Often when we hear the word ‘innovation’, we think about advances in technology or inventing new devices. For the most part, however, innovation is about seeing something in a new way and improving your business by doing things differently, writes Aaron Smith, Founder and Chief Cultural Officer, KX Pilates.

Innovation can be about adjusting your systems or changing the way you run your training, right up to creating a new product or service for your clients.

How we kept innovating during lockdown

The spread of COVID in the community and the subsequent lockdowns have been a catalyst for rethinking in every business. For us, a Pilates brand with dozens of studios nationwide, shifting to online ‘At Home’ workouts was our biggest innovation in the last 12 months. When gyms had to close, we had to find another solution to deliver workouts to our clients, workouts that did not rely on the reformers we had in our studios.

Part of that was rethinking the way we presented our brand; because we have carefully designed our studios to reflect our values and the experience we want our clients to have, we were aware that we could no longer control the environment once we beamed into people’s living rooms. Our brand, therefore, became even more focused on the service we provided, including the care and attention of our team and the connection within our community. Staying front of mind to our clients was key.

Innovate from the core

Since I started KX Pilates more than a decade ago, I have had a number of side projects and businesses that have spun off from it. I’d always thought of KX Pilates as a lifestyle brand – and it is, it uses Dynamic Pilates and the concept of kaizen, Japanese for continuous improvement, to bring together like-minded people.

Back in 2013, I co-founded an international fitness retreats company and I began to extend the brand into other related fitness areas, including yoga, barre and indoor cycling. We wanted to do for these segments what we had done for Pilates: have a premium offering that went beyond a workout, encouraging improvement in their lives and belonging to a community.

All these were successful businesses in their own right but, because we were innovating external to KX Pilates, each business required the same time, energy and effort to maintain as our original business, and it all became too much. I ended up rebranding and selling these offshoots and refocusing on Pilates, our core business. Pilates was my passion and I knew it better than I knew any other fitness segment, which meant I had the expertise to see where it could go.

Why innovation needs to come from within

Since then I’ve learnt that it is vital for innovation to come from within. In addition to the shift to online workouts when our studios were closed, we also worked on improving our booking systems and online training academy, which also greatly assisted our joint venture with our new Chinese partner. Not only does that benefit the way we operate in Australia, but it’s also something that can be adapted and sold to others in the fitness sector internationally.

And finally, we are rolling out a piece of equipment that has been in the making for a few years: our very own KXFormer machine. There are two main business reasons for this kind of innovation: the first is that the dynamic workouts we offer require customised equipment that can withstand high-intensity moves specifically found in our style of training at KX. We’ve had slightly customised machines in the past, but they were easily copied, so the second reason to have our own is to control the intellectual property and make it much, much harder for copycat studios to replicate because they don’t have the equipment that gives them the same variety, intensity and creativity.

This has become a key part of our confidence now that we are expanding overseas. I remember going to a fitness expo in Singapore in 2017 in search of International country partners. A common question potential investors would ask is whether the machine was our own IP. Once they found out it wasn’t they lost interest because they saw it too easy for competitors to copy. So having the IP locked up with the manufacturer, arguably the number one pilates manufacturer in the world, US brand Balanced Body, means that the only people who can purchase a KXFormer is a KX Pilates franchisee and if anything should happen to their business, we as the franchisor have first rights to buy them back – they cannot sell them to the general public.

Innovation is, at its core, about introducing new methods, systems or products to add value to a business. To ‘shift the dial’ so to speak. In the last 12 months the innovation mentioned above will be a game-changer to differentiate our brand moving forward. Once you understand where you can drive value in your core business, innovation comes easily.

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