Chief Growth Officer of HYROX: Douglas Gremmen

yesterday we sold 42,000 tickets, becoming the biggest affiliate business. And in the world now we have 15,000 gyms. How can I create a fitness event that is scalable but that is accessible to everybody? This is Douglas Gremon, Chief Growth Officer at High Rocks, the global fitness racing brand that has rapidly grown into one of the world's fastest expanding sports movements. Douglas leads the company's global expansion strategy, scaling the sport across new markets, partnerships, and millions of athletes worldwide. If we keep doing it in the right way, we're hopefully going to make a meaningful contribution to getting people healthier. Every event was doubling year on year, which created a very accelerated growth plan. We entered in Japan and our first event was 6,000 people. In a country we'd never been to, we're adding anywhere between 809 new gyms. We think that 3 to 5 million people will be coming to our events in the next two years. We didn't want to build an event business, we wanted to build a global brand. Ike and Adidas and Pumad are now selling more running shoes than they've ever done before, due to people coming to the gym. What one of the beliefs that you have about the future of fitness that most people in the industry underestimate? Long-gevity 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 repressions. 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. Yeah, both from. So it's 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. They 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 higher rocks and the physical side of fitness, but there's so much more to physical well-being. And yeah, we're gonna meet some very interesting people and hear some interesting panels. Yeah. There's actually start from the last to be where we're 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 boots and people speaking to each other. And it always makes me wonder how is this a health oriented event? And so you mentioned connected health. So let's start from that. And 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? Also, first of all, connected health is the 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? It's like, okay, but what space do we have available? What do you want to achieve? Whatever works works for us. I'm not 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 a lay. Is it, hey, you got 250 square meters, about 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, 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, that's okay. That's start the workout. You're like, that's a roar. That's a ski yerk. That's a non-motorized treadmill. You're like, people are like, yeah, but how do I do a ski yerk? 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 now everybody is 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 just from the logistics of this, did people basically, they come to this type of events, was everybody's rooted and they needed to come there and change everything and you've 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 as hyrox and please, 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 want to activate at these events? Do we just want to 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 fours, like, hey, group one needs to get 2,000 meter on a ski arc. To camaraderie, the friendships, the shared suffering, all of a sudden, the noise in the room was like things 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 there was some four people that don't know each other, we're 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. And 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 P history. Like, what were you doing before high dogs? How did you hear about high dogs? Man and most fillers know world before high rocks 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 back end, 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 high rocks 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 Tutskut 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-barriage entry. Just like running has a low-barriage entry. So you need to run a pair of running shoes. What do you need to do? High rocks, 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 got to lock the city up. You got to get permits. All the hassle of organizing a city marathon is not easy. He was very much thinking, how can I create a global fitness concept? That's a very high-end 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 after two years and he called a couple of guys and he said, hey, guys, I'm going to run a first mini-high rocks workout. Douglas, you seem like a relatively fitness-obsessed guy. You want to come to the first workout, join the first workout, join the first event in Hamburg, 600 athletes. I'd never been on a skier before. I'd never push this leg. before. Christian Tutzko was judging my wallballs, 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, high dogs, like what's the what's the journey from there? Well, first of all, there was a nice little gap called COVID in the middle, right? And must have met the entrepreneurial spirit of Christian and Mo, first to the two founders at the time, they kept the company afloat 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, 220 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. And just say, what do you mean, getting 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 high rocks, which is, okay, we're going to bring a fitness equipment to a hall, we're going to run a cool format. If we don't get that out quickly and scale quickly, it's going to 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 state, 1750 people at some of the events pre-COVID, so we believe that 750,000? No, no, sorry, our first event, 700 people, 1500 people, you know, so we saw, we at 1500 people were like, okay, there's a business model here. How many events happened until when like 90 events before COVID? 90 events and you were having around 1000 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-high rocks workout. We influenced the coaches, we got in front of the members, handed out t-shirts, handed out red bullcans and every day we were visiting a gym. I see, so basically you're saying that the initial unlock of high rocks was going from gym to gym to speak to the trainers and also the participants, so actually, the good news about high rocks is we know, 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 van 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 the thing, the beauty of it, and then it's a ripple effect. 500 people influence a thousand, 1000 people influence 2000, 2000, influence 4000, 4000, influence 8000, and before you know, every van was doubling year on year, which created a very accelerated growth plan. And you're saying, you're tasked to the expansion, like, what does this actually practically mean when you vote to London is like, do you start searching for people are going to help, let's do you start searching for stadiums or how does these 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 them in? This is like six months in or is this far? Yeah, at the time it was more opportunistic of course, but now there is, when we are, the goal is 150 events by the end of 27, when we think about the complexity around road shows. So we have 12 road shows around the world of 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 high rocks 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 you know, 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 did it, like 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 Jim by Jim and I'm following the same approach, or did you find local differences across? Yeah, I'm almost looking back and saying, where are we? That's smart. Where are 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 Jim penetration, but I wouldn't say that we've gone out with a mega McKinsey style consulting project and all of a sudden go, well, 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. Right. Good question. We've 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 new, Eve 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. 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, three hundred percent in a year, it took two, three years to get to that number. Secondly, and it's a, it's not a negative, but CrossFit was very popular in 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 heart. CrossFit's not for me. CrossFit is a tough sport. I can't do high rocks. And we're like, yeah, but high rocks is more like running. You can run. So we run 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 US, just the cost of building a company, hiring people, operationally and logistically, everything is more expensive in the US when you're coming with not a fund of let's say, hey, we hear 20 million, let's go and build the US. We try to build it organically, one higher at a time, one event at a time. We make a little bit of loss on that event. We go on, right? 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 in 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? 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? 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 know, and 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 off course challenging that, the shareholders are challenging and rightfully so. However, at the same time that the US was not growing as fast, Europe was exploding. Like, and when I'm in 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 2000 to 4000. 4000 people at an event for us was a relatively economically extremely successful case. All of a sudden, Amsterdam 4000 people, Hamburg 4000 people were like, wow, can we do two days? 4000, turn to 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 land's Armstrong. We showed up to our event in New York, 5,000 people. And after that, the world changed. Every event sold out in 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 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 a 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 long term. The ties are going to turn, but we had to make a big, bulky move. And that was organizing event 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 a, 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, the whole environment and the whole momentum in the US shifted from that moment within seconds. You mentioned Lans Armstrong. Would you say that from a growth perspective, having very well known folks doing high rocks, did actually end look growth? Or was it more that more people are growing over time and more people are 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, soft, their friends raise and they sell their community raising. And 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, any movie star to come and participate at high rocks events. It's, if you have an identity of being fit, if you have the identity of wanting to run marathons, then why not do a high rocks and just that amplified everything we did to that weekend in London, sorry, New York with Lans 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 Lans Armstrong to famous actors are all there. There weren't there as influencers. There weren't there as brands. They were there as a consumer that loves to compete and challenge himself. And with Lans being the epitome of what performance looks like, but that was what it was about. Wasn't about Lans and Armstrong, Lans and her rocks. It was about Lans and Lans. How does it, like, how does it change from an event that you have 600 people joining at the first London event and maybe I'm certain, and so on. And then now you have tens of thousands of joining at events. What I say logistics of that look 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 like, how, what 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. I was probably the worst event organizer in our company, but I could handle 500, 1500 people. If you look at our operations department in the 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 is like, hey, how do we enhance the customer experience, the athlete experience from entertainment to music, to F and B experiences, to hospitality, to spectator experience. And that's gotten so much bigger. Well, 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 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 have 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. Yeah. For that team, like, what does it look like? What kind of people do you need to have these events? And what kind of talent, talent, which 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 70s. 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 fool 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 been 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, you know, 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 comes to an event is as wow, that was better than last time. We'll come back again. If he feels that the experience is flattening out or the same, it's going to be harder and harder to keep that retention. It's going to be harder and harder for him to boast around and 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 invest in the 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 hydrox 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, is it, 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 two personals? First of all, it's a sport, right? So the moment you get into the sport, you're not going to change board 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 trainings. Everybody has a purpose to get to that start line. What always say that first time finish or the moment they finish, they want to 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 you're 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. 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 tenth 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. We talk a lot about community. I don't think a hierarchy is creating the community, but we've created a podium for communities to come too. Jim's 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, 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 to the Jim's. I find it very interesting because like it's- high-distance is becoming also a service for Jim's and enabling the Jim's to offer high-doc 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 Jim's that pay for our services, right? We are a service provider and it started out very, very small a couple of years ago where Jim's were asking us how can I train our athletes? How do I address them? Educate our coaches. Can we run Hirocks classes? Very basic questions and we start 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 it's own structure. So I wouldn't say we started a new company, but we started a new vertical, which was Hirocks 365, which focused directly on speaking to the gym owner. For me, there was 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 in-bounds. 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 any time fitness or affiliate 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 baritory entry is very low for gyms. So we're charging anywhere between $100 and $130 a month, which equates to potentially getting one new member or one member stays-- - $130 to $130 a month. - A month for the actual gym. - For the actual gym to pay us-- - It's free. - It's free for you. - 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 on ROI and rightfully so, but the baritory 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, seven percent per month. We're adding anywhere between 800 and 900 new gyms to our affiliate network. We have the goal to get to 40,000, 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 product? - 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 in-bounds, 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 high rock 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 in-bounds. So we're getting about 600, 700 in-bounds leads a month of gyms wanting to affiliate with pretty much a 50, 60% conversion rate. - Sixth-day-am. 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 next story. Do we first need the gyms and then we get the affleads? Or do we first get the affleads 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-man on all parts. So that's on the independent side. Then Mike Key Challenge came or our Key Challenge came. What if tomorrow, a plan of fitness calls us and says, hey, we want to affiliate our 4,000 locations? What products and services do we need? When what structure do we need to have in place to build an ecosystem that we can serve 24-hour fitness and we can serve plan of fitness and we can serve with basic fits. 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 high rock training across 400 locations, educate a thousand 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 want to accommodate high rock training inside their studios in the same way they have a spinning studio and never blad a studio and never weightlifting area. They're now investing in high rock spaces with high rock 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 roll out of high rock classes, which meant that hey, high rock classes are sold out. We're getting new members because of high rock class and they're now thinking about, okay, how do we bring that in a scalable version into LA Fitness with six, 700 locations. So it's just been really amazing to see how gyms are understanding that people want to train differently. People's demands for what they expect in a gym is now high rock style facilities and high rock style clothing. I'm guessing the 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 turn from a 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 is this insight? Pretty much. I've looked, I think it depends from gym to gym, right? So every gym has a different focus point on how they want to 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 their headphones, goes and lifts weights and the ladies go into a high rock 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 a thing due to the introduction of high rocks, it's called a training 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 and how people are consuming fitness, but the demands are also different. And then what they're expecting from a coach is different. I want to sign up to a high rocks. I go to my local gym and I go to the coach and hey, can you get me ready in six months? That coach needs to be where what high rocks 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 strategies are under 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 high rocks is such a big retention play for all these big box gyms and small box gyms. One sure in an ecosystem where you love training, you love the community, love the equipment, you love the price point, you're not going to change gym. Is then the CRM of this gym a big problem? The CRM of you mean the database of the gym or generally what do you mean? 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 silo that crossed different in the US and also in Europe as well. So so many different softwares that the gyms are going to be using. So I'm guessing if you're over time of feeding them a technology, who can I want to this technology is just becoming more and more and more complex? Yeah. 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 being generally for us has been very hard to understand who's doing what? For what dream? Some gyms have invested heavily in a 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 is 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 as 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 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 James are asking themselves, how can I build a deeper relationship to my end member via digital experience? Let's touch it on cross feed and the differences there. What people are going to see the difference. And then I would also like to figure out what's your take of cross feed? I believe when I was young, maybe like 15 years ago, there were are peaking somewhere there, what happened scenes, and how would you compare it with high looks? - 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, I had a massive growth, probably until 12 to 13 to 14. Obviously COVID was tough for everybody, right? So I don't think CrossFit was particularly worth hit and then most other gym infrastructures. And if 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, 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, $3,000 to $4,000 a year, but gyms were able to build on the back of a global brand. I didn't have done that very successfully, they probably got to, here say, 12,000, 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 three 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 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, there are gonna teach you stuff that you will not learn anywhere else. Secondly, they build it around the 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 are 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 high rocks? 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 1500 CrossFit boxes around the world are also a high rocks 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 high rocks 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 high rocks 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 F-45 or into an orange theory or into an 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 the 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 high rocks at CrossFit, that would not allow us to serve the market that we want to serve. We want to also want to serve the Planet Fitness member at $19 a month. And we also want to 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 high rocks where it suits their needs. It reminds me, maybe it's a bit philosophical, but it's this lack of like the easiest, the easier they're onboarding, the more the usage across people. So for example, if you see Pigeau Ball or Padel because it's very easy to start and if you start playing Pigeau Ball, 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 Padel that just grows so extremely impopularity. 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 impopularity and make this stand for many years. And like it also goes to games, right? Like the music games that apply, this is some sort of super Mario era Leon that when you start the game is like, you just play for like the first day. - The music. - 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 these games, it's so easy at the beginning. And it reminds me of 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 a pickleball and Padel, but have massive respect for those two and completely understand where you're coming from there. Three components, low baritur 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 high rocks 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've 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 high rocks. So that's super low physical barrier. You're then creating the social component around, let's say Padel, you're always four people on the court. It's become this massive, the sport is great, it's super fun, low technical barrier to entry even though Padel 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, take the box. And then the third layer is price and availability. There's now Padel 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 high rocks, all those three components are there. You will be able to find a local high rocks 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 in 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 Padel 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 Padel, pickleball is 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 sports in the world. - It's very interesting because like you're using some sort of analogy, like a church that like all of the gyms you can consider 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. And it's super interesting. We spoke earlier about getting to 100 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 five million people, three to five 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 five 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 B to B 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 does 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 high rocks 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 high rocks 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 a gym. [BLANK_AUDIO] or earning, 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. I mean, 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 build a relationship to the end consumer in the Crossfit box. If they had done so and they knew their four million members better, they might also be in a different financial situation right now, because then you get the flywheel effect. You know you're actually participating in 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 it a bit earlier about the high-rocks gear and the high-rocks shirts, and all of the gear that people can buy, which is very interesting to me. Like I've seen the very early days of gym shark back in the day and how did they start from like selling in the events in anything 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? Like it's maybe it's not the main business, it's bad like so many people are interested in the brand, interested in buying all of the shirts and all the gear that they can run with and do the workouts with. So let's speak a bit about that. - First of all, a really fun example with gym shark, of course, because I think gym shark highlights the fact that they created a brand inside an industry that the top four or five brands did not take series at the time. - Yeah. - So all of a sudden let's say Nike was focusing on Tennyson Golf and gym shark was focusing on the fitness industry. Not realizing, none of those brands were realizing how big fitness was. And gym shark 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 girls, 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 want to 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 two dollar t-shirts at the end of a race and saying, hey, here's your event t-shirt. Know what we did is we gave a $10 voucher and saying, go and buy this amazing high-rocks 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 want to be a merchandising business, we want to be in a parallel 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 mayor Puma store, we just launched our new high-rocks, the first high-rocks 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, that what you need to be good high-rocks athlete, the apparel, the lifestyle, what you need in training. And you see this in gyms, and if, you know, to the listeners also out there, footwear has changed in the last two years, in gyms because of high-rocks. People are now buying carbon plate running shoes, which are only meant for marathon running to actually go in training gyms. They're buying a weight lifting 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, they're 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 are having a 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 their 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. Now, first iteration is now, second iteration will be a completely 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 slowly going up in what their share of voices 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 Hirox. - It's interesting that you would expect from the, let's say, big whales, and Nike and 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, I don't know, they see me and also getting into the space. Maybe a bit contrary and 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 the pad 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? Sonas are great, love it. I mean, sonas are so important. Cold plunge recovery is great. I know almost you see, so sonas as a social component. There's the physical benefit but I'm also having meetings in sonas. I'm meeting friends in sonas. I'm doing cold plunge just 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 pedal 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 yet 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, the simplicity is like the 95% of health. As well as 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 peer 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? There's not tens of thousands of people, but even if you do 500 people, a thousand 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, the actual events are, it's 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 is 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 100 biomarkers or we have better doctors than you have doctors or we have better supplements and that it 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 a 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. - Yep. - And that's probably the biggest thing. to the industry that we're going to lose the customers because they might lose faith in what they're being sold. And it's also an easy thing, right? Like if you see it behind a laptop and you're trying to approach people, everybody's doing that. It's the very easy thing to actually set up an event and go like go and do it physically. 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 come back to like a year, two years, three years, five years, ten 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 then in and said, okay, everybody's digital focus. We're going to be experience focused 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 actually experienced. And at the same time, digital was declining. So I think we had a little bit of a perfect storm. There were people experience 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 events 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 Hirox 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 won'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 question, if we do this conversation five years soon now, where is Hirox? Honestly, I 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 going to have to be disciplined where we say yes, where we say no, we're going to 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 road 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. You know, we're going to 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 want to be in every school in the world and make sure that we are lowering obesity within kits? 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 it that in the right way, we're hopefully going to make a meaningful contribution to getting people healthier. Thank you so much for the chat. Nothing. Perfect. Yeah.