Reinventing a 25-Year-Old Company Through Category Design w/ Carl Daikeler, CEO of Beachbody

Category Thinkers

Aug 15 2023 • 59 mins

There's plenty of examples of founders, obsessed with a problem, applying category design to build their business and dominate their market.

But realistically, most people that first encounter category design are not in the founding stages of their company.

That's why talking to the CEO of a publicly traded company that decided to apply category design to reinvent his company after 25 years will give you the insights you may need to apply category thinking in your business.

Carl Daikeler is that CEO. His company, BODi, has revolutionized home fitness for the last 25 years with products like P90x and Insanity, but recently found themselves in a comparison trap when entering the digital landscape.

That's when he found the mental scaffolding of category design, and is now designing a completely new category around fitness called, health esteem.

In this episode you'll learn about:

  • What it looks like to have a CEO and company obsessed with a problem they need to solve
  • How BODi has leaned into their superconsumers in 3 different ways to get big results
  • Why Carl feels like the category design work is just beginning for his BODi and what the risks of poor implementation are


Your hosts today are John Rougeux and Pablo Gonzalez (connect with them on LinkedIn!)

If you want to stop just listening and join the conversation, join our community at CategoryThinkers.com