Fitness retailer growing again
A locally owned company selling home and commercial exercise equipment is expanding as it caters to a growing wellness market.
Better Body Fitness is opening a 15,000-square-foot warehouse store with a service center and offices at 165 S. Pine St., near Division Street and Second Avenue. The downtown complex is expected to open in October and will offer used and new scratch-and-dent equipment, along with a selection of new products, including Crocs and Sanuk footwear.
It’s the fourth location in the area for the business, which is also moving its Coeur d’Alene store on Bosanko Avenue into a larger retail space at 6235 N. Sunshine St.Better Body Fitness has several licensed stores in Montana and the Tri-Cities that operate under different owners and recently started selling franchises.
Since the company opened its first retail location seven years ago, sales have increased at a healthy 15 to 20 percent annually, said Jim McKee, who owns the business with his wife, Lisa Watts-McKee.
“We’ve worked very hard to make people understand that fitness is not torture,” he explained. “Fitness is full of people who need us – they’ve just got to want us first.”
McKee said most customers are 30- to 60-year-olds who exercise at home. Although most of the company’s growth comes from sales to individual households, a number of schools and businesses are adding fitness facilities to their offerings. McKee estimates that the fitness company has sold equipment to 120 local businesses, including personal trainers, physical therapists and companies setting up wellness centers for employees.
Intermountain Community Bank of Washington, based in Sandpoint as Panhandle State Bank, integrated an exercise room into its newly built Spokane Valley branch on East Sprague Avenue near Costco.
Melody Balmes, vice president of regional services for ICB, said the chief executive officer requested that she ask employees what features they would like in the new facility. They mentioned a fitness center.
The room, inside the new 16,000-square-foot bank, has three cardio machines, a television, lockers and showers that will be available to about 50 employees who work on-site or at the downtown banking center.
“We kind of went for the employee-first kind of thing,” said Balmes, adding that the bank also added features for the community that includes a coffee bar for raising money for nonprofits and a community meeting room.
McKee said some businesses integrate fitness centers into their company plans because studies show that people who exercise are more attentive on the job and use less sick time.
With child obesity rising, he said, local schools have used grant money to create workout rooms for middle and high school students. The company also has staff on hand to fix equipment that breaks.
“We are doing a lot of work for those guys. We service their products because it’s obviously a hard environment.”