Gymforless has been acquired by Sodexo BRS Spain on February 1st 2018. Gymforless is a market place that gives access to more than a 1.000 fitness clubs to consumers and employees — combining thus a BtoC and BtoBtoC model.
From a simple gym access app Gymforless has become a benefit plan for companies, offering a better quality of life to their employees. As such Gymforless has attracted the attention of Sodexo Spain and the group has decided to acquire the startup. The leader in the sector of restaurant tickets plans to integrate Gymforless into their portfolio of services dedicated to contributing to the quality of life of employees and their motivation.
In this short video interview Oriol Vinzia, CEO of Gymforless talks about the past, present and future of the company:
With this acquisition Gymforless will become part of strong group while maintaining its autonomy.
“They know we are a startup and they understand we need to be able to grow at the pace of a startup.”
“If we integrate completely they know we’ll lose speed. In a few years the structure will definitely be different but at the moment we we will remain independent while creating partnerships with their existing clients.
Corporate wellness is a trend. Everybody talks about it and it becomes more and more important for companies to offer benefit policies to retain their talent. Everybody wants to work out and have it as easy as possible. With Gymforless companies can give their employees just that!”
Oriol, how did you start at Gymforless?
I joined Gymforless after the startup was founded and had been working for about a year. Guillermo Libre whom I met through Groupalia while we worked there together called me.
It was easy for him to convince me as Gymforless combines my two passions: sports and ecommerce. I started my career at Decathlon and later switched to online while working at Vente Privee and seven years at Groupalia, in the sales and marketing area.
How was your start?
When I joined Gymforless, Guillermo who had founded the company was about to leave so right away we went through a change of leadership.
The change of CEO in a very young company is not easy — I had to integrate in the team quickly and take new steps in a new direction together. As an app we started selling day passes but then pivoted to what you now know as Gymforless Club. Through our Club app you get to access different gyms in your area, you get to chose the day, activity and sports center.
The market is very competitive with a wide range of independent gyms and only very few gym chains it is also very fragmented and dispersed. We bring the gyms together so that consumers can chose easily. For gyms we bring them new users who discover their activities — Gymforless brings them extra revenue.
How did you approach sales and expansions within a city?
When Gymforless started it was not easy to sell — we did not have the app but had to sell the idea and there was nothing comparable to Gymforless in the fitness industry. So we looked to other areas where similar models are working. Booking.com does the same for hotels or ElTenedor for restaurants. We were a new player in the market, so it was first hard to explain it to gyms but after the first year the acquisition of customers has become much easier.
First we needed volume of partners and then we brought the customers. We were generating a high volume of transactions and we realized that this was an attractive offer for companies. Now we have a team dedicated to acquiring gyms, another team dedicated to acquiring companies as customers who offer Gymforless as a benefit to their employees and thirdly we have our marketing team concerned with acquiring final consumers. With this new area dedicated to b2b customers we were able to grow much faster and we’ll see what this new partnership with Sodexo will bring.