Name Games - Icon Fitness

Name Games - Icon Fitness
If you walk into a Sears or Walmart, you'll probably never notice a treadmill brand called Icon Fitness. But if you've bought a treadmill at Walmart or Sears, chances are quite good that you've bought yourself a treadmill made by Icon Fitness. The following brands are part of the ICON lineup:

Epic
Freemotion
Free Spirit (Sole Fitness also sells under this name occasionally.)
Gold's Gym
HealthRider
IMAGE
NordicTrack
Proform
Reebok
Weider
Weslo


If you haven't already, I urge you to take a look at the consensus on the ICON brand here. If just want the short answer, ICON has produced less than stellar fitness equipment in the last decade but it seems that they’ve really begun to turn themselves around in the year 2007.

TOO MANY BRANDS, TOO MANY MODELS

There seems to be no end to the number of models available from ICON. In fact, a quick search on Icon's customer service website shows over 1500(!) results if you search for "tread" under the Proform brand. Can you imagine, 1500 releases? If you release a new model everyday for 4 years, you still wouldn't be done and this is only from one brand. (If you count all of its other brands, add another 2000 or so models for a count of close to or over 4000.) Now to be fair, many releases are just slightly upgraded versions of the same models so it’s not 4000 completely different models and the company has also been in the business for a long time. Nonetheless, 4000 is an enormous figure.

Now, these numbers are not meant to impress you. Instead, we’re trying to draw light to the question of why they are spending so much time and resources to promote such a large number of models when a few solid, high quality models from each brand would have been much more economical. So why is ICON doing this? Does it benefit you, the customer? My guess is no. If certain models have performed well in the past, they should keep those models in each year instead of recycling new ones into the system. Then again, they’re selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of equipment each year so what do we know…