Fitness Connection
Six years building a national gym chain’s digital infrastructure.
What began as a website rebuild became the product team behind Fitness Connection’s entire digital footprint — web, mobile and the screens on the gym floor.
- Industry
- Health & fitness
- Partnership
- 6 years, ongoing
- Platforms
- Web, mobile, in-gym
Snapshot
Team
- CTO
- Head of Product
- Senior Project Manager
- Lead Full-Stack Developer
- UI/UX designers
- Full-stack developers
Platforms
- Website
- iOS & Android
- Service kiosks
- Gym-floor displays
Stack
- React
- React Native
- Node.js
- Sanity
- Figma
The brief
Fitness Connection’s website lagged the brand their marketing team had built everywhere else. Worse, every change — a promo banner, a class schedule — needed a developer. A team that had to move at the speed of a membership campaign was waiting on engineering to publish copy.
The ask was a redesign and a rebuild.
What we saw
Everything upstream of the join button was marketing spend, and the flow at the end of it was leaking. Prospective members hit nested accordions and a stack of friction that gave them reasons to stop. A nicer site would only have been a nicer path to the same bottleneck — so we treated sign-up as its own design problem.
The second call was ownership. A rebuild that left marketing dependent on developers would have recreated the original problem in a newer codebase. Content had to belong to the people writing it.
More membership sign-ups in year one.
A React rebuild with Sanity put publishing in marketing’s hands, and a sign-up flow redesigned around the decision a prospective member is actually making.
What we kept building
Over the six years since, we’ve built much of Fitness Connection’s technical infrastructure — well beyond the browser.
One system, every screen
A Figma design system built to survive the jump between a phone in a trainer’s hand, a display read from across a room and a kiosk used in ten seconds.
Underneath, Sanity is a single content layer feeding every surface through Node.js middleware — the website, the trainer app and the screens on the gym floor.
Today
Fitness Connection’s digital products now run the member experience from a first visit to the website through checking into a class on the gym floor — and the marketing team publishes directly.
