ICON Fitness Equipment manufactures discount fitness equipment as well as commercial fitness equipment. You may be familiar with their brand names of Weslo, ProForm, HealthRider, Weider, IMAGE, JumpKing, Reebok, and NordicTrack. Read on for a full ICON review.

Icon Health and Fitness is a privately owned company based in Logan, Utah, that employes roughly 6,000 people and had an estimated $1 billion in annual sales in 2000. Icon Health and Fitness is actually the world’s largest manufacturer of fitness and exercise equipment. Icon products are sold under the brand names of Weslo, ProForm, HealthRider, Weider, IMAGE, JumpKing, Reebok and NordicTrack.  Products manufactured by Icon include treadmills, stationary bicycles, elliptical trainers, trampolines, strength training machines and other related fitness items. These products are sold through catalogs and websites for each brand name, infomercials, and through retailers including Sears, Wal-Mart and Kmart. Icon originally started producing fitness equipment solely for home consumers, but it now sells equipment for commercial use as well.

The fitness equipment company now known as Icon Health and Fitness got its start in 1977 when two college students started a small import business. These college students, Scott Watterson and Gary Stevenson, were majoring in business at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, when they and their friend Bradley Sorenson incorporated Weslo Design International under Utah law. The company’s original incorporation papers state that the purpose of the company was to 'engage in wholesale and retail sales of clocks, furniture, marble, metals, insulation, and other raw materials and manufactured items, and to engage in export and import sales of such items, and to invest and make investments in real and personal property, and to engage in any business whatsoever ...'. After they graduated from Utah State, the company began selling wood stoves and shortly afterward began selling trampolines and mini-trampolines, their entry into the fitness equipment business.

The young company’s annual sales had reached almost $30 million by 1983, with the majority of sales coming from trampolines and exercise bicycles. Soon Stan Tuttleman, a business man from Philadelphia, bought 55 percent of Weslo. Under Tuttleman’s ownership, Weslo continued to grow, doubling its annual sales to $60 million by 1988. Weslo underwent another ownership change when Weider Health and Fitness acquired the company along with ProForm in 1988. With this change came new products like motorized treadmills, which brought the annual sales to $202.4 million in 1991.

Icon Health and Fitness was incorporated on November 14, 1994, combining Weslo, ProForm, Legend Products Inc. and American Physical Therapy Inc., a division of Weider. Through the mid-1990s Icon continued to grow as the company introduced new and innovative products, like the ProForm Crosswalk treadmills that had a trademarked Space Saver feature that allowed home users to fold up the running deck for storage. Then in 1996, Icon sold bonds to raise $82.5 million it used to buy HealthRider Corporation, a Salt Lake City company that sold a popular line of exercise machines. With the addition of HealthRider sales of $250 million, Icon’s sales reached nearly $1 billion.

Icon continued to grow in the following years, acquiring a company that produced mainly commercial fitness equipment, something it had yet to venture into. Icon also acquired NordicTrack, a company with a strong brand name that was facing bankruptcy. Icon was able to successfully offer new products including treadmills, ellipticals, recumbent bikes and strength machines, under the NordicTrack brand names. At this time Icon also began offering its products through licensing agreements with other firms. For example, in 1998 it signed an agreement with Reebok to produce home exercise equipment to be sold under the Reebok name. Icon also offered its own brand names NordicTrack, ProForm, and HealthRider under various licensing agreements. Meanwhile, Icon in 1998 introduced its new ProForm Club Series of commercial treadmills, which surprised the fitness industry since ProForm previously was sold just to home consumers.

By the early 2000s, Icon was still doing well and standing out among the competition by introducing new, innovative products utilizing new technology, such as iFit.com. IFit technology was advertised as the ‘world’s first internet-controlled fitness equipment.’ With this new technology, users could plug their equipment into their computers and then use the iFit.com website to select various programs - many of them programed by certified personal trainers - that automatically adjust speed, incline, and resistance levels so the user can continuously get a challenging workout. Icon also branched out a bit in the 2000s by designing and manufacturing eight models of scooters.

In more recent years, Icon has been challenged to find new customers in a declining economy. Icon’s technology innovations have definitely helped it on this front, as has its wise leadership.

Address:

1500 South 1000 West

Logan, Utah 84321

U.S.A.

Telephone: (435) 750-5000

Fax: (435) 750-0209

http://www.iconfitness.com

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