A new type of fitness consumer emerged during the early 2020s that BowFlex identified as "enthusiastic cross-trainers". This demographic tended to be more urban, inclusive, well-educated, and generally more sophisticated about design. They also tended to exercise at home in smaller, urban residential spaces such as condos and apartments. BowFlex realized they needed to rebrand and redesign their offerings quickly to capitalize on this new demographic opportunity and catch up with the competition who were already serving those customers.
We entered a strategic partnership with BowFlex in 2022 and began the process of rethinking the Visual Brand Language of BowFlex products to help them reach this newly identified segment of the market. We worked with the internal product development team and their external branding partner to build a design language for hardware that resonated with the "enthusiastic cross-trainer" customer. We led the internal design team in a series of intense attribute mining, visual framing, competitive benchmarking, innovation development, brainstorming, and design refinement activities to get to the fundamental design principles that would inform new and future BowFlex products. These strategic development activities lead us to a design language solution that turned away from the hyperactive, noisy, and traditional approach that BowFlex had taken over the past several decades to a minimal, modern, simple, sculptural, and refined approach that resonates with their new customer target. We strove to develop a design language that boils down to an underlying philosophy of "simple execution". That philosophy has been efficiently expressed on two of Bowflex's new entry-level exercise machines, the IC Bike SE and Max Trainer SE.
Every new BowFlex product will be designed with "simple execution" as the guiding philosophy that informs how all of the design principles are applied. A "just what you need" attitude was deemed most important to the overall implementation of the BowFlex design language and will help keep internal design teams focused on delivering visual and functional consistency.
BowFlex products have no extraneous details or visual noise. Each product has minimal, exposed structural elements (particularly important for large exercise machines), a thin display, and an optimized base. BowFlex's new design language epitomizes "simple execution" and helps BowFlex products fit seamlessly into a customers' lifestyle and environment.
