In This Story
In the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns, when people were still hoarding hand sanitizer and stores struggled to stock their shelves, business partners Cam Brookhouse, Martin Tweedie and Lorenzo Spreafico were holed up in a living room, trying to build a gaming platform with whatever they could find on Amazon.
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“We locked ourselves in my living room with a sewing machine and a 3D printer and taught ourselves game code,” recalled Brookhouse. “We were like ‘there’s kind of a climbing harness that I reckon you could chop in half and staple to something else.’”
The trio MacGyvered together what would become an early prototype of Quell – the world’s first gaming platform, built specifically for fitness. At the same time, a different at-home program platform was exploding across the world.
Peloton Interactive Inc (PTON), known best for its signature stationary bicycles and accompanying remote spin classes, saw its share prices quadruple in 2020. By 2021, shares were going for as much as $156 and the Peloton brand had become a global success. Customers eagerly awaited themed workout series featuring music from pop stars like Beyonce and Taylor Swift, while Peloton instructors became celebrities in their own right.
It was a complete coincidence that while Peloton (and COVID-19) were taking the world by storm, Brookhouse, Tweedie and Spreafico were developing their own at-home platform. Quell wasn’t developed in response to the pandemic or the at-home workout boom. Rather the founders began looking to fill a gap in the market even before lockdowns began.
The trio were enthusiastic gamers – Brookhouse, the CEO, and Tweedie, the CTO, bonded as students at the University of Oxford partially over their love of video games. After finishing university, the friends observed that many people their age were struggling to work out consistently once the organized sports of adolescence fell by the wayside.
“I was a competitive swimmer, gymnast, diver, did boxing, I did hurdles, like you name it,” said Brookhouse. “I absolutely love, love, love exercise, especially team sports.”
What he found he didn’t love as much, however, was what the team at Quell refers to as “default fitness” – the rote exercises that people fall back on at the gym. During their research, the team discovered that many people had positive memories of exercise from childhood, but that those experiences didn’t carry through to adulthood gym sessions.
The trio saw video games as a way to bring back the joy people experience when playing games and sports, while also accommodating the schedules and habits of busy adults.
“We played every fitness game on the market,” in the months before the pandemic, Brookhouse explained. “Most of them were just not very good fitness and not very good games either.”
Enter Quell – an immersive video game that promises to burn 600 calories in an hour, through a range of fighting moves.
Quell’s controllers are “ a set of motion tracking devices that we built from scratch ourselves because there was nothing else out there that would let us do what we wanted to do,” explains Tweedie. “We also included a third sensor, which is worn around your chest as part of the belt to allow us to track full body movements.”
The platform debuted this summer to promising sales and the company is continuing to develop new games, designed specifically for the platform. But Quell’s premiere comes at a difficult time in the at-home fitness industry.
The pandemic-era boom that led to Peloton’s skyrocketing growth, was (perhaps inevitably) followed by a crash, when the world opened up again. By early 2022, Peloton had laid off nearly 3,000 employees and a few months later the company slashed the cost of purchasing its bikes. In August 2024, Peloton shares cost less than $4, down from their peak of more than $150.
At the same time, other at-home fitness platforms are also facing a steep decline. In March, BowFlex filed for bankruptcy – blaming its financial woes on “post-pandemic environment and persistent macroeconomic headwinds.” A month later, the privately-held exercise equipment retailer American Home Fitness also filed for bankruptcy.
“Post-COVID, there’s been a real decline in at-home exercise,” Charles Bullock, an attorney representing American Home Fitness in the legal process, told Crain’s Detroit Business, in April.
Quell’s founders, however, remain optimistic for their product’s future and for at-home fitness more broadly.
“You see these companies, like Peloton, which is a fantastic product and a fantastic business, getting excoriated in the press because performance has come down,” Brookhouse said. “Of course it’s come down. You had a massive exogenous effect.”
“We started this before the pandemic, because it was a problem before the pandemic. It’s a very innate thing about our current fitness market, and the options available,” he continued.
“Fun [exercise] is gated behind massive barriers and the easy-to-access [workouts] are boring. And I think that’s still as true today as it was, you know, before all of this craziness happened.”