Inspire Fitness Achieves a Full Cycle Go-To-Market in 6 Months

The fitness industry fundamentally changed in 2020 when gyms closed and kicked off the connected fitness revolution. As an “Iron first” company, Inspire builds some of the industry’s best fitness equipment but their application for streaming live and on-demand workouts wasn’t meeting expectations. With a nascent in-house software team, Inspire Fitness met a significant roadblock in its digital transformation.

Also, with the supply chain issues caused by the pandemic, Inspire Fitness faced challenges acquiring hardware — made Inspire Fitness needed a technology partner to take them from iron-only to connected-consumer even more challenging because they needed different devices for each piece of cardio equipment.

To go to market, Inspire needed to overcome the following challenges:

• Building a solution for connecting equipment with streaming and recorded workouts with a lack of in-house Android development expertise.
  
• Supply chain management expenses associated with enrolling devices before shipping to retailers.
  
• Order fulfillment issues working with global suppliers.

Esper’s Solution

Inspire Fitness knew Esper was the right fit for a technology partner because of our Android expertise — both in software and devices running on Android OS. To enable Inspire Fitness to quickly go to market and launch their digital transformation, Esper provided end-to-end solutions.

With the right support in place, Inspire Fitness achieved:

• A connected fitness app and the ability to go to market in 6 months with ongoing software development support from the Esper team.
  
• Improved customer experience with granular control and timed, targeted OTA updates.
  
• 30% cost savings, extended hardware life, and the ability to implement on their customer use case with Esper’s flexible, custom operating system Esper Foundation for Android.
  
• Faster order fulfillment from global suppliers — Esper directly coordinated with ODMs to build a suitable Android image.
  
• Ready to ship devices with seamless enrollment during manufacturing.
  
• Ability to remote-support clients and gain real-time device data on the Esper Manage console.