Sweat: The story of a fitness sensation born out of Adelaide

Sweat is a story of two young entrepreneurs who had a vision to inspire women across the world. This is how the Adelaide-born brand became a global sensation.

It started in a backyard in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs and rapidly became a global fitness sensation.

But it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for Sweat, which this week announced it had sold to US software giant iFIT in a deal worth around $400m.

The astonishing rise of the Adelaide born start-up is a tale of two young entrepreneurs who had a vision to inspire women around the world to lead healthy lifestyles.

With Kayla Itsines as the face of the brand, and Tobi Pearce working behind the scenes to scale up the business, Sweat has been a perfect blend of ambition, passion and hard work.

Itsines often credits her upbringing in a tight-knit Greek-Australian family in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs for her success, while for Pearce it’s a rags to riches story.

Kayla Itsines and Tobi Pearce before their split. Picture: Kayla Itsines/ Instagram

As a keynote speaker at events he would often mention his difficult upbringing in Kangarilla, and how he left home at 16, experienced homelessness and for a while lived in a tin shed.

At a South Australian Tourism Industry Council conference in 2018, he explained how a passion for personal training and an entrepreneurial spirit helped him turn his life around.

“I started off as a personal trainer, moved into running boot camps about 12 months later and I made my first million at 19, which was a really great moment,” he said.

For Sweat it all started in 2012 when Pearce and Itsines met, unsurprisingly, at the gym.

Pearce was doing a double degree in Law and Commerce, studying to be a personal trainer, training clients and running a boot camp business, while Itsines was training women one-on-one in the backyard of her family home.

But as her reputation grew through word of mouth, it was becoming impossible to keep up with demand.

Pearce persuaded her that she could still train them, that it didn’t need to be face-to-face, and that’s when the inspiration for Sweat was born.

Itsines in 2014, before the launch of the Sweat app. Picture: Bianca De Marchi

Less than a year after meeting, the pair moved in together and, from a spare bedroom, devised their plan to take over the digital fitness world.

It started with the downloadable PDF Bikini Body Guides with exercise and healthy eating plans, and was soon followed by bundled e-books and branded fitness equipment.

The first version of the Sweat With Kayla app was the game-changer when it launched in 2015.

“So we created a program, I wrote the workouts, wrote the explanation of the exercises, put it into the 28 minutes and put it online. And it just went off,” Itsines told The Advertiser in 2016.

Women would send Itsines before-and-after photos of how they’d transformed their bodies with her program, and her young cousin showed her how to post them on Instagram.

By harnessing the power of social media, Pearce and Itsines were able to quickly grow their fledgling app into the lucrative US market, and the transformation selfies became a hallmark of the program.

Itsines at fitness event in Melbourne in 2016. Picture: Jeremy Simmons

World tours followed, with Itsines packing out stadiums in Los Angeles, New York, Amsterdam and London, with thousands of fans at bootcamp events.

In 2016, Time named Itsines as one of the 30 most influential people on the internet, and the pair became the youngest debutants on the BRW Young Rich list, when Itsines was just 25 and Pearce 24.

As Sweat was taking off, the duo started to splash their cash.

They bought a sprawling multimillion dollar house in Malvern, while Pearce took a liking to fast cars, cruising Adelaide’s streets, sometimes a little too fast, in his black Lamborghini Huracan.

Tobi Pearce with daughter Arna. Picture: Kayla Itsines/ Instagram

A messy defamation battle between the Sweat duo and fellow Adelaide online celebrities Durianrider (Harley Johnstone) and Freelee the Banana Girl (Leanne Ratcliffe) in 2015 presented a minor setback, but Sweat powered on.

Pearce and Itsines were engaged in April 2018, and when baby Arna arrived a year later, it seemed like they had it all.

But the bombshell announcement of the couple’s split last August cast immediate doubt over the future of the empire they’d built together.

It came as the company was approaching $100m in annual revenue following five consecutive years of double digit growth.

Pearce insisted that Sweat would continue unaffected, with Pearce running the business as chief executive and Itsines remaining the face of the brand.

“Kayla and I have maintained an incredibly good working relationship and partnership in our organisation since the first day that it was founded,” Pearce told The Advertiser last December.

“If anything I would suggest that recent business performance is probably a representation of the fact that if anything we’ve got even stronger in that regard.

Itsines with other trainers following the birth of Arna in 2019. Picture: Supplied by Sweat.

“Kayla is a tremendously good co-founder, she brings an incredibly unique visitor business and obviously as a trainer I don’t think she needs any more validation.

“She’s motivated tens of millions of women around the world – there’s not many other people who can say they’ve done that.”

But speculation about a potential sale of Sweat increased after the split, culminating in this week’s announcement of the massive deal with iFIT.

As part of the deal, Pearce and Itsines have plans to build a “bigger and better” Sweat from Adelaide, where the business will continue to be headquartered as a stand-alone brand within the iFIT group.

With Pearce celebrating his 29th birthday earlier this week, and Kayla recently turning 30, there’s sure to be plenty of gas left in the tank.