There are moments in life, extremely rare in my case, when you stop and look back. They coincide with special events or important milestones, when you take stock to understand where you’ve come from and where you’re going. Everyone does it, every parent, when they look back at the path taken by their children and family. Above all, entrepreneurs also do it because a company is like a big family and the products are a bit like children. I love this metaphor, not just because as a good Italian and someone from the Romagna region, the family is the driving force behind everything, the cradle of every vision and burst of energy, but because the metaphor of the changing family helps us understand how a company evolves, from an ideal and a dream to a brave start-up and then a sturdy multinational. This is why I’ve decided to look back, as we mark forty years of Technogym, at the path travelled by an idea, which was and is the dream of getting the world moving.

So, when and how does a dream begin? No one can say exactly. Of course, some people provide the fertile ground that allows dreams to take root. In my case it was curiosity, the desire to look further down the track, the hunger. In my book Born to Move, I remember that in August 2000 – when my brother Pierluigi and I were still visualising the project for what would become the Technogym Village – I felt the need to lay my eyes on what, at that point, was just a design. I had a crane lift me up into the sky because: “If you look down from above you get a better understanding of what’s there and it’s easier to see what’s not there yet, by looking at the whole forest rather than just one tree”. I’ve always been like that. But let’s start at the beginning.

When I graduated as an industrial designer I went straight to work for Roda, a leading mechanical company in fruit packaging, the main industry in Cesena in the very early 1980s. I got on well because I had the skills to manage the machines that used electronics to design the calibers and replace the designers of the previous generation. I could have been happy with that comfort zone, the permanent job, the quiet provincial life, plus I’d already found love with the girl who would later become my wife, Stefania. But I was buzzing, looking for the idea that would take me further. I tried with fashion, one of my greatest passions – I wrote to Armani because I wanted to become a designer. But it didn’t go anywhere. And then, in September 1982, I happened upon the world of fitness by chance. Italy was still galvanized by the football World Cup victory in Spain and sport was experiencing a golden age, but gyms are not football, and at that time they were basements with rudimentary equipment, shabby, and pretty unsafe. That was when I found the idea that opened the doors to my future; by combining my mechanical skills with a passion for sport and my love of design and beauty, I realized that there was a huge opportunity to design machines that were comfortable and convenient to use.

In the cold winter of 1983, in the garage back at home in Calisese near Cesena, with the help of Stefania and Pierluigi, the Hack Squat was born and that was when everything started. The product boasted plenty of innovative features that allowed the user to modify the load with brick weights, without anyone changing your weights on the bar, and above all to access fluid and safe movement thanks to the mechanism of the cam, which ensured that the weight was distributed throughout the exercise trajectory.

Today that first piece of equipment is now in the Innovation Gallery at Technogym Village and when I look at it I think back to those frantic months: to Stefania who modelled for the first promotional book; to the American magazines that introduced me to the products used in the States, by such legendary figures as Schwarzenegger, Lee Haney and Lou Ferrigno; to the new machines I designed and made in the evenings and at weekends, given I was still working at Roda; to the orders from gyms that were mounting up; to rushing to deliver; to the decision to found the company in October 1983 with my brother, which could have been called “Tecnogim” (sic), Italian style, but I wanted it in English, because I already sensed that we would become international, which was why we put in the H and the Y.

It was a pure start-up, but it was just the beginning. I left Roda. I felt lovestruck; I had a world to conquer, even if when I told people I was making fitness machines, they would say “What on earth are they?” In early 1984, Steve Jobs launched the Macintosh 128K, in Italy everyone was going crazy for the paninari and Moncler jackets, and at twenty-three I left the garage and rented my first warehouse in Gambettola, on the site where, with several extensions, Technogym would stay until 2012.

But making fitness machines could not be the be-all and end-all. A trip to the United States showed me that there were giants there who I had to compete with, meaning I had to innovate, to find a new path just for Technogym. Meanwhile we understood that, if we wanted to enhance the company’s prestige, we had to focus on athletic conditioning, because sport, as well as being a market to exploit, had the potential to define the brand. And what better place to start than football? Berlusconi, who had just bought AC Milan, wanted to invest in a large athletic conditioning center at Milanello. I got in touch with Sacchi, who is also from Romagna, and when he saw photos of the equipment he was convinced and asked me to kit out the AC Milan gym.

Three years passed and all the experiences, stimulation and drive to stand out sparked a new idea: wouldn’t it be great to bring a whole gym into people’s homes, with equipment that lets you do twenty-five exercises in one and a half square meters? The answer was yes and Unica was born, designed in a weekend full of creative intuition and incessant drawing. Unica was not just gym equipment but a piece of furniture and design that quickly became an object of desire in homes, glossy magazines and, over the years, a genuine icon of Italian design.

Technogym owes a great deal to Unica, because its success opened the doors to Formula 1 for us and introduced me to Ayrton Senna, who, as a devotee of Unica, agreed to be our ambassador in the 1987 championship. The mythical 80s came to an end with the Italia 90 World Cup, which chose Technogym as Official Supplier, with a gym-lounge that played host to champions and journalists, and became a benchmark for the event.

The advent of the 1990s saw the second turning point, after Unica. Evolution teaches us that every living organism adapts to changes in its environment, starting as it is before adapting or occupying every empty space it finds. A company is like a living organism; it adapts to changes in the world with its products. Electronics were beginning to change every aspect of life, so why not insert them into our products and give them an extra edge? In 1989, this brought about Race Line, which was based on the CPR patent (Constant Pulse Rate). It was an important innovation, for the brand and the product. For the brand, because alongside mechanical expertise we added electronics, which involved significant investment in technological and scientific research. For the product, because we added cardio to strength, with CPR technology that allowed for the modulation of training intensity based on the user’s heart rate to which the machine adapted; if the exertion was too high, the machine automatically reduced the training intensity, while if it was too low, it increased it. The Run Race treadmill would be the icon of this new line, becoming a cult product and marking Technogym’s first shift from bodybuilding to fitness, or rather it was no longer just about muscle toning but also cardio training, for more complete physical well-being.

A new path that was also a philosophy of life was opening up. While fitness focused on looking good and was legendary for Americans, I thought we should focus on something that would make us stand out as Italians that referred to the “mens sana in corpore sano” of the ancient Romans. We wanted to include the mental well-being angle alongside the physical, which needed a reference to fitness. It was with this in mind that we created the concept of “Wellness” in 1993 and Technogym became The Wellness Company. They told me it was hard to make people understand at a time when the whole market was moving towards fitness. But this was exactly where the paradox lies. When something is successful it’s already obsolete, because everyone will exploit it until there’s nothing left and only those who have already thought about something new can anticipate the future.

And this is what happened in 1996 when we opened Technogym USA in Seattle. It was right in the middle of the Clinton era, a decade of major economic growth in the States, where the giants of IT were preparing for the Internet revolution. Being in Seattle, Bill Gates’s city, meant breathing in this creative climate, being right in the laboratory that was preparing for the world’s tomorrow. Technogym’s biggest transformation began: moving from a mechanical company to an electronics and IT company. In 1996, we patented the Technogym System, the world’s first training management software that allowed users to automatically activate Technogym equipment and take their own personal training data with them thanks to a portable memory, the TGS Key (the first wearable device in the world). The basic concept was that wellness is not just about exercising at the gym, but a habit and a form of self-care that comes with us wherever we go, making training portable and allowing the machines to be custom designed according to the user’s data. This intuition was epoch-making: USB keys would become widespread only a few years later; broadband and smartphones didn’t exist yet. We laid the technological foundations for evolutions that almost twenty years later would lead to the MyWellness cloud and Technogym Ecosystem. But I’ll get to that.

Meanwhile 1996 and our arrival in America were good for us; alongside other manufacturers we were invited to kit out a facility for the athletes at the Atlanta Olympics. The opportunity to bring our expertise in athletic conditioning to the elite global level was under our noses, we could not pass up the chance. What’s more, also in 1996 we managed to become the fitness trainers for Schumacher and Ferrari, and we kitted out the Technogym Truck, a travelling gym that followed the drivers around to the various circuits; two years later, we created the “neck machine”, a product specially designed for drivers with the aim of training them to resist neck strains, a machine that would set the example for many other teams. In 1998, I met Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, and, with the Sydney 2000 games just around the corner, we offered to become the Official Supplier to the Olympics, creating all the training centers for the athletes. We won the international race because our proposal convinced them on every level, type of equipment, complete service, support and trainers. Since that fantastic year 2000, we became the Official Supplier for athletic conditioning to the Olympics; in fact, we were the ones who introduced this product sector to the games. We’re now about to become the Official Supplier to nine Olympic Games: Athens 2004, Turin 2006, Beijing 2008, London 2012, Rio 2016, Pyeongchang 2018 and Tokyo 2020, right up to Paris 2024… and we are already working on Milano-Cortina 2026! We have never failed to meet this challenge and the extremely high quality of product and service it requires.

In the 2000s, we continued to evolve the brand and the product. We adapted to changes in society and tastes, and anticipated trends. We had already been successful in the American market with the Selection strength line, which was the result of a synthesis between design, biomechanical functionality, ease of use and comfort that began to make the difference even in the United States. In 2002, with the new cardio line Excite, we built something into our product that was still missing: entertainment, TV. Once again, we were the first in the world to do so. The basic idea was that training doesn’t have to be a boring and tiring experience, but should stimulate all the senses. Sight with the TV screen, hearing with music through headphones linked to the machine, smell with special fragrances designed to stimulate training, touch with ergonomic materials, and taste with special compartments for your water bottle or a snack… training simply had to be a multisensory emotion. Shortly after that, the step from the TV screen built into the machine to an online connection came as no surprise. In 2007, when Google launched its universal search function, we launched Visioweb, the first interface to connect sports equipment to the web – you could train while scrolling through social media, watching videos on YouTube or listening to the news on CNN. The road to digital wellness was now open.

That takes us back to the start of my story, when, in August 2000, I was trying to visualize from high up on a crane how the Technogym Village would turn out. We opened it in 2012, with a ceremony that became engraved on all our memories, with guests such as the then president of the Italian republic Giorgio Napolitano and Bill Clinton, who has always believed in our vision of wellness. To usher in a new direction for Technogym, that same year we launched MyWellness, the first cloud-based platform in the fitness industry that turned the concept of “wellness on the go” into something real. Thanks to these new technologies, the intuition I had in 1996 finally became concrete; wellness was now digital and users could connect to their custom-designed training experience any time and anywhere: at the gym, at home, in a hotel, at work, from the doctors and outdoors. And they could do so from multiple contact points: Technogym products.

When I started out, it was already a big achievement to create a machine that protected the back from possible tears and was comfortable for bodybuilders. Now the new frontier is custom designing the training experience for every single user. And their needs can be very different, from fitness for staying in shape with effective and fun experiences, to sport for improving athletic performance, to health through prevention-oriented exercise programs, to post-injury recovery, or treating particular disorders.

To satisfy the infinite wellness needs of millions of users we’ve created Technogym Live, the world’s largest virtual library of on-demand training videos, accessible through product consoles and on Technogym App, our app based on artificial intelligence, designed to help people train with greater frequency and intensity, in a targeted way, to achieve better and quicker results: superior results faster. Today, we’re proud of the fact that Technogym has completely redefined the way people access sport, wellness and health, creating completely custom-designed digital solutions based on goals, passions and needs, as well as content that is relevant to each and every one of us. Thanks to the huge potential of artificial intelligence, we have created an ecosystem that is unique in the industry and includes connected fitness equipment, apps and on-demand video training content that can be accessed anywhere at any time. This whole interconnected world of equipment, trainers, doctors, gyms and users, combined with content created ad hoc for Technogym Live is the Technogym Ecosystem, a digital environment of 25 million users – out of a total of 55 million people who train with Technogym products – who experience wellness thanks to the dream a boy had forty years ago of getting the world moving.

Now that dream stands on its own two feet, not just because it is carried forward by thousands of team members all over the world, but because wellness for me is not a product but a legacy to leave to future generations. The greatest challenge for an entrepreneur is not to conquer the market but to transform people’s perception. The Technogym legacy is the Wellness Economy, because wellness is a huge economy. Science has long been telling us that movement and a healthy lifestyle help cure and prevent the killers of global society such as being sedentary, obesity and chronic diseases. Healthcare systems all over the world spend billions on tackling these problems, making the saving that a systematic wellness approach would have in terms of costs and human life incalculable. This is why both Technogym and the Wellness Foundation, the results of my own commitment, have been acting for years with important economic, political and scientific stakeholders to translate this vision into an agenda for change. The revolutionary reach of the Wellness Economy is on a par with that of the Green Economy. Is it too big a dream? I don’t think so, and, looking down from above, I know that this is the right direction. And in any case, it’s a dream that is good for everyone, which is why it’s worth giving it all we’ve got.

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