Fitworks Fredericton's showroom interior (Submitted)
Fitworks Equipment and its New Brunswick locations have been challenged to keep up with the home fitness boom during the pandemic.
“Everything just kind of exploded,” said Fitworks Fredericton owner and manager Roy Hayter, explaining that in March and April they were doing 10 times their normal business. “We sold everything we had, our inventory was drained down to almost zero – it was really overwhelming.”
The store was getting 100 phone calls a day, in comparison to the previous average of 15 to 20 phone calls daily, along with long lineups for curbside and doing hundreds of transactions daily.
Fitworks Fredericton’s newly arrived equipment (Submitted)
“We scoured all of our wholesalers, we tried to and still continue to try to get as much equipment as we could,” said Hayter. “We sell a 300-pound weight set with the Olympic bar and the weights – in a regular month we’d sell eight or 10 sets, and then from March until May we’ve sold 150 of them.”
He found resistance weight training equipment, such as weight plates, dumbbells, benches, power racks, and barbells, were the most popular at the start of the pandemic, but demand has now shifted to cardio machines, like treadmills to ellipticals.
“When the pandemic first hit, people didn’t want us in their homes to set anything up,” he said, explaining it is normal to see people doing weights and resistance training during the spring and summer months, then switch to focusing on cardio in the fall and winter.
“The cardio stuff is just nowhere near the demand required – we’re getting, five to 10 requests a day and in the last few months I’ve been able to get maybe a dozen machines.”
Supercharged demand led to depletion and backlog of supply and wholesalers are unable to keep up, resulting in shipping delays and increased raw material costs on top of being shipped from faraway places like China and Taiwan.
Fitworks Fredericton’s showroom interior (Submitted)
“If you had to have someone like me looking for 30 machines in a smaller city and then someone in Ontario looking for 300 machines, it’s hard for us to get any sort of priority,” Hayter said, adding that Fitworks’ waiting list extends into next fall.
Currently, half of Fitworks’ commercial projects, providing equipment for hotels, apartment buildings, workplace gyms and universities, are still on hold.
“We do a lot of workplace wellness with the Irvings,” he said. “We’ve got at least three or four different facilities in Saint John and all of those are still closed or everyone’s working from home.”
The impact of the pandemic on the fitness and equipment industry is still unfolding.
“I think that with the increased demand people are less picky about the equipment that they get,” he explained. “It’s really a mixed bag – as companies out there see the high demand for fitness equipment, I could see there being more competition, with higher prices and longer wait times.”
This story was originally published on Huddle.Today – an Acadia Broadcasting Limited content partner.
