As I look back on the highlights from 2022, what stands out to me are the success stories from our customers, the positive direction of travel in fitness, wellness as a whole, and the huge sense of achievement within the Wexer business.
2022 has been an interesting year – I choose my adjectives carefully and admittedly with a degree of understatement – as businesses around the world have variously battled with looming recession, spiralling energy costs and the aftermath of the pandemic.
I’d like to take this opportunity to recap some of Wexer’s most memorable highlights from 2022.
Wexer’s Most Memorable highlights From 2022
#1 – New growth foundations
Wexer’s acquisition by Core Health & Fitness in April was a pivotal step that now gives us the support, investment and distribution we need to dramatically scale our business, build an even more diverse digital ecosystem and accelerate towards our mission of hybridising the fitness industry. We’re hugely excited by this new partnership and looking forward to building on these foundations in 2023 and beyond.
#2 – Cross-vertical acceleration
As the world finally moved back to in-person experiences and gyms reinvested in the in-club product, we once again saw growing demand for Wexer Virtual; GLL in the UK and Swedish giant Nordic Wellness deserve particular mention for their forward-thinking initiatives in this space. We also saw demand surge across verticals, with 2022 headlines including a new global agreement with Hilton Hotels, an exciting project with Sun Peaks Resort in Canada, and significant momentum in the corporate wellness space.
#3 – Learning from the best
Launched in January, The Wexer Podcast has gone from strength to strength this year. Hosted by yours truly, we speak to digital pioneers and experts from around the world, offering listeners insights and advice to support their own digital journeys. The conversations have been fascinating, the learnings rich and diverse. You’ll find a season one summary here and can listen to seasons one and two-so-far right here.
#4 – Making the best, better
At Wexer, we believe the best can always be better, so we’re continually working behind the scenes to bring new features and functionality to our market-leading technology. This year, that’s seen the launch of a Web Player app as a partner product to our popular web application. Optimising the Web Player experience for mobile use, the app offers enhanced casting functionality, allows for push notifications and mirrors each company’s Web Player design for UX consistency. We also launched Virtual Connect, allowing operators to channel self-produced content through their Wexer Virtual players in-club to put their own superstars on studio big screens – on-demand and live stream. Watch out for more exciting product news in 2023!
#5 – Enhancing wellness
If we didn’t already know it, then McKinsey research published earlier this year made it perfectly clear: for today’s consumer, the buzzword is wellness. Already an area we’d been growing, in 2022 we pressed down the pedal and brought in a wealth of new wellness-focused content, from a new Breathe channel to a Stretch and Recover category, meditation to Sleep Stories by Sweat Factor, an ever-expanding array of mind-body classes to snackable wellness breaks in the shape of Office Fit by Sweat Factor. The uptake has been phenomenal and we’ll continue to place a strong emphasis on wellness in 2023.
#6 – Unrivalled strength in depth
We’ve continued to expand our content partnerships across other genres, too, to ensure our library remains best-in-class. Aside from the aforementioned wellness partnerships, new content partners onboarded in 2022 include Yogaia and CITYROW, as well as some exciting new collections from SH1FT Fitness. With new content showing first on our Mobile home page, we’re also driving a steady stream of fresh content from existing partners so there’s always something new to try.
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#7 – Millions of experiences
With our already-rich content library getting ever more compelling, our user base growing, and people now having more choice in where they work out compared to recent years, we’ve had another strong year in terms of experiences delivered: over 6 million globally in 2022. As our Mobile platform takes off – not least courtesy of the API and SDK we launched last year – we’re excited to grow that number still further in 2023.
And these are just some highlights from 2022! It all adds up to put us in a strong position as we move into 2023 – a year in which we’ll accelerate towards our mission of harnessing digital to bring fitness and wellness to communities around the world.
Get in touch now to discuss how Wexer can help your business leap into the digital age: info@wexer.com
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