If you were granted a day off just to look out for your wellbeing, what would you do? I would spend it with my family. Our CEO Mohammed would most definitely work out. Others might see a therapist or go to the beach. Well, that’s exactly what we did. Whatever we wanted, we were Out of Office. I mean the whole company.
On Monday 4th April we celebrated ‘Wellness Day’, celebrating 10 years of SweatWorks. That’s a decade of providing solutions that allow our mission of ‘Wellness for All’ to become a reality. So we’re encouraging wellbeing, in whatever shape that takes.
Though there are endless ways to care for our wellbeing, we put fitness at the centre of our vision’s strategy. It’s right there in our positioning statement : ‘Fitness Focused. Innovation Driven’. Why? Because we understand that the bigger picture of wellness is the goal, but what’s going to get you there is your concentration on getting fitter.
Take mental wellness. To be mentally well doesn’t necessarily mean working out, but if you ask people that work out, “Do you have mental wellness?” they’re probably going to say something along the lines of “Yeah man, if it wasn’t for working out, I’d be depressed all the time.” Your mental wellness can suffer for many reasons, but what Is known is that if you were to walk, pick up some weights, get on a rower, get on a bike, do something else that’s fitness-oriented, your mental wellness would likely improve.
So when we work within the fitness industry, what we’re really doing is propelling that overall mission of wellness. Technology is the tool that we use, because it’s able to scale the whole fitness game. It opens up avenues of support, knowledge, feedback, engagement and encouragement to achieve your wellness goals faster.
In the very beginning, when Mohammed started the company the sensibility was to ask: “How can we create a product that would allow us to get people fitter and improve the quality of their lives through wellness?” But creating just one app had a limited scope as to how many people we could reach. So then we turned that around, to make it our mission. Instead of making one product that makes people fitter, we’ve been partnering with companies worldwide who are creating a range of products that are making people fitter. Our impact is magnified beyond all original expectations.
Take Strava, for example. They aggregate numerous data points from athletes all around the world and use this to build a community with the same aim – to be healthier. In SweatWorks we provide a gym refund for any employee working out a certain amount per week. They track it on Strava and we encourage our internal community and they get rewarded. But even without the financial incentive, they get so excited when somebody likes their workout efforts. They’re noticed by other colleagues in the business and it also motivates others. That’s not just in our office – Strava has millions of people using it around the world. That’s a mega audience that we can now help in our mission of wellness for all. And we help Strava to reach more people in return.
When we started working together, Strava was particularly iOS based, but when Samsung released their new smartwatches, Strava wanted to integrate in order to allow those smartwatch users to access their platform. The watches were the Tizen operating system and featured a round face – a total departure from the square-face iOS composition of their app for the Apple Watch. There was nothing that we could take from iOS and import over. So Strava asked us if we would be willing to work on a project like that – literally recreating their app into something totally new. And we did.
We had to consider things like “How does it work when you use the bezel instead of poking and tapping?” We did UX, UI redesign, and then custom coding.
Our job as innovators is to provide the solutions. We thrive off the challenge, but that’s not why we do it. We own our mission. When we’re looking at clients, it’s not just clients for clients sake. If you really look at all our clients, they are there because they’re pursuing and have the ability to make our vision of ‘Wellness for all’ happen. The strength of our impact is in the strength of our clients. Together, we’re making the world healthier.Are you with us? Get in touch.