Wellhub is adding Reebok fitness classes to its suite of offerings, the corporate wellness platform announced on May 21.
With the partnership, Wellhub users in the US, UK, and Germany will have access to the Reebok Fitness App, which includes workout programs, run tracking, and mindfulness offerings.
Reebok is the latest brand to sign on with Wellhub, which counts more than 3.5 million employees in its network. The company announced a similar deal with Nike Studios in January, and also has partnerships with Apple Fitness+ and Strava.
Brands tap into corporate users. The corporate wellness market is attractive to brands like Reebok because it offers them a chance to tap into a new customer base, Wellhub CEO Cesar Carvalho told HR Brew.
More than 23,000 companies currently offer Wellhub to their employees, and when these workers engage with the Reebok Fitness App, they’ll help the company generate additional revenue, he explained. Wellhub pays Reebok for every user that joins its fitness app through the platform.
“Instead of building [their] own sales team, instead of developing an all-in corporate strategy to go after one client at a time, they already instantaneously have access to all of those clients,” Carvalho said.
The addition of a brand like Reebok helps strengthen Wellhub’s attractiveness to HR leaders and employees, Carvalho added. “Our mindset is that the more partners we have, the better the value proposition…it makes the product more attractive, and therefore companies communicate more, and more people sign up.”
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The state of workplace wellness. Physical health initiatives have long had a foothold in the workplace—weight-loss challenges, for example, were once seen as an effective way to engage employees while cutting down on health costs, but have since fallen out of favor among some in the HR community for alienating parts of the workforce. As of 2024, 22% of employers surveyed by SHRM offered an on-site fitness center or classes, while 21% offered an offsite membership or subsidies for classes.
In recent years, employers have embraced a more holistic vision of wellness, Carvalho noted, investing not only in fitness offerings, but also benefits intended to assist with sleep, meditation, and mental health. This shift is also reflected in Wellhub’s programming, and its decision to rebrand from Gympass last year.
Given the challenges of the current economic environment, total rewards leaders may be dealing with tighter budgets and under pressure to demonstrate the business case for their benefits. Wellhub considers high employee participation rates as a primary driver for some of the outcomes HR leaders may hope to see from its platform, such as reduced healthcare costs and fewer sick days, according to Carvalho.