The fitness hardware window of opportunity

The fitness hardware window of opportunity

It’s gonna be interesting to see where health and fitness hardware for consumers is going.

lululemon recently announced that they will sort of pivot away from Mirror and be more device agnostic (source) . Chinese fitness mirror company Fiture is dropping is US operations (source)

It’s hard adding hardware to people’s private homes — even harder if it doesn’t have a ubiquitous purpose.

Beyond the cost aspect, the space in our homes is limited and fixed furniture won’t be frequently replaced. No matter how good the service it brings is.

Instead our homes are becoming a web of infrastructure technology that enables services. Small pieces of technology like speakers become connection points to big data services (think of Sonos + Google as an example), TVs are on this network too.

Although technology is progressing, it also stabilizes. As an example replacement rate of mobile phones have been fairly stable for a decade and is expected to stay between 2.3–2.7 years. (source)

For TVs the same cycle is a lot longer in this study 37% state that they haven’t replaced their TV in a decade. Followed by 22.5% stating “every six to seven years”. (source)

What this means is that it’s really hard to get into people’s living room with HW, especially in the short run.

I understand that mirrors aren’t meant to replace TVs, but just like with TVs this piece of technology does require wall real estate and available data shows that hardware replacement cycles at a factor that needs to be taken into account.

Interestingly enough, our bodies are becoming real estate too (sort of).

New #wearables are coming in a continuous stream, but most people use only one (potentially watch + ring). Yet many new wearables are focusing on a specific sensor or monitoring purpose.

History repeats itself. I used to work in the mobile phone industry and back in 2008 Sony Ericsson had 40+ different models available. These were variants of core models with different niche specifications, one hade a 3.2mp camera, another one had Sony Walkman MP3 player and 3.5mm headphone jack.

As the industry matured — with massive help of the iPhone and Android smartphones entering the scene — this shifted and you don’t see many niche phones around anymore. Why? Because consumers want both a good camera and a music player, but won’t carry multiple devices. This goes in cycles. Nokia owned the phone space for a decade, iPhone (and Samsung + Android too) has owned it for another decade. At some point something will disrupt ant then another cycle starts.

The same development should be expected with wearables. Right now we see niched wearables mixing algorithms and applications with hardware sensors.

Over time these sensors will be present on all wearables. It’s not a wild guess that your ordinary human wouldn’t want to choose between being able to monitor sleep, clukose levels, metabolic health, oxygen levels and detailed activity.


Looking at what’s happening in the case with Mirror, we should expect the same for wearables once the sensors commoditize. This means that the window of opportunity for new hardware is closing and it will be more like a game of ’winner takes it all’ where very few hardware players will be compete for (most probably) wild volumes of users.

Relating to the wearable fitness trend, this means it will eventually rely on general technology rather than industry specific and innovation will move to software and data driven services.

Soon, byt not quite yet, the window of opportunity for hardware game of fitness technology will start closing and the remaining players will become part of the infrastructure for this innovation cycle.

Anders Gran

Entrepreneur | Executive leader in tech | co-founder Twiik (IPO) | ex Sony & ustwo | Empowering healthier lives through tech 👉🏻 dreamer & doer

1y

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