playing Pickleball, like in the first one hour, you can actually be functional. But if you play tennis, you would need one year to actually play tennis.

So then at the end, you have games like Paddle that just grow so extremely in popularity. And I think it's also like, the things that are becoming timeless over time is the onboarding journey needs to be easy. And if the onboarding journey is easy, then you can get a lot of users, get a lot of people, and then expand basically in popularity and make this stand for many years. And like, it also goes to games, right?

Like if you see games that apply this is some sort of Super Mario early on that when you start the game is like, you just play for like the first stage. Yeah, and you do just only two movements. And then, but then over time, it becomes more difficult, but you already know. So the onboarding journey of this game, it's so easy at the beginning. And it reminds me the similar philosophy here.

Yeah, obviously you're almost stabbing me in the heart because I'm a tennis player and I'm seeing the growth of Pickleball and Paddle, but I have massive respect for those two and completely understand where you're coming from there. You have three components probably, low barrier to entry, like you said, from a physical point of view, the social component and the price component. And if you have all three of those, you can grow very, very quickly.

The foundation of HYROX was always based around natural body movements, which means you don't need to learn a skill to participate in the sport. All the movements that we have applied are all based around, everybody can squat, everybody can push, everybody can pull, everybody can hinge, everybody can run. So if you have an able body and you have a pair of running shoes, you can do the movements that are applied in HYROX.

So that's super low physical barrier. You're then creating the social component around, let's say Paddle, you're always four people on a court. It's become this massive, the sport is great, it's super fun, low technical barrier to entry, even though Paddle obviously much harder than Pickleball. The social component then that enhances the sport where all of a sudden the four of us can all of a sudden have a fun game and drink a beer afterwards.

Wow, tick the box. And then the third layer is price and availability. There's now Paddle courts all across Europe, there's Pickleball all across the world. So all of a sudden you have access to participation, which makes the rocket ship go so quick. And it's a little bit the same with HYROX, all those three components are there. You will be able to find a local HYROX gym within two to three miles of where you live.

You're able to participate in events and you're able to build those friendships that you're looking for. Take all those boxes and it's a flywheel effect. And we're fortunate enough that the gyms were already there. There's 400,000 gyms in the world, not even speaking about the non-commercial gyms and the corporate gyms, there's probably closer to a million facilities in the world where you can go and train.

So the infrastructure was there, we didn't need to build Paddle courts, we didn't need to build Pickleball courts. We just need to get the people inside those gyms thinking slightly differently about the sport. So that's I think really where we've been fortunate enough that the hardware investment has been relatively small compared to Paddle, Pickleball's a little bit of a lower lift, but there's a lot of similarities between those three sports and I would consider them the three fastest growing sports in the world.

Man, it's very interesting because like you're using like some sort of analogy, like a church, that like all of the gyms, if you can consider them as church, basically you're using that as a flywheel into the events and then from the events back to the gyms and so on. It's super interesting. We spoke earlier about getting to a hundred million people, like if this is happening within the next two years, how does it happen?

The how, I don't know yet. The ambition is absolutely there and let me emphasize why there is such an ambition, right? We can look at it from two ways as well. We think that three to 5 million people, three to 5 million people will be coming to our events in the next two years. We'll have 1.8 million people racing this year, we're opening up many new markets, China's gonna fly, the US is growing by two to three X a year.

So we will get to three to 5 million very, very quickly. So that has nothing to do with touching 100 million lives. When you think about it, that's our direct to consumer approach. When we think about the B2B play that we have at the moment, 15,000 gyms growing very rapidly, pretty much getting to 40,000 gyms very quickly, we're starting to think about, okay, what is the impact these 40,000 gyms can have on 100 million lives?

And I think that's the beautiful thing where we've kind of have this ambition. If we can start knowing who trains HYROX inside gyms, and we can indirectly build a relationship to that customer or that prospect, and we can give tools to the gyms to service their members better. So we can give LA Fitness services that allows them to build a better relationship to their HYROX athlete inside their gym.

And we're able to feed some data back to us, and we know how 100 million people are training, what they're doing in the gym, how they're engaging with the sport. That will again create a flywheel for the events business, but there's so much other exponential data that we can get out of that that we can actually supply to these people. So I think the flywheel effect of 100 million people training in an organized manner inside gyms has never been done before with one rights holder or one brand.

Sometimes you say it's like putting a capital T on tennis, like we are a commercial organization, but we're also the sport. So if tennis could know everybody that plays tennis, it would be a completely different dynamic. CrossFit sadly never built a relationship to the end consumer in the CrossFit box. If they had done so, and they knew their 4 million members better, they might also be in a different financial situation right now because then you get the flywheel effect.

You know your athlete that's participating at your races, you know the gym, and you know the members at the gym that are participating in your sport. Then economically, it becomes a very interesting flywheel. The question then is how do we get there? We can brainstorm a little bit about that, but that's of course the million-dollar question.

I think we discussed a bit earlier about the HYROX gear and the HYROX shirts and all of the gear that people can buy, which is very interesting to me. I've seen the very early days of Gymshark back in the day and how did they start from selling in the events in NEC in Birmingham and how they actually expanded to a billion-dollar company in a very specific fitness category. And I get the numbers you mentioned earlier about how much you guys are selling is super impressive.

So can we speak a bit about that? It's maybe, it's not the main business, it's bad, like so many people are interested into the brand, interested in buying all of the shirts and all of the gear that they can run with and do the workouts with. So let's speak a bit about that.

First of all, really fun example with Gymshark, of course, because I think Gymshark highlights the fact that they created a brand inside an industry that the top four or five brands did not take seriously at the time. Right, so all of a sudden, let's say Nike was focusing on tennis and golf and Gymshark was focusing on the fitness industry. Not realizing, none of those brands were realizing how big fitness was, right?

And Gymshark has created an identity around the person that goes to the gym from a 16-year-old to a 35-year-old, right? So they were really able to tap into that generation, that new generation of gym-goers, which is super exciting to see. So that just shows the spread and the importance of fitness as a sport. If you look at us thinking about the decision we made very early, and I think credit to our founders, we didn't wanna build an event business, we wanted to build a global brand, which meant for people that are doing endurance events or running marathons, we consciously decided not to give away $2 T-shirts at the end of a race and saying, hey, here's your event T-shirt.

No, what we did is we gave a $10 voucher and saying, go and buy this amazing HYROX Lifestyle T-shirt that you're proud to wear to the office, that you wear to the gym, that you wear on your date night, that defines your identity. So very early on with Puma, we were able to decide we don't wanna be a merchandising business, we wanna be an apparel fashion business, right? Fast forward seven, eight years, ups and downs with Puma, but massive learnings that we are now today in a place where wholesale, we're buying anywhere between 30 and 50 million worth of product from Puma.

We're in every major Puma store. We just launched a new HYROX, the first HYROX Puma dedicated shoe with its own mold, its own grip made for the sport. We sold close to 5,000 pairs yesterday. All of a sudden, it's not just a nice to have, it's a must have. It is what defines you as a person, but it's also what's gonna help you become a better athlete. So the business around what you need to be a good HYROX athlete, the apparel, the lifestyle, what you need in training.

And you see this in gyms and to the listeners also out there. Footwear has changed in the last two years in gyms because of HYROX. People are now buying carbon plate running shoes, which were only meant for marathon running to actually go and train in gyms. They're buying a weightlifting shoe and a training shoe and a running shoe at the same time because they're doing hybrid training. All of a sudden, people are not coming in with all stars and vans and just, oh, I don't know what I'm gonna do today.

I don't care what shoes I'm wearing. People are consciously choosing the footwear, which has massively changed the game for even Nike and Adidas and Puma that are now selling more running shoes than they've ever done before due to people going to the gym. And I think that's the change that's really happened. And now you see everybody jumping on that and the Nike and the Adidas is having to crawl back and go, wow, we need to service that customer.

We need to innovate product. Then you get to the problem of the industry. It takes three to five years to innovate a shoe. So who can get there quicker? And Puma has obviously been working on it for five, six, seven years that Puma now has the first mover advantage that they can come out with a shoe. First iteration is now, second iteration will be a completely new shoe built from scratch coming out in 12 months.

Probably takes Nike two more years to get there or three more years to get there, which means that Puma is slowly going up in what their share of voice is inside the gym space, which is super exciting to see the dynamics of how you're able to change the global footwear industry, being a sport like HYROX.

It's interesting that you would expect from the, let's say big whales, the Nikes and the Adidas and so on to dictate this kind of trends, but what actually always happens is that smaller companies become much bigger and then these companies are noticing and also getting into the space. Maybe a bit contrarian question I wrote to ask you is, what's one of the beliefs that you have about the future of fitness that most people in the industry underestimate?

Oh, you got me thinking. You got me thinking there. Or maybe what do you think that most people in our space don't really believe in, but it's actually true? Look, I think generally it's a very boring answer, but it's going back to the fundamentals. The fundamentals of what health is all about and we spoke about a little bit earlier. In the end, longevity is a very simple concept of four simple things.

Sleep more, walk, exercise more, eat well and be surrounded by great people, right? If you create a facility that encompasses all those four areas or at least gives you advice on sleep, gets you moving in a safe and positive manner, makes it fun to do the things that you love doing, you're able to provide an ecosystem where you can eat healthy and you create a social gathering point, then that takes pretty much everything you need.

So all the other stuff are nice to have, right? Saunas are great, love it. I mean, saunas are so important. Cold plunge recovery is great. I now almost see saunas as a social component. There's the physical benefit, but I'm also having meetings in saunas. I'm meeting friends in saunas. I'm doing cold plunges for the physical benefits. If they're there, don't know, but it's creating again, it's creating an activity.

It's creating a shared experience, right? So I think it's not always as groundbreaking or doesn't need to be that groundbreaking as long as it's going back to the paddle pickleball example. If it's available, accessible, it's fun and you can do it with friends, it's gonna stick. If it's gimmicky and it doesn't do any of those things and gimmicky, that's nice. You do it twice, you do it three times, you don't see the benefits, you're gonna stop consuming.

What do you think?

I actually like, I agree with you. Like simplicity is like the 95% of health. And so that's very interesting. And then the other thing that I think that is true is also the fact that most people think that in our space that I'm going to use social media to achieve much bigger growth. And I think what's actually true is events are so much more useful because it creates this community and it creates this word of mouth that people go around and speak about.

And I think that it might sound more unscalable, but it's a much more scalable thing. Doing it in person, doing the events and not even at the scale that you guys are doing, right? It's not of tens of thousands of people, but even if you do 500 people, 1,000 people, it is the one thing that people are going to remember so much more than seeing an ad on their, I don't know, X or Instagram or whatever, like 50 times. So I think like for growth in our space, actually events is one of the things I would think that.

Well, it goes back to social connection, right? It goes back to being credible and I think being credible in the physical space is a much harder thing to do. So if you are able to achieve that, the loyalty towards that's going to be much bigger than the social media snippets and the ads that are coming your way where it's very hard to differentiate between one diagnostic and another diagnostic and 50 biomarkers versus a hundred biomarkers, or we have better doctors than you have doctors, or we have better supplements and that becomes very hard to dissect also because there isn't really a media that facilitates it.

There isn't a neutral media that is not commercially driven by brands or influencers that allows us to get an honest, fair, critical opinion on which direction to take. So in the end, the customer's not really being guided into a pathway that's right for them.

Yeah.

And that's probably the biggest danger to the industry is that we're going to lose the customers because they might lose faith in what they're being sold.

And it's also this easy thing, right? Like if you sit behind a laptop and you're trying to approach people, everybody's doing that and it's the very easy thing to actually set up an event and go and do it physical, first of all, because so much fewer people are doing it. The competition is so much less. And if you do a good event, then it's just forever memorable. And then people can return back to it like a year, two years, three years, five years, 10 years later and speak about it.

And I think that's maybe why we were a little bit lucky that coming out of COVID with the growth that we had, it was COVID obviously facilitated digital growth phenomenally, right? Digital fitness, what is that? All-time peak in 2018, 2019, Pelotons of this world were raking in the money. Yet we came down in and said, okay, everybody's digital focus. We're going to be experience focus first. And we saw everybody, I wouldn't say drop off digital, but longing for that experience.

And we were able to really create and be the front runner in what is actual experience. And at the same time, digital was declining. So I think we had a little bit of a perfect storm there where people experienced the benefits of digital fitness. They also experienced the drawbacks of digital fitness and subsequently the importance of community and physical events, which is rooted in hundreds of years of history.

We talked about Athens and we talked about probably the Olympics of a thousand years ago, but that hasn't changed. The fundamentals of sport have never changed in history, which I think is why it's so important that HYROX is perceived as a sport, not only from the physical attributes, but also from the social attributes, which means at the end of the day, and that's our biggest challenge really. If our events are selling out so quickly and it stops people from participating in the sport because they couldn't get a ticket to New York, we are challenged now with how do we allow people to participate in our sport when they can't get a ticket?

And that's a really fun challenge because we don't believe we can be a sport if it doesn't live at every level of the pyramid. It's got to live in local high schools, it's got to live at universities, it's got to live at local clubs and it has to live at the big events that we're doing. If we're only doing the top of the funnel, if we're only doing the top events and the Olympics, we will lose a lot of athletes in the journey because they're not getting access to the New York event.

So that's definitely, I wouldn't say a moral obligation, but if we really want to consider ourselves a sport, we have to challenge ourselves that we're able to meet the customer every day of the week.

For my next question, if we do this conversation five years from now, where is HYROX then?

I honestly have no idea. We kind of know where we want it to be, but if you see the opportunities that are coming our way, the momentum that we're building, the mistakes that we're making, we're definitely gonna have to be disciplined where we say yes, where we say no, we're gonna mess it up on certain things. So going down certain avenues saying, okay, let's identify pro sport as an avenue. Okay, what does that look like?

How can we compete with Formula One in five years? Bullish statement, but is there a route where we're saying, okay, we have 300 million fans, they all love fitness. Will they get behind the world champion? Will they get behind a team? Is that where we want to go? That could be there in five years. Olympics 2032, everybody gears up towards that. We're gonna have that podium moment. Do we believe that's what success looks like?

Is it in the middle layer where we're saying, hey, we want 100 million people. Do we get to know 100 million people? How close can we get to that goal? And then what extrapolates from that business case or the potential around the business case of knowing 100 million people? Or do we believe that we wanna be in every school in the world and make sure that we are lowering obesity within kids? I think there's so many angles that we're now touching, which is what's making it such a rewarding experience to help build this company from the ground up because we're going down avenues that we've never considered.

All we know is that we're impacting people's lives. And if we keep doing that in the right way, we're hopefully gonna make a meaningful contribution to getting people healthier.

But all right, Douglas, thank you so much for the chat.

No, thank you. Perfect.