GymBag.
Curated product discovery experiences — the fitness subscription box I founded, branded, and grew solo.
- Scope
- Brand Design, Product Strategy
- Status
- Shipped
- Team
- Solo
- 2015 – 2016
Finding great fitness products is surprisingly hard.
The industry is full of shady marketing and supplements that don’t work, so discovering products you can actually trust is its own chore. To test whether a curated box could solve that, I filled the nearest shoebox with products and texted photos to friends with no context. The reaction, “That’s sweet, where’d you get that?”, was all the validation I needed.
Positioning a defensible, premium box.
Anyone can box up some supplements, so I focused on the one durable moat: brand. ‘Embrace The Journey’ cast fitness as a hard but worthwhile grind (while quietly reinforcing retention). Contrasting Gotham and Squares typefaces, a bold orange on an otherwise reserved palette, and sharp corners communicated a confident, sophisticated strength, which enabled us to price at 3x our competitors.
Earning attention I couldn't buy.
As a broke student with no budget, I focused my acquisition efforts on organic social at the overlap of where my audience existed and the content I could reasonably execute solo: Instagram. It quickly amassed 20K followers in just 3 months and became the source of 99% of our site’s traffic.
Building trust through design.
A new name in a shady space invites doubt, and Cratejoy’s templates made us look less legitimate. Unwilling to settle, I taught myself the HTML by hand, from swapping hexcodes to reworking whole layouts, and built a Past Boxes page showing real photos and contents of each shipment. It converted at 2.5% as the priciest box in the niche.
Designing delight worth a month's wait.
To get the unboxing moment right, I designed and curated each box in-house. Colourfully and neatly packed with a cohesive theme and informative inserts, each turned a service into a shareable product, building community, growing the brand through subscribers’ networks, and lowering CAC.
$30K in revenue, solo.
“Encouraged me to keep at it, rather than taking a job at SumoMe.”
“Earned a cease and desist for doing a good job marketing concept photos!”
