In good shape
Italian gym equipment makers Technogym got a head start in the fitness business before it was big business. Founder Nerio Alessandri explains how promoting a wider healthy lifestyle culture is a vital part of their company philosophy
words by Josh Sims
Nerio Alessandri, 47, goes to the gym three times a week, before going to work. Sometimes he goes again when he’s at work. In fact, when he travels for business, he makes a point of visiting the hotel and local gyms too. That may suggest he is some kind of fanatic. But really he’s trying out competitors’ equipment. It’s all work to him. Fitness, or as his company puts it, ‘wellness’, is a happy by-product of good business. Because Alessandri, when he’s not running on the treadmill, cycling or flexing on his favourite Kinesis machine, is the founder and president of Technogym, designers and manufacturers of advanced gym equipment and one of the world’s fastest growing companies in the market. “All our employees are fit,” he jokes. “It’s a choice. They’re not forced to have a good body. For us wellness is about body and mind, about finding a balance.”
It is a message that has been well received in his native Italy, where Alessandri, by trade an industrial designer, has been named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and is also the youngest man ever to be nominated Cavaliere del Lavoro, the Italian equivalent of a knighthood for services to industry. No wonder, given that his Cesena-based company, which employs 1,400 people worldwide, exports 85% of its products to over 100 countries. Next year Technogym, which already supplies Formula One, America’s Cup teams and numerous European soccer clubs, among them Juventus, Liverpool, Real Madrid and AC Milan, will be the official supplier of equipment to the Beijing Olympics.
Technogym is not new to the Olympics. It also supplied Sydney 2000, Athens 2004 and Turin 2006. The motivation for winning Beijing was not as clear cut as a more ruthless business type might imagine. Yes, as a way into the huge Chinese market, winning the contract was a crucial step in the company’s future. But, adds Alessandri, “What we really want is to spread the culture of wellness across China. There is no gym culture there at all.”
Indeed, it is perhaps only fitting for a fitness company that its sense of corporate responsibility should be a blend of market-building and a slightly New Age mentality. “When the market was all about body-building we started talking about fitness and when the market started talking about fitness we started talking about wellness. We take a more holistic approach now because you’ve got to stay ahead,” explains Alessandri. “The company has two identities: the first is economic and the second is social – encouraging fitness education and health initiatives. It’s all about driving the wellness lifestyle. Every company, I guess, has a mission. We produce equipment that is aimed at encouraging wellness, so it’s easy for us to have a social face. That’s not so easy if you make cigarettes or alcoholic drinks.”
Not that Technogym’s rise to the higher steps of the business podium came that easily. If other companies thrive by spotting a gap in the market, fewer manage to do so by creating the market altogether. When Technogym launched nearly 25 years ago, gym attendance was strictly for the vein-popping muscle-bound. Technogym not only introduced technology to a world of basic dumb-bells and bell-bars – some of its equipment has an in-built computerised personal trainer, others an integrated TV system, while Kinesis, one of the company’s latest products, uses balances and kinetic energy to create a new kind of low impact workout that is predicted to revolutionise the gym industry. The company was also at least in part responsible for introducing the idea that gym culture could be a lifestyle choice, with your workout machinery so sleek you not only feel chic using it, but would be happy to have it at home. Indeed, Technogym is recognised as much as a design company as a sports one. Alessandri sees himself as some kind of hybrid too: his business card reads ‘Wellness Designer’.
“Back then people just didn’t go to the gym, didn’t think of going to the gym as part of their health, part of their lifestyle,” says Alessandri. “Nobody talked about wellness when we did either. It was a strange idea. Now of course, the media always talks about improving your well-being.”
“And as an industrial designer it is important to me that the products look good. They’re reliable and efficient but also beautiful products, the kind of equipment you’re happy to have on show in the best spot in the house,” he adds. “In that way I think Technogym could only be an Italian company. The idea of wellness is part of the Italian family way of life. It comes from Roman times – the spa, the hot springs. It was all typical of ‘Italian’ culture 2,000 years ago. And Italian design is known all over the world of course.”
It was the question of design that introduced Alessandri to his big idea in the first place. At 22 and with a steady job with an industrial design company that specialised in packaging, he found using his small town gym’s equipment tedious and unrewarding. So he set about spending his evenings and weekends designing equipment he thought would not only look better but work better – good equipment that would bring good results – and then, cobbling together sprockets and springs reclaimed from junk yards, he began to build his vision in his parents’ garage.
“At the time I was passionate about sports and the equipment in the local gym was, well, let’s say that the equipment wasn’t very advanced. I could see that there was room for improvement. So I started building it. My parents weren’t so happy about it, especially as they thought that I should concentrate on my job. In Italy they say if you have a safe job, you should never leave it. But what I built I sold to the gym owner, he then asked for other pieces and soon I was doing it full time. I’d always had a dream of becoming an entrepreneur. It was what pushed me. I had a passion to build something new. Innovation is the driver for everything I do.”
The timing for such a company to be in the ascendant could not be better: with rising levels of childhood and adult obesity placing a huge strain on already stretched healthcare costs, an ageing population and longer working hours adding to daily stresses, the provider of gym equipment that is as attractive as it is effective can only be onto a winner. With its research and development labs having already developed machines that mimic real road cycling, for knee injury rehabilitation, that adjust the user’s effort in response to his heart rate, and others than can be packed down to fit into a small bag, maybe Technogym will come up with solutions to the ailments of the times.
“Listen, I made a lot of mistakes along the way. You do when your market isn’t clear. But you have to learn from them,” says Alessandri. “Every day I come to the office I try to think about it as if it was my first day, that is to say to come in accepting that there is always a lot to learn. You can’t ever feel that you’ve achieved everything. You have to move forward centimetre by centimetre.” It is an apt lesson for his business – a lesson like that is one that perhaps comes to anyone seeking to add an inch to the bicep or take one from the waistline in a hurry.
“Making money is important in business, of course, but you also have to take time to enjoy life. We are an Italian wellness company, after all, so what else would I say?”
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