After working in executive positions for companies such as Philips Oral Healthcare and S.C. Johnson & Sons Inc., Christine Robins decided she needed a change. Always willing to take risks when it comes to business, she decided in 2009 to leave the comforts of those global companies and take the CEO role at a struggling, venture-backed BodyMedia Inc.
“I wanted to try something different,” Robins says. “I wanted to come into an organization or a business that had an interesting product or business model that needed to get to the next level.”
Founded in 1999, BodyMedia was exactly what Robins was looking for. The company is the pioneer in developing wearable body monitoring systems that are designed to help people lose weight, improve performance and live a healthier lifestyle. Unfortunately, the direction of the company and the purpose of its products weren’t always that cut and dry.
“Early on, the founders had developed a technology and a product that was well before it’s time,” Robins says. “When we commercialized our first product in 2001, this notion of wearing multiple sensors on your body on a 24/7 basis — if you weren’t chronically sick and in a hospital, or you weren’t a performance athlete — was a weird notion. We didn’t even have cell phones in our pockets in 2001.”
The founders spent years trying to figure out what market, customers, channels, and partners this technology and know-how could help assist. It wasn’t until 2008 and 2009 that BodyMedia found a bit of a groove.
“We were primarily focused in the medical and research space early on and in late 2008/early 2009, we augmented the portfolio to also have a consumer-based solution, and that’s when our business took off,” Robins says.
Here’s how Robins helped steer BodyMedia in the right direction and kept the business at the forefront of a budding industry.
From idea to in-demand product
Early in the growth of BodyMedia, the company struggled to understand where its product would fit best. It would be fair to say that BodyMedia had a lack of focus.
“I said, ‘We’re never going to have sustainability or keep the lights on if we continue to just dabble in stuff.’” Robins says. “The founders kept waiting for the market to tell them where the best place was. The challenge with that is if you have an early-to-market technology, the market’s not going to tell you, because the market doesn’t know yet. You have to create a need.”
As a result of waiting for the market to indicate a direction, BodyMedia was all over the board. It needed to place a bet.
“If you’re running a company, you’re making decisions every day that have risk,” Robins says. “But if you’re running a smaller company, you’ve got to place a bet and it’s got to be a focused and well-informed bet. Then you have to go with it and be willing to listen to the reactions of people and figure out how to be a continual learner.
“You have to get a product or service built that satisfies your hypothesis of the market and who you’re going after, and build your messaging and get it to market to get real feedback. You can iterate in an office and give your opinions until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t put it out in the real world and it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter what you think.”
BodyMedia’s technology is a lifestyle management system that helps people manage various health-related conditions. With the help of Robins, the company geared its assets toward delivering a solution that helps people lose weight.
“We picked the weight management market and built a solution that’s solid and works for those people and has the types of things that they need,” she says. “There are a number of chronic conditions it can help, but they all have one underlying key driver, and that’s lack of lifestyle health, and our sensors can help people understand that.”
BodyMedia’s product has an accelerometer and three physiological sensors that have to be in contact with the skin. The product has received clinical validation and has accuracy that’s unmatched in the market.
“If you’re trying to manage your weight, it’s calories in, calories out,” Robins says. “They need that math and they need it simple. We built something that people will wear on a 24-hour basis, because losing weight isn’t just about going to the gym.
“It’s the things you do at home. It’s parking in the back of the parking lot. People don’t manually track that stuff because it’s too difficult to do. If you put a device on and let it do all the tracking and have it present data in software that shows them their targets, it’s much easier.”
BodyMedia’s product has hardware that’s wearable and software that targets a specific user base. The third thing Robins focused on was finding partners — those who people would trust to be committed to the product.
“We started to partner with Jenny Craig, 24-Hour Fitness, health plans and then we put it in select retail stores. We make sure that those retailers are committed to the category, and it’s consistent with where our consumer target would go to look for this product.”
It wasn’t just a clear focus for the product that launched BodyMedia into growth mode. Once the company turned to the consumer market, it had to turn its attention toward making the product more functional and attractive in terms of design.
“It was around form factor and getting something that people would engage with,” Robins says. “Over the years we have gone from a product that was bigger than a hockey puck that you would wear on your upper arm to, by the time I came, an inch and a half square. This year we launched a product that is the size of a quarter.”
BodyMedia saw significant moves in its sales volume as it went away from bulkier products to slimmer models. Its new Core 2 product launch also improved the design perspective, giving the device an industrial, almost jewelry-like feel and look.
“Over the years, we’ve really evolved the form factor,” she says. “As we moved into the consumer arena four years ago, that was a big reason for the uptick.”
Keep evolving
Since Robins’ arrival in 2009, BodyMedia has improved its business by leaps and bounds, and has single-handedly been responsible for growing the credibility of the wearable sensor market. Now Robins is focused on the next steps.
“We are continuing to look for new features that we can build into the hardware or the software,” Robins says. “We have four sensors today, and are looking to add a fifth sensor for heart rate.”
BodyMedia has done such a great job in the wearable sensors arena that the company has created a more competitive market.
“That opens the next chapter for this company,” Robins says. “We’ve done what we wanted to do, which was have this category be established as credible.
“We were the first ones in wearable sensors period, back in 1999, but we were serving a different target in terms of the medical and clinical focus. We were the first ones to bring it to consumers in late 2008 and early 2009, and since then we’ve seen a huge influx of competitors.”
Robins’ philosophy about competition has always been that new competition isn’t bad because it does several things.
“No. 1, it gives the category credibility,” she says. “No. 2, it brings awareness to the category. No. 3 is that competition keeps you on your toes. I don’t fear competition. I fear that we can’t continue to innovate and differentiate. Competition makes you be sharp in your decisions, strategy and execution.”
In this category there were a couple of other smaller players, but a year and a half ago, both Nike and Jawbone came into the space.
“That’s when I stood back and said, ‘Yes! This category has arrived,’” Robins says. “When you get players like that putting their marketing muscle into it, you know that they believe this category is in it for the long haul.”
In fact, this past April, BodyMedia announced that it was being acquired by Jawbone, a major player in wearable technology and audio devices. This move gives BodyMedia and Jawbone a leg up on the competition.
“The competition has some barriers in terms of entering this market, some of which are technical and some we’ve created by our patent landscape,” she says. “That’s allowed us to be uniquely positioned in the market.
“Our acquisition gives Jawbone a really nice combined platform that has a single-sensor device that serves certain markets and needs, and the other multi-sensor platform that we have can serve other markets and needs.
“Together we can accomplish far more than we ever could apart. That’s pretty exciting. My immediate focus is to try to get this company integrated, but in parallel, it’s also continuing to drive our strategy and our innovation pipeline with a new owner, assets and synergies we can now leverage.” ●
Takeaways
- Discover where your product or service fits best.
- Get market feedback and make improvements.
- Look for ways to make the leap to the next level.
The Robins File
Name: Christine Robins
Title: CEO
Company: Body Media Inc.
Born: Beloit, Wisc., and raised in Green Bay, Wisc.
Education: Double major in finance and marketing from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a master’s degree in business administration from Marquette University.
What was your first job, and what did you learn from it? I worked in a fabric store in high school. I have been a big seamstress since the time I was 10. What I learned was it exercised the creative side of me.
What is the best business advice you’ve ever received? When I was working at SC Johnson, the CEO at the time was Bill Perez, and I was running various brands for them as part of my marketing capacity. We had to do regular business updates, and I had screwed up. I had made a decision to launch something and it didn’t go well, and I had to go in and tell him.
He looked to me and said, ‘What did you learn? What would you do differently?’ I was prepared for that question, thankfully. He then said, ‘A well-thought out mistake I can tolerate. Just don’t make it again. If you ever place a bet, and it’s not well researched and it fails, then there’s no turning back.’
It was a great lesson of having to take risks in business, but they have to be well-educated and well-informed risks.
Do you use the BodyMedia sensor? Absolutely. I wear it 24/7 because it captures both your activity and your sleep efficiency, and as a CEO, a working mom and a wife, I don’t have much time to sleep. When I look at my data and the reality of it, it has caused me to try to focus on getting more sleep.
Do you have a favorite capability of the product? I like that it tracks sleep efficiency. I call that feature the Cracker Jack prize.
How to reach: BodyMedia Inc., (412) 288-9901 or www.bodymedia.com
