Les Mills an international success

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BETTER FITNESS: Les Mills International is a finalist in the New Zealand International Business Awards for best business with revenue $10m to $50m category.

Fitness chain Les Mills International lives up to its tagline that the company is "for a fitter planet", transforming people's fitness worldwide.

With the exercise-to-music classes it designs from scratch now exported to 80 countries around the globe, the company has come a long way since Olympic athlete Les Mills opened his first gym with wife Colleen in Auckland in 1968.

Les Mills International – a finalist in the New Zealand International Business Awards for best business with revenue $10m to $50m category – now has 90,000 certified instructors teaching its classes in 14,000 licensed gyms and clubs around the world.

Les Mills gyms have weekly member attendance almost double the industry average.

Attendance at its classes is equivalent to more than 3 million workouts a week, but the company wants to boost this to 200 million workouts a week worldwide by 2020.

Les Mills Enterprises chief executive Vaughan Schwass heads the part of the fitness giant that promotes the brand, creates class choreography, manages licensing and exports the classes through its 30 agents worldwide. "Because 99 per cent of our work is international it often flies under the radar. I think most New Zealanders probably don't know what we do or how successful we are internationally," Schwass said.

The company has a unique licensing arrangement with music labels EMI and Sony to use their original music in its gyms and as the soundtracks to the fitness classes it licenses to clubs worldwide.

Its classes range from martial arts-inspired, step aerobics and dance-based fitness to its benchmark class Body Pump, which sees users work out using a barbell and weights.

"Our classes are very much driven by motivation and results; our brand integrity stands on the fact you will get results doing our classes," Schwass said, adding that a huge amount of research goes into selecting music with the right beats per minute.

One of the challenges in trying to appeal to so many different markets around the world is cultural differences.

Its classes are licensed to some religious organisations including a number of Jewish community classes in the United States, for example, and lyrics to the pop music they are set to can be offensive to some – requiring adaptation.

As well as designing classes that keep consumers coming back, Les Mills is in the process of patenting a new barbell system it designed with Christchurch-based 4ormfunction.

"We recognise that the barbell with weights hasn't been innovated for the last 40 to 50 years, it's remained the same. We identified through observing people using it how intimidating and hard to use it can be; they don't necessarily get the full exercise benefit," Schwass said.

"We've been through extensive design and are launching a product in March this year called the Les Mills Smart Bar. We think it's going to be extremely successful around the world and we're going to talk to a bunch of partners about distributing it around the world."

Les Mills will also partner with an American fitness video company and launch a home fitness DVD package, based on its Body Pump class, in the competitive United States market in March. It will be called Les Mills Pump and will include purchase of the Smart Bar.

- © Fairfax NZ News