ATOM - HOME GYM KITS & ONLINE TRAINING
THE STORY
During the 2020 Pandemic lockdown, people began to give more importance to health and fitness but were forced to do so from home. We at RPM Training saw an opportunity to be the one-stop shop for an entire home gym and functional training program to stay healthy physically and mentally.
INITIAL CONCEPT
Already a manufacturer of and what the industry considered the best equipment of the category, we knew the new equipment needed to follow the same form language and standards we’ve held our products to. The goal was to create a family of products that looked like they were cohesive when used together or separately. I acted as the project manager that oversaw the project from launch to completion keeping us on track with our branding, budget and timeline.
Sketch by Patrick Christian.
IDEATION
As the initial sketches began, we carefully inspected each piece of equipment for opportunities to improve. We inspected handle diameters, material choices, form angles, and any other details that could stand our products apart from what was currently on the market.
Sketches by Patrick Christian.
REFINEMENT
As we discovered innovation opportunities, we narrowed down our form language to shapes and textures that not only looked attractive but what we thought would perform well in the gym. A shape that kept reoccurring was a new shape that we appropriately named the “squircle” which resembled a rounded square. This shape went on to define our dumbbells and reoccurred in many of the products’ forms.
Sketches by Patrick Christian.
PACKAGING
Using our existing kraft packaging as a starting point, I worked with packaging engineering and a graphic designer to develop a line of packaging that was descriptive, showed the product’s highlights and gave a essence of our in-house product development.
Packaging design by Patrick Normandin
STUDIO PRODUCT PHOTOGRAPHY
When the final products started to hit our warehouse, I was responsible for getting our website and outgoing marketing ready for launch. We hired a photographer and I worked with him to pick the correct angles and lighting to show the products accurately and in-detail.
Photography by Daniel Salcedo.
PRODUCT RENDERING
The gym kits were available in 3 different versions; the Axis Kit, the Fly Kit, and the Power Kit. These kits represented different amounts of equipment and pricing. Within each kit, you could also select the different weights you wanted. This made for a very complex product to show and describe on our website. The solution was to work with a rendering team to create images of every variation possible so people could see exactly what they were purchasing before adding it to their cart.
RECORDED WORKOUTS
- JUST PRESS PLAY
Taking the guesswork out of fitness programming, we wanted to provide functional fitness classes for the people who purchased our equipment. We built our own filming studio and filmed six months worth of hour long classes for people to follow along with. Each class had professional coach and three athletes of different skill and equipment levels. My role was to oversee the building of the filming studio, work with the production team in the early stages of filming and facilitate the hand off of the filming to an in-house production.
AN ONLINE COMMUNITY - THE PLATFORM
We decided to break apart the online training (ATOM) from the RPM brand to reduce confusion between the brand delivering a digital product and the brand delivering a physical product. This meant Atom needed it’s own website and training platform. I was responsible for the user interface design of the new website and working with the developers to create the new website that would describe and sell the online training subscription. You can check it out at TrainAtom.com