CEO Corner: Wahoo Fitness’ Gareth Joyce on Tapping Into a New Market

Wahoo Fitness made its name producing equipment and tech for hardcore cycling athletes. Joyce’s vision for growth includes bringing more casual fitness enthusiasts into the fold

Wahoo Fitness is in growth mode. Last year, the fitness brand known for its hardcore cycling equipment and tech launched its first-ever treadmill, followed up by other new launches, including additions to its popular indoor bike lineup. 

For Gareth Joyce, who took over as Wahoo’s CEO in March 2024 shortly after founder Chip Hawkins re-acquired the company, these launches are part of a plan to widen Wahoo’s appeal beyond hardcore cycling enthusiasts and into the wider world of fitness. 

Joyce sat down with Athletech News to discuss his background as an “intrapreneur” inside corporate giants like Mercedes and Delta, why he decided to make the jump into fitness, and his plans to expand Wahoo’s target market in the years ahead.  

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length. 

Athletech News: Can you tell us about your background why you decided to join Wahoo Fitness in 2024? 

Gareth Joyce: I spent most of my career in corporate life inside of very large companies, including nearly 15 years with Mercedes and Delta Airlines. But I was always kind of the “intrapreneur” —  the engine inside of a corporation driving change.

I knew at some point I wanted to take my experience into smaller businesses that are more growth-focused. During COVID, I moved into a role where I was leading a battery electric vehicle business that had some great positives and some challenging outcomes. We had a lot of growth, including going public, but we ended up having to reorganize through Chapter 11.

It was really a twist of fate that led to this opportunity: one of my former colleagues at Mercedes left Mercedes seven or eight years ago to go work for Wahoo. Seven or eight years later, I got a phone call from him, and he told me they were looking for a new CEO. He said, “I think you’d be a good fit. You know how to run businesses, and you’ve been an athlete.” I was also a user of Wahoo products. So I met with the investors and the board: we had a lot of good conversations, and it was a very comfortable fit, so I took this on as the next new adventure.

ATN: You used the term “intrapreneur,” which is interesting. What have your early priorities been as Wahoo’s CEO? 

GJ: I saw the same thing I observed being in an early-stage technology company, albeit in a different industry. Innovation in early-stage companies is intentionally disruptive. But equally, as a company starts to mature, there’s a tipping point where that disruption can become challenging for the business because you don’t have well-established processes and disciplines. Mature companies don’t develop those because they want to intentionally make their business complex; they develop them because they realize that as a business matures, complexity requires process for controlled outcomes. So I realized fairly quickly that we needed to focus on execution and develop more discipline around our product strategy. We’ve made significant progress in those respects already.

The other thing is, the way we think about our market and our consumer segmentation was something we had to change to truly recognize the potential we have to bring our products to a much wider audience. We have incredible products that have not yet enjoyed the benefit of market reach that I think we can achieve. We typically build products that appeal to the apex athlete, but there are many aspirant athletes out there. There are probably around 40 million high-performance athletes around the world. But if you think about that layer below — people who have a goal to run a 10k or cycle a “grand fondo” once a year — the market is more like 400 to 600 million people around the world. 

ATN: How do you reach those next-level fitness consumers? 

GJ: It’s not just one thing. I think there are many things that we need to do, and it will take time. But if you think about it from a strategy point of view, we’re uniquely positioned in that we have products for athletes who are interested in training — both cycling and running — and we have the capacity to reflect on that performance indoors and outdoors. We’ve got indoor cycling trainers, bike computers, power pedals, heart rate monitors, and speed and cadence sensors, so we can create this whole ecosystem of information around the athlete.

We’ve now introduced the treadmill, Kickr Run, which gives us access to the running market.  All of this has opened up the aperture of consumers for us that is much wider than it used to be. So priority number one is, how do we consolidate the positioning of our brand as more than just a cycling brand? We’re a running brand now, too. 

From there, we’re then able to grow far more opportunistically, with the potential introduction of more products that support a market that is, as I said, probably 10 times larger than the market we’d built our business on. 

ATN: Speaking of cycling, there’s been a lot of talk about a decline in demand for the modality, particularly in indoor cycling. What’s your outlook on the cycling market? 

GJ: If you look at some of the data that’s published by organizations like PeopleForBikes in the U.S., cycling is in a low-growth phase. But inside of that, there’s nuance. Road cycling is not in a high-growth phase, but gravel is growing very successfully, and mountain biking is too. So you’re seeing a bit of a mode shift, if you like.

Indoor cycling, at least from our point of view, is healthy. I know that in the strong partnership we’ve developed with Zwift, they’re seeing good growth. So using an indoor training product as a tool for athletic development, whether it’s as a pure cyclist or just for the benefit of fitness, is still an attractive proposition.

ATN: Looking ahead, what are your key strategic goals for the future of Wahoo? 

GJ: Our roadmap for the next five years is robust and clear, and we’ve got a very good understanding of where we’d like to take the brand and our product to attack the opportunities I’ve described. 

Beyond that, we’ve got the opportunity to go into other products that support athletes. If you consider an athlete today, strength training, for example, has become a critical component of athletic development. So we can think about that domain. Then there are other sporting disciplines, like rowing and swimming. 

So if I look down the pike, the opportunity for us is substantial; the hardest part of executing successfully will be having the discipline around developing a product roadmap and being committed to executing against that without becoming impatient.