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Need a wearable fit for an elite athlete? Whoop, there it is

Swimmer Ryan Lochte is among the athletes using  the Whoop team system.
Photo by: WHOOP
Among everyday people, Fitbit has carved out a sizable lead in the wearable category in recent years. But Harvard-trained entrepreneur Will Ahmed believes Fitbit left a void in the elite-athlete space that his company, Whoop, aims to fill.

Whoop is what the company calls a performance-optimization system that tracks analytics deeper than the basic calories-burned and steps-taken metrics used in mass-market offerings like Fitbit, which had a category-leading 24.5 percent global market share in the first quarter of 2016, according to a May report from International Data Corp.

Whoop Strap 2.0 is a newly launched $500 consumer version.
Boston-based Whoop, which charges between $100 and $200 a month per athlete for its premium Whoop Team Performance Optimization System, launched a $500 consumer option last week called Whoop Strap 2.0. The company works with numerous college and pro athletes, Olympians, military members and teams. Elite athletes known to use the Whoop team system include NBA stars LeBron James and Kyle Lowry as well as Olympic swimming gold medalists Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte.

The Whoop bracelet has five embedded sensors that, at a rate of 100 times a second, track heart rate, heart rate variability, ambient temperature, accelerometry and skin conductivity. Those five metrics contribute to three overarching themes that Whoop analyzes: strain, recovery and sleep.

The data, which is tracked on smartphone- or computer-accessible dashboards, shows the amount of strain a body is under, the amount of recovery the body needs before again encountering strain, and how one’s sleep patterns are affecting that equation. When they wake up, athletes get a score from 0 to 100 rating their recovery — high shows you’re more recovered, low shows you’re less. After encountering strain, the score updates later in the day about how much they need to recover.

“I think we’re trying to solve harder problems [than mass-market offerings],” said Ahmed, who refused to divulge Whoop’s financial figures outside of having raised nearly $25 million in venture capital. “We’re trying to solve the problem of overtraining, undertraining and what it takes to optimize performance. And when you set yourself out to really understand problems of that level, it requires a much deeper understanding of the body.”

KEY EXECUTIVES:
WILL AHMED: co-founder and CEO
JOHN CAPODILUPO: co-founder and CTO
AURELIAN NICOLAE: co-founder and product development engineer
 CARLOS FAMADAS: CFO and vice president of operations
 GARY McCOY: senior vice president of applied sports sciences
 JEFF GATTO: senior vice president of engineering and supply chain
 JACK SEITZ: vice president of software
 BRENT KOEPPEL: CFO and vice president of operations
 KRISTEN HOLMES-WINN: vice president of performance science and optimization
 ERIK VENDT: elite performance manager
The Whoop bracelet can be worn 24/7 because the company, knowing that it needed a device that could be kept on continually, developed a charger that slides on top of the head of the band. Another key differentiator of Whoop compared with other wearables, Ahmed said, is the tracking of heart rate variability, a tough-to-gauge metric that gives unique insight into a person’s central nervous system.

“The medical literature supports that heart rate variability can be a predictor of a number of really important things,” he said. “For former heart failure patients, it actually can be a predictor of mortality; it has all sorts of associations with recovery and sleep analysis; and it’s thought that heart rate variability is something that can help analyze concussions.”

Whoop’s research has shown that the system has brought about “meaningful behavior change” in areas including physical fitness, injury prevention and overall wellness by, among other things, encouraging more sleep, less alcohol consumption and balanced workouts. For example, Whoop claims that athletes who are on the platform for more than three months average 41 minutes more sleep per night and 79 percent lower alcohol consumption than before using the system.

“We’ve always called it a feet-forward system; it’s the first thing to tell you not to work out instead of, ‘Oh, you should hit your 12,000 steps,’ — it’s a completely different mindset,” said Antonio Bertone, a member of Whoop’s board of directors who is also chief marketing officer of the America’s Cup. “The overall concept of recovery is alien to most people out there training every day, so I feel like the data becomes very addictive very quickly and people really start to change their behaviors based off it.”

Beach volleyball player Lauren Sieckmann checks her data.
Photo by: WHOOP
Despite the growth on the team side, the company will have its work cut out for it on the consumer side as it tries to pry market share away from a group of players that, along with Fitbit, includes Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Jawbone and Garmin.

The consumer — or what Whoop is calling its “Prosumer” — Whoop Strap 2.0 product comes with the Whoop band and digital dashboard just like the team option, but is not replete with the access to data scientists and additional hardware that Whoop provides for its elite customers.

“The more granular fitness and health monitoring, there’s a market for that, but it’s not necessarily the size of a mass market,” said Ramon Llamas, research manager of International Data Corp.’s wearables team. “What you’re really unlocking here, especially in team sports is … wouldn’t it be good [as a coach] to know that if we’re practicing in the heat and humidity, even just one player is really taxing himself way too hard? Wouldn’t it be good to get him off the field and to a medic?”

Ahmed said Whoop is negotiating official partnerships with multiple athletes and properties in both stick-and-ball leagues and motorsports. What that may look like from an exclusivity standpoint remains to be seen.

The company, which gained notice last year when then-Cleveland Cavaliers guard Matthew Dellavedova reportedly was forced to stop wearing his Whoop bracelet because NBA rules don’t yet allow for wearables during games, has disclosed that it has individual clients across all the major U.S. leagues.

Swimmer Connor Jaeger
Photo by: WHOOP
Whoop’s competitors in the elite-athlete wearable space include StatsSports’ Viper product, while smartwatches like the Apple Watch also are catching on.

From a marketing perspective, the company mainly has benefited from earned media and word-of-mouth association with influencers such as well-known trainers Mike Mancias, who works with James, and Keenan Robinson, who works with Phelps.

The overall wearables category was worth $13.5 billion in 2015 and poised to grow this year, according to IDC. The number of units sold was projected to jump about 60 percent, from 70 million to upward of 115 million. Whoop’s introduction of a consumer option, analysts said, was only logical if it hopes to take on larger competitors.

“I think Whoop is an example of the next steps that we are starting to take now [in the wearable space,]” said Matt Powell, vice president and sports industry analyst of The NPD Group. “There’s not a huge number of elite athletes out there, so if you’re going to monetize this, you’ve got to sell it to the general public.”

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