Adelaide-based home fitness programme gains millions of extra followers as Sweat app; takeover leads to cuts
Adelaide company Pixelforce helped Kayla Itsines and Tobi Pearce convert their Bikini Body Guide (BBG) business from an eBook to the Sweat app, with a huge boost in followers globally.
Images ocurtesy Pixelforce
Kayla Itsines and Tobi Pearce sold their Adelaide-based Sweat fitness app for $400 million to the global sports tech giant Fit in the United States of America in 2021 – with big cutbacks in staff in 2022. Itsines and Pearce, who started the busines in 2015, also ended their personal relationship in 2020.
Itsines began as a personal fitness trainer in 2008, gaining certificates from the Australian Institute of Fitness and Australian Fitness Network. She started developing workouts to help increase fitness and strength at all levels and gained worldwide attention in 2009 by sharing her clients’ success stories on Instagram. She responded to demand by creating a renowned 28-minute workout programme as an eBook, Bikini Body Guide (BBG), in 2014.
In 2015, Itsines made a record-breaking world tour with her bootcamps, becoming the first person to train 30,000 women in person. A major boosting point was when Itsines and Pearce went to another Adelaide company, Pixelforce, to convert their home workout experience into a more interactive millennials-friendly and desktop-to-mobile Sweat with Kayla app and website launched in 2015. Within a year of release, it reached #1 in the App Store in more than 142 countries. It was on the track to attract more than 40 million followers across its social media accounts.
The app became Sweat in 2017, with new team members extending its programme offering, including body and mind, gym-based weights, fierce and build to sweat, yoga, barra and zero equipment. When daughter Arna was born in 2019, a programme for postpartum women, Kayla Itsines Post-Pregnancy, was launched. In 2021,
BBG was renamed High Intensity with Kayla, BBG Stronger renamed High Intensity Strength with Kayla, and BBG Zero Equipment became High Intensity Zero Equipment with Kayla. The BBG Community was renamed Sweat with Kayla Community.I tsines also wrote High Intensity with Kayla (formerly Bikini Body Guide, 2014), High Intensity with Kayla Recipe Guide(formerly The Bikini Body Healthy Eating & Lifestyle Plan, 2015), The Bikini Body 28 Day Healthy Eating & Lifestyle Guide (2016), and The Bikini Body Motivation & Habits Guide (2017).
