In a small Alberta town, a diverse group of engineers and athletes is helping fuel explosive growth in fitness watches and wearables.
Just off the highway on the way to the Rockies is Garmin Canada's headquarters in Cochrane, where the company is developing technology that extracts biometric data from a person's wrist and feeds it into a watch.
Today there is a great demand for this. Sales of fitness trackers upSouth of the border, US Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled a vision of a future in which every American will use a wearable technology within the next year. four years.
Garmin makes everything from cycling computers to GPS devices for boats and planes, but has carved out a niche among athletes and runners with a wide catalog of ultra-specific sports watches and wearables.
Its fitness device revenue grew 30 percent in the most recent quarter, according to the company's latest data released this week. raised fitness segment revenue growth forecast for 2025. Stocks fell A little On Wednesday, as broader sales became a little noticeable, the outdoor advertising segment saw a year-over-year decline.
“Things are going very well,” said Ivan Feinseth, partner and director of research at Tigress Financial Partners in New York, who sees the current decline in stocks as a buying opportunity.
But growth in a particular sector means the need to maintain it. Company having built the company, which has had a presence in Canada in recent years, must continue to offer new versions of its devices while fending off trialsstaying ahead of competitors and maintaining customer interest, especially when many are cutting back on spending in a slowing economy.
Local roots
Garmin Canada started out as a different company: Dynastream Innovations. In 1998, four engineers in Cochrane's garage started a company with a basic device that could attach to a person's shoe and tell him how fast he was running and how far he had traveled.
Back then, according to Dynastream co-founder Jim Rooney, if someone needed this information, the only option was to get in the car and drive their running route while looking at the odometer.
The company then had to figure out how to transfer this data into watches and convince people that the watch was worth wearing.
“People stopped wearing watches; they used their phones for everything,” said Rooney, who is now managing director of Garmin Canada. “We had to give people a good reason to put them back on their wrist and use them.”
Over the years, Dynastream has manufactured products for other major players such as Suunto, Adidas and Timex, Rooney said. Garmin went from the company's biggest competitor to its largest customer, Rooney said, and eventually acquired Dynastream in 2006.
Dynastream became Garmin Canada in 2018. Since then, the company's Canadian headquarters has undergone a major expansion to a three-story building in Cochrane, which employs approximately 280 people.
Despite the company's growth, Rooney said they decided to keep their base near the mountains so that numerous product testers could easily head to the mountains to try out the latest running or cycling devices.
Constantly growing demand
Whether you're an ultramarathoner or a casual runner, interest in fitness devices is growing.
According to research company Circana, sales of fitness trackers in the United States since the beginning of the year got up This figure was 88 percent compared to last year and is expected to continue to rise.
The devices are also getting a boost from people using their workplace health spending accounts to buy them, a trend that analysts say is likely to continue.
“The health care industry is gradually moving from seeing the purpose of life as fighting people's illnesses to trying to promote health,” said David McGregor, an analyst at Longbow Research, in an interview earlier this month.
He said there is some speculation that the US is considering legislation that would allow people to pay for these hours without a doctor's note.
“If this happens, the total addressable market will expand dramatically.”
How long can you grow?
Like any consumer products company, Garmin's most pressing challenge is figuring out how to come up with new versions of its devices to keep customers coming back.
At Gord's Running Store, a longtime Calgary store, salesman Nigel Lochlan said they no longer carry Garmin products. While he believes the company currently leads as the most popular device among runners, he noted that there are many other options.
“We can sell people the same thing for $400 less,” said Lochlan, who himself wears a Polar brand running watch.
The company also doesn't make smart rings, a category that attracts a lot of users. height in the broader fitness wearables market these days.
Recent lawsuit from fitness tracking app Strava over alleged patent and contract infringement has become a PR issue. For a short period of time, this row caused a lot of noise on the Internet among runners and cyclists, although it was recently fallen.
Finally, another obstacle could be the state of the economy. The US and Canada are teetering on the brink of recession, although the company has so far managed to convince people to continue shelling out for their fitness watches.
“It's just unclear how long Garmin can remain sustainable,” Longbow Research's McGregor said.
But in a crowded market, Garmin is targeting true outdoor enthusiasts. While Apple, for example, has several different watches aimed at casual fitness enthusiasts and more serious runners, Garmin has dozens of different devices aimed at specific sports. niche data points and ultra-long battery life.
“If you are truly a running enthusiast, a cycling enthusiast [or]now, and horse loveryou favor Garmin,” said Feinseth of Tigress Financial Partners.
Rooney couldn't say what projects the company is pursuing in the near future, but said it is focusing on both form and function.
One possible area of growth? Animal kingdom.
Feinseth noted that horse owners regularly spend thousands of dollars on animal care, so the new equine health tracker costs relatively little at $840.
“Believe it or not, rodeo is becoming an increasingly popular spectator sport,” he said in an interview earlier this month.
“When you're riding a horse and trying to rope a cow or a calf, you need a Garmin tail monitor.”
