Arnulf Refsnes
Founder and Managing Director
Yngvar Andersen
Founder and head trainer
Annema Refsnes
Founder, trainer and head of SoMe
Ole Petter Hjelle
Founder and PhD public heath
Jitendra Rai
Founder and CTO
Through technology development, Naardic aims to create the world’s most social and engaging online fitness training experience.
After a fantastic launch in Norway, Naardic plan for an international rollout in 2022.
All fitness training classes at Naardic are online and interactive. This means that the trainer sees each participant during the class and can motivate them individually. The classes are a mixture of personal training and live streaming group classes. Our experience shows that it´s more personal to have online classes than classes in a physical room.
The Naardic concept was first created by Annema Refsnes, one of Norway’s most respected and well-known personal trainers. However, personal training with a well-known trainer is expensive and few have the access. Naardic enables the experience of a personal trainer in your own home and is much more affordable.
To realize the Naardic vision, Annema initiated a partnership with Agilis, Yngvar Andersen and Ole Petter Hjelle as co-founders.
Agilis A/S is led by CEO Arnulf Refsnes and CTO Jitendra Rai. Agilis has a proven ability to create excellent digital user experiences.
With their experience in communication, knowledge in training and their personalities, Yngvar Andersen and Ole Petter Hjelle are perfect co-entrepreneurs to realize Naardic.
After a pilot period, Naardic was launched in August 2020 and used Zoom as video conference software. Zoom is great as a general video conference system, but we see a lot of improvements to make the user experience even better. That is why Naardic started developing its own video conference system, tailored for fitness classes, in 2020. We expect to launch this system in Q4 2021.
In 2021, the Naardic IT development team has steadily worked to improve our customers' user experience to enable even better fitness classes.
Physical gyms are great for socializing, both with friends and trainers. Online fitness offerings are generally great for convenience, efficiency, and geographical freedom, but traditionally they have been a rather lonely and detached experience.
Naardic will combine the best of both worlds, the social experience of a gym with the convenience of online home fitness.
Ownership structure
Naardic Holding A/S owns 100% of two companies
- Naardic Tech A/S carries out the technology development together with tech partner Agilis
- Naardic Training A/S carries out all training and licenses web and video conference technology from Naardic Tech A/S
Market
The total fitness market in Norway was NOK 6B in 2019. Online or connected is steadily taking over a substantial part of the total market, fueled by the Covid pandemic.
On a world scale, the market for online fitness is estimated to be USD 6B in 2020 and is projected to grow with a CAGR of 34% to USD 50B in 2027.
Naardic operates at the interception between live streaming and personal training. This is the area of online training that is growing fastest.
Expansion strategy
www.naardic.no is the cornerstone of Naardic’s commitment to online training and focuses on three defined user groups:
- Private users
- Company membership (sold directly or through third party)
- Training for special groups (overweight, elderly, disabled and more)
In addition to membership sales to customers, Naardic will invest in the following business areas:
Partner agreements (2020)
Offer existing fitness centres and other players an online training offer administered and performed by Naardic. Current agreements exist with:
- Roede (dietary guidance)
- Aktiv Mot Kreft (Active against cancer)
- Myrens treningssenter (Myrens fitness center)
- And more agreements are under negotiation
International roll-out (2022)
Naardic will go international with English classes and international payments options in Q1 2022.
1-on-1 personal training (2021)
20% of Naardic customers indicate they want personal 1-to1 follow-ups in addition to group classes. For this, we will use the existing trainers and Naardic’s propriety video conference system.
Naardic franchise (?)
Licensing concept and IT platform to players in other countries. As an example, trainers in Spain could create Naardic.es for the Spanish market. A franchise fee would typically be 8-10% of the sales and 1 million NOK to start up.