T-24-005 : Kaleen Canevari - Mechanical Engineer to Connected Fitness CEO
You're listening to TRADEOFS, a podcast about the trials and tribulations of designing and manufacturing hardware. Each month, we sit down with founders, engineers, and other hardware professionals to understand the trade offs inherent in building a business that makes physical products. I'm Nate Padgett, hardware community guy and founder of Informal, a freelance collective that helps companies build and ship world class hardware.
Chris:And I'm Chris Rill, startup founder, engineer, and fractional CTO, where I help hardware and software companies build and scale their products. TRADEOFFS captures the best of these conversations so you can learn about the skill sets needed to successfully bring physical products to market.
Nate:Today, we're excited to have Kaleen Canevari on the show. Kaleen is the founder and CEO of Flexia, a Techstars backed fitness hardware company and the maker of the world's first smart Pilates reformer. She's seen all sides of building a hardware startup and rode the wave of venture capital that came with the fit tech boom of the pandemic. So, Kaleen, thank you so much for joining. Really appreciate this.
Kaleen:Thanks for having me.
Nate:Could you maybe introduce yourself, your company, Flexia, and kinda where you all are at at this point?
Kaleen:Absolutely. My name is Kaleen. I'm the founder and CEO of Flexia. We make the world's first performance metrics for Pilates, and we deliver those metrics through a hardware product. We make a Pilates machine called a reformer, and then we have an online studio subscription where people take classes and see their feedback and progress over time.
Kaleen:My background's in mechanical engineering. I started in the automotive industry. I've been in medical devices, lots and lots of product development until I ended up at the world's biggest Pilates equipment maker as a design engineer. And that's really where I first found Pilates. It changed my life, and so I've started my Pilates teacher training journey at that point.
Kaleen:And that experience really culminated in founding Flexia in 2020.
Nate:Oh, man. And what a great time to start the company. Right? Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to start a business in 2020 and what that roller coaster was like for you?
Kaleen:It was like right in the middle when I started my very first presale, so summer of twenty twenty. On the one hand, it was fantastic. Peloton was taking off. Everybody was in the Connected Fitness craze. You know?
Kaleen:Peloton for boxing, Peloton for strength, Peloton for Pilates. Right? People were buying. On the other hand, supply chain was a disaster. And so figuring out how to manufacture not just one reformer, but the first 80 that I sold much less than the next 400 was another adventure.
Kaleen:Not just because of the supply chain crisis, but also because starting a hardware company and getting your first batch manufactured is hard in itself. You have no track record. You have often very little money. It is just manufacturers are taking a risk on you. So it was the wild wild west, it felt like.
Chris:And actually, for context, because I don't know a whole lot about Pilates, what exactly is Pilates? What is a
Kaleen:That's a great question. Pilates is resistance training. It's really great for building mobility, strength, works on core control. It was invented by a guy named Joseph Pilates, and it's pretty new. But the method uses devices like a reformer that use extension springs as resistance.
Kaleen:So a reformer has a frame that's about the size of a couch, and on the inside is a carriage with wheels. And there are extension springs that attach that carriage to the frame. And depending on how many springs you have attached, that's how much resistance you're working against. So you can push against the floor, you can push against the foot bar, you can pull against ropes to move the carriage. And sometimes more resistance is harder as you would expect, and sometimes more resistance is easier.
Kaleen:So it creates support in that movement. So Pilates is really scalable. My grandmother who has spinal stenosis can do the same workout as LeBron James. There'll be differences, but what we care about is, are they doing what the instructor asked? Not, hey.
Kaleen:Are you maxing out how much weight you're doing? And so the reformer itself, based on my experience in the studio and traveling the country as an equipment technician, I made a lot of small changes to the reformer to make it more space efficient and fit a wider range of bodies. And this particular reformer design holds a special place in my heart and in our customers' hearts because it's professional grade, but you can stand it on end so that you can store it in a regular eight foot ceiling. It's a little bit wider in the carriage so that your arms have space. NFL players love it because it fits them and their wives.
Kaleen:So a lot of people ask me, why didn't you just put the technology on a reformer that already exists? I wanted a better reformer.
Chris:And by someone, you mean venture capitalist.
Kaleen:How did you know, Chris?
Nate:Well, he's got the scars.
Chris:I've been in many conversations with venture capitalists.
Kaleen:Yes. Yes.
Chris:So back to manufacturing. When you were engaging with these manufacturers, were they ODMs, contract manufacturers? Talk through what that first manufacturer looked like for you.
Kaleen:Well, I built my very first prototype that I have never shown pictures of publicly in the summer of twenty twenty. Then I did a presale, proved demand, and then designed and built the first working prototype, which we used for our first photo shoot. I built that myself in my dad's wood shop, outsourced some of the aluminum parts, but basically did
Nate:all
Kaleen:the woodworking and everything. And if you look at it, you can't tell the difference between it and the current product, was super smooth. And then we started sourcing. At the time, freight overseas was so expensive. I had a really hard time finding overseas manufacturers in The US.
Kaleen:And so I was working with a firm that was helping basically connect me with contract manufacturers in The US, which was very attractive to me for a variety of reasons, but was also really interesting in the process to see how The US manufacturing system is and is not set up to support contract manufacturing versus places like China. And so this firm put us in touch with basically someone who was going to arrange the assembly and sourcing of all the parts. And we ran into problems right away. I mean, the very first price analysis they did was immediately out the window. The first time we got a quote from even one supplier and the price kept rising.
Kaleen:They were quoting that they could make this reformer for $1,200. And I was like, well, you know, I'm selling it for a couple grand at the time, and I really wanna make it in The US. We're saving on import duties, ocean like, there's so many advantages to doing that. And the next price jump was, like, up to 1,800. And I was like, well, there it goes.
Kaleen:And right at that point, we were having discussions about price, and the relationship was not very good. The manufacturer told me that my design was overengineered, that I didn't know what I was talking about, and I didn't need to be so stringent on what I was asking for. So I fired them. And
Nate:I know. I have so
Chris:many questions. Like, how did that conversation even come up? Because you were saying I want you to build this, and they're saying, I can't hit your price targets because of how you engineered it, so we wanna do it a different way.
Kaleen:You can't hit your price targets and your tolerances. And I wanna emphasize here that I've been designing Pilates equipment for eight years at that point for other people. This is not a complicated machine. There's no injection molding. There's no molds whatsoever required.
Kaleen:Fault mostly woodworking. And, yeah, they were unable to deliver what they promised and when pressured, put it back on me.
Chris:Oh, that's not uncommon. But what do
Nate:you think the issue was? Do you think they lost interest? They just didn't have the expertise, and so they really were out of their depths? What do you think the friction point was?
Kaleen:Well, I don't know how many women you've worked with in hardware, but this is something that I've run up against in my entire career, which is I'm not taking at face value that I know what I'm talking about.
Chris:How many times have you heard, oh, honey?
Kaleen:That's like in one ear and out the other, Chris. Like, at this point, like, what? I think a really good one is, oh, you're a really good woman engineer.
Chris:No. No. Come on.
Kaleen:Oh, all the time. All the time. I've never met a woman who's as good of an engineer as you. And that is one of those comments where you hear it and you're like, well, it's a compliment. This person means well, like, whatever.
Kaleen:But on the other side, it's like, well, now I'm not an engineer. I'm a woman engineer.
Nate:Yes. Very very telling about you being categorized.
Kaleen:Yes. Yeah. So working with all men on this product that they're trying to tell me they know more about than I do when I've been working on this for eight years already. So I hit that pushback everywhere. And let me tell you, it's not over a year.
Kaleen:Promise. The other part I think was the world was really crazy. Having someone who's used to sourcing a product with the resources of a big corporation behind them and the name that you can take seriously, that's a very different experience than going and trying to get people to take a risk to develop the processes to manufacture something for a smaller company that doesn't have a track record is sometimes a huge detractor for manufacturing partners because they wanna see an established business that they take a risk on. I think that had a huge part in what we experienced. I mean, I would have loved, and I still would love to make this product in Mexico.
Chris:Yeah.
Kaleen:But the way that I think the manufacturing world is set up is very different. China is really, really good at contract manufacturing. Mexico is very, very good if you set up your own manufacturing facility there, but less so the infrastructure to support contract manufacturing. And The US is a different story.
Chris:Sounds like things did not work well for you guys in The US. What happened?
Kaleen:We said, well, we can source all these parts and teach someone to put it together. And so the first 450 reformers
Nate:that
Kaleen:we made, we internally sourced all the components and had it assembled in Mhmm. At a warehouse in Indiana.
Chris:Oh, wow. So you're you're not manufacturing in The US. You're manufacturing in China or other places in in Asia?
Kaleen:The first batch of 400 something was here in The US. And it was really great for us to have that close relationship with all of our suppliers so we could learn really where the challenges were in making each of the parts. It was not cost effective at all. So we did start the process of finding and vetting an overseas supplier. And so now we work with someone whose facility is in China.
Kaleen:And, honestly, the quality is 10 times better, and the unit economics make a ton of sense.
Chris:Did you have to change your tolerances or No. The design at all to meet The US manufacturing standards?
Kaleen:I had to change some things based on what dies people had already. So say, like, a curved post, I wanted to be a nine inch radius, and they had a seven inch radius die to bend it around. Well, they were like, well, you could pay and buy a new die, or we could adjust this. But we didn't adjust the tolerances, and many of our manufacturers couldn't meet them even though they said they did. So we had a lot of quality problems in the beginning.
Kaleen:But we basically went to the next supplier and we're like, what about these tolerances? And they're like, sure. I mean, it's we're not talking like laser. This is, you know, tenths and maybe hundreds, 500. It's not that much.
Kaleen:So it was a bizarre experience. And I'm sure that my experience is probably not uncommon, but it's also probably not universal for getting a hardware product off the ground in The US or anywhere.
Chris:I feel like every manufacturing effort has problems. It's just they're different for every manufacturer for every product, but you are guaranteed to have problems. Oh, yeah. So just expect that it's going to be a journey.
Kaleen:Yes.
Nate:Well but I I think, Kaleen, you hit on, you know, why China's been able to become so dominant. Right? Like, there's just this this willingness to kinda work with the companies that you don't really get in The US. Right? How, like, un uncollaborative American manufacturers can be unless you're a certain size.
Nate:You know?
Kaleen:That's a good way to put it, and it I think it brings the attention to how important the communication is between the company and the manufacturer. And and when I talk to other early stage startups who have hardware, you know, immediately, the issues are all about communication and, honestly, transparency. You know? Are you delivering what you say you're delivering? And do you know as a founder, as a company, what you're asking for is actually what you want?
Kaleen:And from the very beginning, I'm really proud of how we, as a company, have said, well, this is what we think it should be, and then listen to our customers and see how things behave in the field and make adjustments based on that. Like, look, there's one design decision I made early on that I reversed because of a customer. It had to do with whether the headrest was adjustable on some reformers. Most professional reformers, the headrest can tip up at an angle to give your head a little bit of support. And I made mine nonadjustable in the beginning because most of the people I taught never really messed with it.
Kaleen:And I think as an instructor, there are better ways to support your head. Immediately, customers reached out and said, why isn't your headrest adjustable? And so we never launched with a fixed headrest because people were telling me my hypothesis was wrong. People wanted it. So we listened.
Chris:Did it ever cross your mind to use that as an accessory? So make the headrest adjustable and just sell an additional headrest that was Yes. More adaptable?
Kaleen:I have so many product ideas. In Pilates, I mean, there's just props and add ons and, like, everything galore. But as a founder and as a business person, focus is key. The size of our team and the resources we have, we have to focus on the things that we have and make the hard decision to say, well, the next infusion of capital, we can invest in this place and this place because distraction is a real thing. It's a real thing.
Nate:Oh, yeah. Shiny object syndrome.
Chris:Have you always had that discipline?
Kaleen:No. In this business, yes. In life, no. Absolutely not.
Chris:So so what helped inform the discipline and focus? Because I feel like it's rare for founders, especially CEO founders, who have the vision and they wanna do everything. And here you are understanding that trade off, which is less is more.
Kaleen:I think there are a couple reasons. The first one is market related. So the Pilates industry caters to Pilates instructors who then cater to their clients. So if you're a Pilates end user but not a teacher, there is no help. It is overwhelming.
Kaleen:Am I allowed to to cuss on this with this? Because it is like
Nate:Cuss away.
Chris:Fuck yeah.
Kaleen:Because it is overwhelming to try and figure out what reformer is right for you, what accessories you want, what exercises you should do. And all of the companies selling things are aimed at instructors who have at least five hundred hours of training. And I wanted to simplify things. I wanted to go after the end user, support them in their Pilates journey, and that meant making the process of deciding what to buy and knowing how to use it much, much simpler. That was a part of what I wanted to change about the Pilates product world.
Kaleen:The other part was it was so much work to keep selling the first thing that I learned really quickly how important marketing is and how important understanding your finances are. And those Yeah. Two things together, it's pretty obvious we can't afford to split focus. Quality would suffer. Sales might suffer, and that's the early stage startup, I think.
Kaleen:I love ideas, and most of my advisers love contributing ideas. But coming up with ideas is the easy part.
Nate:Yeah. You know, I always like to say ideas are like assholes. Everybody's got them. You know? They're not all they're not all good.
Kaleen:You know? So true.
Chris:Yeah.
Nate:Yeah. I totally get the discipline to not chase the next shiny object, but to Chris' question of, like, why didn't why not both or think of an accessory? Do you plan to create something like that if there's bandwidth or or budget?
Kaleen:There are probably five products designed in CAD already, you know, or, like, we have some that we have prototypes of. And then it's a matter of, well, what's the marketing strategy gonna be? And I always ask, if you say yes to this, what are you then saying no to? And
Nate:Yeah. Great question.
Kaleen:And that's counterintuitive to a lot of junior level employees, much less people who want to work and to please you and just say yes to everything. And those conversations with my team are the most important ones in terms of understanding what it will take to actually support the launch of the product on day one. Right. There's some experimentation investment required to get to a point where it's repeatable. Figuring out how it integrates into the knowledge base so that people have the technical support that they need, figuring out where the marketing assets go and the content.
Kaleen:We film classes. How are we gonna work these accessories into our education part of our product? All of that stuff obviously takes time, but we'll get there.
Nate:I have no doubt you're gonna get there. Can you talk a little bit about team composition? Like, product marketing, like, ops that go with delivering and warehousing and supporting that product, and then you're also teaching classes. Like, that is so much for a lean team. You know?
Nate:Kinda how are you balancing it all?
Kaleen:Yeah. It's changed. You know, I was by myself for the first year, then I brought on two cofounders, a CTO, someone for marketing and content, and then eventually a supply chain lead. But the company doesn't look that way now. So at the height of our team size, we had 10 people.
Kaleen:We had a mechanical engineer. Main job was a lot of documentation and problem solving, sourcing, and setting up a new manufacturer, and then learning what needs to be changed so that the manufacturer has clearer instructions, or does their supplier have a deviation they wanna request? Is that actually okay with us or not? Right? And worked with our ops person.
Kaleen:So we had a head of operations who, in the beginning, was managing all the parts in the assembly here in The US and then managing the onboarding and setup of our basically all in one partner in China. We no longer have that role. Things are pretty steady state in our current form. So now we're at six. And I like that size because I get to work really closely with everybody.
Kaleen:But we definitely feel on the other side of things like, well, we have to be even more disciplined about what we can take on. At the moment, we have a contract manufacturer, so they handle the sourcing and assembly. And we have a warehouse on the East Coast. So they go by boat to a warehouse in the East Coast who handles fulfillment and one off warranty support stuff. I'm heavily involved in content, and I run marketing and sales.
Kaleen:And I work with our CTO on our online studio software product. We have a CFO. We have two marketing folks, one who does kind of growth marketing and one who does inside sales and copywriting. And then
Nate:Is growth primarily ads driven, or is it
Kaleen:Ads, email, technical stuff on the website, all the integrations. Performance. And then customer support.
Nate:Well, and this also is relevant to something I wanted to revisit about 2020. Like, it was so cheap to run ads in 2020. I'm wondering if you guys benefited from that.
Kaleen:Yeah. We didn't get serious about running ads until after the privacy settings really kicked in. So if you think about our progress in the venture world, we really hit the tail end of the Connected Fitness rush Mhmm. Which you could think about as a sucky thing because we don't have, you know, shit tons of money coming out of our ears, but also a good thing because we didn't raise that insane valuations that have now crashed.
Chris:Yeah. I imagine your stake in the business would be dramatically different had you raised those big rounds and not been able to live up to those valuations.
Kaleen:I mean, talking about the VC world and raising is like a whole another topic, and I really think that there are days where I go, god, I wish I had a cushion or I had started a year earlier or whatever. And then there are other days where I go, we've had to learn so much discipline. Our business is really intelligently run now. And the the things that we have learned and been able to iterate on and hone, we never would have figured that stuff out if we weren't so concerned with margin and efficiency, and we were just concerned about top line growth.
Chris:Knowing what you know now, you just go through Techstars. You're raising money. What would you have told yourself back then, like, after that check hits the bank account? What have been the one thing you you would have said to yourself, clearly informed by some decisions that you've made?
Kaleen:We spent too much money on content and not just money, but focus. So it took away from some other activities that were really important, and we were slow out of the blocks. We didn't have a realistic goal and the right people in the growth marketing seat. And that has been the biggest struggle is I know how important marketing is. And I've had a lot of people come in and do that role, and it generally goes better when I'm the one leading that department.
Kaleen:I've not ever been able to step away. And I'm not saying that that's universal or how it will always be. The hardware people I talk to, the technical founders are like, I hate selling. I wanna get someone else to do that. And the reality is that is the most important aspect of taking my idea from nothing to something was the selling of it.
Chris:Can why do you think that you haven't been able to find someone to live up your expectations, I guess, to put it that way?
Nate:The tolerances. The tolerances were just too I know.
Kaleen:Part of it is I'm a first time founder. This is my first time leading a team in many cases, like, trying to figure out what the characteristics are of that person and what actually I want them to do and define it and communicate it, that's hard. And it's something that wasn't until, you know, x amount of time into the relationship that it was like, well, we're not getting these results or, you know, your focus is here, but I really need focus here. And how is that really in service of the business goals and of me and raising money? And it's learn by learn by trial.
Nate:Totally. It's essential at a certain stage for the founder to be the one that is driving the growth and the sales because quite frankly, who else is gonna care as much as you do? Right? Like, the incentives are perfectly aligned for you to be the one that cares the most. Plus, like, you wouldn't have started this business if you didn't have some insight that, like, frankly, it takes a founder their entire lifetime to fully convey that to others.
Chris:Yeah. I've it's one of the
Nate:things I've struggled with a lot too. For the longest time with informal, I was like, I'm gonna find someone else to do the sales. I'm gonna find someone else to do the marketing. But, you know, nobody's gonna be able to give as good a pitch as you.
Kaleen:Yep. And I can't say I have done it perfectly or always made the right decision, but I I can say I have learned so much by getting it wrong. Then this is something that I think the people who can't handle it in startups are the ones who want to be perfect. And
Nate:They can't let go.
Kaleen:I get stuff wrong every single day, but I never, I don't think, get the same thing wrong twice. And so that gross part of it, it's sexy to grow, but no one realizes how vulnerable it is to grow.
Chris:I I would say in defense of these hired contributors, they don't necessarily have the same authority to make mistakes and take risks. Right? So I imagine they're playing it safe because their job is on the line. Right? And you, as the founder, have the unique ability to to take those risks.
Chris:And in a lot of cases, when you make those mistakes, you're not necessarily fired. So founders have this unique authority to take these big swings. And I guess it's really about the the team culture to give those individuals that space to make those mistakes. I don't know. I I just wanted to, you know
Kaleen:Agitate?
Chris:Throw out that it's yeah. I I the reason I say that, I've seen it happen all the time. It's like, why isn't this person doing this? And I'm like, well, clearly, what you're asking right now is something that's really risky. Like, have you guys had the conversation about if this goes wrong?
Chris:Because Mhmm. You like, if this goes wrong, do they still have their job? And it's like, I never thought about it that way. And I'm like, well, you're a founder. Like, these are the things that I would do as a founder.
Chris:Like, get out of my way. Let's just go let's go make some mistakes.
Nate:Yeah. And they're afraid afraid to make mistakes.
Kaleen:Well, I think this is, you know, broader workplace conversation about communication, and it's really hard for really technical people as well as other people, but to be vulnerable. And and I totally understand it because a lot of people I work with hate it or don't like that I'm honest or vulnerable with them because it makes me look like I don't know what I'm doing. And people don't wanna look like they don't know what they're doing. And the best people on my team that have been here the longest are the ones who can have those honest conversations with me about risk versus payout, and we can understand each other. The ones that struggle at Flexia are the ones where the ego comes into play, and we can't have an honest conversation about what happened and taking responsibility for the learning.
Kaleen:I'm not gonna fire someone because they didn't meet their goal. I might fire someone because they weren't honest or they're delusional about what I want versus what they want, But my goal is that we can have those conversations because I want my team to learn. I know what it's like to learn, and I know that I can't do it all myself.
Nate:Yeah. But how else are you gonna be able to take a vacation? You know? Like, it's so important. I
Kaleen:take vacations, and what happens is you plan ahead. But it works. It works. But there was probably a year period where I didn't, and things got better. Yeah.
Kaleen:Once I did. Once I ripped the Band Aid off and was like, I'm gonna unplug for a week.
Nate:Did you read Build, Tony Fadell's book about building Nest and building hardware startups? No. He has, like, a whole chapter about taking vacation and, like, actually taking a vacation and just how you gotta you gotta prioritize that. I gotta be better about it.
Kaleen:Yeah. Do you check your phone when you're on vacation?
Nate:Constantly. Yeah. It's really bad. I I've never been one of those people who would delete my email because it makes me too anxious. Like, I would be a nervous wreck the whole time.
Kaleen:What about you, Chris?
Chris:I'm always connected. Now that I mean, now that my phone has satellite coverage, I'm good wherever. I bring Starlink with me too sometimes if I'm off the
Nate:He's got really redundant connectivity just in case.
Chris:Yeah. Man. But, no, I I'm I think I I I would say I've had a really hard time stepping away. Like, the first vacation I ever took was actually my honeymoon. I'm in, like, French Polynesia.
Chris:I was getting, like, Internet, like, every couple days to check-in on the team. And the reason I remember this so clearly, because obviously, a connected camera product, security and privacy is, like, top of mind. Well, during my honeymoon, Edward Snowden drops the bombshell about basically privacy and security as we understand it. So I was probably way more paranoid back then, but I thought my company was over. Like, I'm like, who's gonna put a camera in their house when, you know, it's just getting gobbled up into a database somewhere?
Chris:And so I spent, like, the next couple days, like, designing out. Like like, how would I do this end to end encryption? Like, well ahead of its time. And I get back, and I'm like, guys, I solved it. Like, company's fine, and everyone's looking me like, this guy's freaking crazy.
Chris:Like, what do you mean? The world hasn't stopped. Like, what are you talking about? We're not going to ship this. What what you want?
Chris:If grandma loses their password, the this is completely unrecoverable. And so I was like, alright. Well, if if, you know, it when when customers start asking for it, then maybe. And even to this day,
Nate:no one cares. And you were still married when you got back from your honeymoon after doing that?
Chris:Yeah. Yeah. My wife's amazing.
Nate:There you go. Props to her. She should be on this podcast. TRADEOFFS. TRADEOFFS for being married to Chris.
Chris:I'm gonna go ask my wife. Like, did I make a mistake? Yeah. Yeah. So I don't go on vacation that often.
Chris:No.
Nate:I was gonna say since we're taking a trip down memory lane, but, Kaylee, you were talking a little bit about how you're an engineer. You know, before this, you were you were working on Pilates machines. Like, how'd you get started with hardware? Kinda what brought you into this industry in the first place? Because we're all bunch of weirdos for doing what we do.
Kaleen:My dad has been an engineer forever, not by degree, but he's a woodworker, an artist, and he used to do interiors for private jets, which have to meet FAA requirements.
Chris:Who's the cool coolest client you
Kaleen:know of? I don't know any names, but one of the biggest jobs he ever did was a complete remodel of an albatross, which is a big plane that can land on water or on the runway. And the whole purpose of that remodel was to accompany someone around the world who was gonna recreate Emilia Earhart's path.
Nate:That is super cool, though.
Chris:Yeah. Love that.
Kaleen:He was always working on stuff. You know, my he also had the more flexible schedule, so he would do my hair in the morning before school and pick me up afterwards. And, it's a really, really great role model. I was in four h, so not only did I raise cheap for market, we did aerospace and rocketry in our at our house. My dad was the leader, so I often built things with him.
Kaleen:And I loved math a lot. And in high school, I had to convince my counselor to let me take mechanical drafting and AutoCAD classes because those were in the shop section of the school, and honor students didn't go there. But I was, like, one of the only women in the class, and it was the coolest part of my high school. And then I went to study mechanical engineering. So I went to a small school in Michigan that used to be associated with GM, called Kettering, and I went there because they have a co op program.
Kaleen:So I did a semester crunched into three months, and then I'd go work out at a paid internship for three months. And then I'd go back to school for three months, and then I'd go work at a paid internship. And that was transformative. I mean, I'm a California girl. I can't say that the Midwest is like a place that I really felt at home at home.
Kaleen:But to be in to work in the automotive industry where I got to get my hands dirty. And I and I'll be honest, like, if I didn't have internships, I don't think I would have finished an engineering degree. I do not care about thermodynamics. I do not care about many of the high level courses that I took. And if I hadn't been working and seeing my future was not crunching numbers in the way that we were in classes, I don't think I would have pushed through it because I would have been like, who wants to do that?
Kaleen:I don't wanna do that. And at the end of the day, I job hopped from a small nonprofit that makes wheelchairs for third world countries. I dabbled in grad school. I went I was actually in a PhD program for bioengineering for nine months.
Nate:What was the nonprofit that made the wheelchairs?
Kaleen:Whirlwind Wheelchair. Okay. Just an amazing story and and mission and company. The founder of that organization is just he's amazing. There's so many things that you'll appreciate this.
Kaleen:Wheelchairs are a big deal outside The US because it's often really hard to navigate them on imperfect streets.
Nate:Mhmm. Mhmm.
Kaleen:They're not accessible. They have grates. They have rocks. They have cobblestone. So how do you design a wheelchair that can navigate that terrain?
Kaleen:Then how do you make that wheelchair easy to fix? So take all the parts that you have on Honda motorcycles, which are the most widespread mechanical thing in the world. If you have a Honda motorcycle shop, you can fix this wheelchair if it breaks.
Nate:So cool.
Kaleen:And then how you make it look good because how you look in the wheelchair is a big deal about how you navigate your community. So it was a really, really cool organization.
Nate:Very cool.
Kaleen:Yeah. It
Nate:sounds like an amazing experience for you.
Kaleen:Yeah. But I think all the experiences, I'd never stayed anywhere probably more than a year and a half. I loved the learning and the progressing, and then I would get tired of the bureaucracy, or I'd get tired of not understanding the reasons why we were doing certain things that I didn't agree with. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be close to the customer, you know, have creative control.
Kaleen:I wanted all these things that, you know, you you look at it and you're like, oh, that's a pipe dream. But I get it as the CEO of a startup. Like, I can get my hands dirty as much or as little as I want, and the I love that.
Nate:So did your decision to form your own company come out of that, you know, that that realization that you wanted to be able to do more and and be more hands on, or was it because you found a product or problem that spoke to you enough that you were like, oh, yeah. I could make a business out of this.
Kaleen:My last full time job was the Pilates equipment manufacturer, And I saw customers call in and be like, I need help with this. And the company would be like, you have to do it yourself. Sorry. Like, we don't have anybody we can refer you to. And I also saw how unsupported Pilates studio owners were.
Kaleen:So studio owners tend to be women. They tend to not have a technical background. And at a hardware company, that particular population can be really gaslit into thinking they're just dumb, and it's not actually a problem with the product. And I didn't like seeing that. And so I left in 2015.
Kaleen:I spent the next five years running my own small business, was a equipment technician for Pilates. So I go into homes and gyms and studios and do installation maintenance repairs. I did the world's first technician training program to teach other people how to work on Pilates equipment. And I I did that while also teaching part time in a local studio. And I saw a lot of problems in the Pilates world when I was having a conversation with my cofounder, who's our CTO, on my honeymoon, actually.
Chris:Oh, look at this. But
Kaleen:and I was laying out these steps of, like, I have this unique ability. I can gather information, what people want, and how long their springs are used. And all of these, Basically, I wanted to gather all this information to prove what I thought I wanted to build was right. And he said, well, do you think gathering all this information is going to change what you believe you need to build? And I said, no.
Kaleen:And he said, well, you should just start. And when you do, I want you to hire me. So that was a different kind of leap.
Chris:Did you marry your cofounder, or did you take a break from your honeymoon
Kaleen:to have that conversation? Great question. I did not marry my cofounder. My husband and I are friends with my cofounder from years before.
Chris:Oh god.
Kaleen:We did a six month road trip honeymoon across the country and stopped to see a bunch of our friends along the way.
Chris:Oh, awesome.
Kaleen:He was one of them. That's awesome. So yes. Yeah. So that's how Flexia came to be.
Kaleen:But, yeah, I would say that Pilates is an industry that has not been innovated on since it was invented. You scroll through your activity log on your phone, and you can see exactly when you PR'd on your mile split or how you PR'd on your back squat, like your output for your spin class. But with Pilates, all you can see is I did Pilates for fifty five minutes. And I refuse to believe that that is the future of Pilates. Pilates doesn't work with traditional fitness metrics, but there are metrics that work with it.
Kaleen:And I think the industry needs innovation, and I think it needs brilliant business minds from other industries.
Nate:Can you talk about the software platform and how you're addressing the metrics around Pilates, you know, needing to catch up?
Kaleen:Yeah. So I mentioned that resistance is provided by Extension Springs. Right? You actually don't know how much weight you're moving, but it means in class, you literally leave with no data. And it's really hard to know for some exercises, how do I change this to make it easier or harder?
Kaleen:And so I wanted to think about, okay, how do we think about the philosophy of Pilates from a sensor and data perspective? So what does a teacher look for interacting with a client in a session? Are you moving in the way that I asked you to, and do you have the right equipment settings? So what we do is we put sensors on the moving part of the machine. So we measure load, distance, and speed.
Kaleen:And for every exercise that we teach on the platform, we have an ideal output for those values. Basically, our Pilates proprietary metrics, control and consistency. So control is if you're doing a bicep curl, say. Are you flinging your arms, or are you moving at a steady pace with constant tension? If I've asked you to hold the carriage still, how much is it wobbling?
Kaleen:Then there's consistency, self explanatory. Is rep eight the same as rep one? And then we show a speedometer. Are you moving at the speed that the instructor is asking you to? All of those things get measured throughout the class.
Kaleen:And at the end of class, we give you a movement quality score or MQS, and that's scored out of 100. So the closer you are to 100, the better you did that class. We say we want you to be within fifty and eighty. We call that the zone of progress because we want it to be still challenging that your body has to adapt, but also not so challenging that you can't show any mastery of it. And so your score is basically how we judge whether you should go up a level or what class you should take next.
Kaleen:And I really like this I really like this concept because I mentioned LeBron James and my grandmother, their MQSs, they might have different settings, but they should be able to have the same MQS. That to me is the really cool thing about leveling the playing field and keeping people motivated on their fitness journey and progressing rather than just saying you should be able to do a 200 pound deadlift.
Chris:It it sounds like you've brought power zone training from spin class to Pilates.
Kaleen:Yes. Yeah. That's you're
Chris:And I hope you have some intellectual property patents filed on it because it does sound
Kaleen:Yes. Yeah. So that's what we're doing now. And, you know, I have a a small part of me, which is not related at all to business or making money. Pilates has been studied, but it's really hard to study scientifically because there's no metrics.
Kaleen:And so how can we study it in our research capacity to prove where its strengths are in a rehab setting, in a fitness setting, the way that you can if you track a progressive loading program in a weight room? And so I think having data in the Pilates space will transform what we learn about the benefits of Pilates and take it beyond. So I'm excited for that in the future.
Nate:That's super, super exciting. Are you going out and trying to evangelize this idea of, like, better data, more science, more efficacy around Pilates? And is that something that's resonating with the industry?
Kaleen:Studying Pilates is trendy in the Pilates world, but that is a very small percentage of the Pilates industry. We have people who come to us and want to put the data into their specific environment to to help this. So pro sports teams, great example. Most pro sports teams have at least one reformer in their gyms. It's the only piece of equipment that has no data associated with it.
Kaleen:It's very difficult to integrate it into their highly measurable training environments. Great candidate for putting it in there. But the user interface and the level of data analysis for that group is very different than a consumer group. And so our business model, the way we make money is consumer based. And so it's a choice of focus that takes away from what we're already doing.
Kaleen:Like, bringing in another group of customers is not feasible without investment of some kind. So now I gotta go sell that.
Nate:Right. Well, is that the is that the goal, professional sports organizations?
Kaleen:The near term, I would like to sell into Pilates studios.
Chris:Right.
Kaleen:So Chris mentioned it. Put our sensor kit on any reformer you want. That way when someone goes in to work out with their favorite instructor, they leave with a report card. And now the next time they show up to class, their instructor doesn't have to remember what they did last time and how well they did it. Or if they have a different instructor, there's context there.
Kaleen:So I think there's a huge opportunity in that space to change it from the fitness perspective, and that's where I am really excited about going.
Nate:My wife would love that.
Chris:What sensors make up the MQS score? Is it mostly an accelerometer, or are there some, like, load sensors?
Kaleen:So the most important sensors are distance and load, and acceleration contributes and helps to check what we're measuring. The distance sensor is a laser. It bounces off the wood.
Chris:The the nerd in me is is just thinking, like, is there a way that you can convert someone's cell phone into their Flexia sensor? In which case, it kinda goes with them. Because I'm just thinking, like, I I love thinking about other business, like, other problems people have, and I'm just trying to solve them. You could sell a platform to a Pilates studio, and now you're white labeling your technology, so they own the customer. But you both own the customer, or you could sell your own platform to them, and now you can, you know, sell your reformer to them directly and cut the studio out entirely.
Chris:But, you know, that's rather sinister. But, anyway, there's lots of opportunity there if you can find a really inexpensive, call it low tech way to get your technology into the studio.
Kaleen:Yeah. I mean, it's pretty low cost, our sensor kit, but that's getting into things I don't really wanna share publicly.
Chris:It's it's high value. High value.
Kaleen:It's high value. You install it once, and you're done. It's one of the easiest installs anybody will ever make to an accessory on their reformer, and it's not hard to train. We use a third party for in home assembly, and we have a set of instructions and videos that live with that company. And then whenever someone goes out to install it, that person learns how to do it just for that job because we don't have 20,000 units sold a year like some of these bigger companies.
Nate:Let let's let's dig in
Chris:on this a little bit. So I'm trying to break down for folks who might be shipping something large. You know? What are the misconceptions about, you know, shipping a large home appliance direct to consumer that are counter to kind of the general wisdom out there?
Kaleen:It is a lot of work to just make things run the way they should run from a logistics standpoint. A business can receive a freight shipment of multiple formers that take multiple people to move pretty easily. A home is much harder to receive a couch sized box that has no handles. Generally, people unpack it on the street can then carry it in. And I wanted to change that.
Kaleen:I wanted it to be so that only one person had the hand of that. That means our reformer ships in five boxes. We first shipped via freight, and everything in our four of our five boxes fit on a pallet. The fifth one, really long. And so we went through the process of making a custom pallet.
Kaleen:With freight shipments, the delivery options are slightly different. So for a lot of consumer people don't really wanna be home to receive it. Freight companies are notoriously not a great customer experience, and they're not just gonna drop it at your front door. And it can get expensive. We had problems with the boxes getting separated with freight.
Kaleen:That was a problem because they tracked it via pallet. And so if one box got separated at a depot, they would lose it forever. So we actually ship UPS grounds now, which was my original intent. So every box has its own tracking number. They usually come altogether, but if not, within a few days.
Kaleen:And one person can generally handle bringing them in and navigating around architecture. Now we have completely different considerations in the packaging, though. So when everything is palletized, it's much less likely that things get tossed on the ground. And when you have everything individually handled, it's much more likely that they manhandle it like any other package. And so then you want someone who's gonna be managing your claims because shipping damage is gonna happen.
Kaleen:And with our product, it's quite a high priced product. It's a big cash outlay to have inventory on hand, and so we only have so many on hand. And it's so expensive to not just ship it.
Chris:What was the reasoning for going with freight?
Kaleen:Cost. We weren't getting UPS discounts. And most hardware founders know if you are working with a three PL, they generally have a corporate discount or, you know, 50%, 60% discount on UPS. Well, because we had our own warehouse for those first units that we were teaching people how to assemble, we didn't have that account yet. So it actually was not cost effective to ship UPS.
Chris:Right. What other options do folks have in trying to get large products to the home that you ruled out?
Kaleen:You can ship it all assembled and crate it, build a custom crate for it. And the trade off there is cost. Right? You want higher assurance that it gets there in one piece and less work for the customer to assemble it, but it's gonna cost more to build a custom crate.
Chris:Yeah. I don't like that option either.
Kaleen:But it all comes back to to areas of coverage as well.
Nate:Yes.
Kaleen:UPS generally gets to every customer. But even with freight, sometimes we would have to use a different freight carrier to go to some of their more remote delivery addresses.
Nate:Oh, yeah. So Been there.
Kaleen:A lot of times people buy it because they don't wanna go to a studio because they're too far away, so that means they live in the boonies. So now you have to consider what delivery options are available to them.
Nate:Right. We we've talked a little bit about investors and funding in general. I'd love to kinda drill down a little bit into the role that venture capital I guess investors in general have played for you and Flexia. And if you have any advice for founders that are considering whether they should raise, how to go about that, what what would that be?
Kaleen:Yeah. I think for any startup, but for hardware especially, leverage your superpower is first and foremost. I consider myself a technical founder even though I'm not a software engineer. I am not a salesperson. I wanna build stuff.
Kaleen:And so in the very beginning, I was in my local startup community talking with investors about my idea, and everybody said, well, prove it to me. How do you know there's demand for this? So I was like, fine. If you're not gonna invest, I'll prove it to you. And then I went out and I did, like, a self hosted Kickstarter.
Kaleen:Got some drawings made off of Upwork, like sketches, used some of my industry contacts, ran $500 worth of ads, and generated a $140,000 in revenue from a three week period. And that didn't really help that segment of investors. But
Chris:I was going to say what other adventure did they send you on? Yeah. I wrote it.
Kaleen:Well, the next question was, well, where's your prototype? Like, what's the actual product? Well, at that point, I had money, and my skills were I can build in CAD, make drawings, and then build it myself. And that's a process that was my superpower for getting this off the ground. Right?
Kaleen:If you're a nontechnical founder, you're looking at tens or hundreds, or I know some companies that have spent millions of dollars to develop their very first prototype. And my shortcut was my skill, and then I had to focus really hard on filling in all my gaps. That story, though, was what got me an interview with Techstars Sports. And my fundraising journey really didn't start until Techstars. So all of this time, was working by myself.
Kaleen:I was living at home with my parents and my husband building this business. And the interview process for Techstars was a few months long from when I first had office hours with them till we got in, and they gave me three things to focus on. Build a prettier website than my hacked together one, find cofounders because I can't do it all myself, and raise some more money. And I ended up getting in and going to this accelerator, having raised $40,000 from friends and family, and then another $40,000 basically riding off of the we're going into Techstars. You should invest in us kind of thing.
Kaleen:In Techstars, raised a couple $100,000 and then did our big seed raise the fall after the program. My biggest piece of advice since I didn't have a network and I had no idea what the venture world was like, Techstars, great place to get a network, great place to learn about venture raising.
Chris:Mhmm.
Kaleen:So it was my boot camp.
Nate:So would you say that, like, at an early stage going into an accelerator program like Techstars or Y Combinator or five hundred Startups is the way to go?
Kaleen:If you need help raising money, absolutely. Mhmm. Worth the equity that you give up. The operational part of the business, that's a different story.
Nate:Mhmm.
Kaleen:The Techstars community is great, but as a hardware business, you're in the minority of founders. And what was really, really difficult for me in hindsight was recognizing who to take advice from. Not just because some people are blowing smoke, but because the stuff that works for SaaS businesses when you're talking about traction, tactics, selling, finances, not the same as hardware. But you will talk to a lot of people who have no experience in hardware telling you you need to focus on things that will improve your SaaS metrics. And it's very hard to find intelligent hardware operators to balance that advice.
Nate:That kinda echoes something I've been having a discussion with with people. Does equity fundraising work with hardware, or is the model of venture maybe just the way it's structured today, is it a good fit for a hardware business?
Kaleen:It depends on the business. There are tons of hardware businesses who make it in the current system. My problem with it is the milestones are different, and the structure precede seed series a, etcetera, should have a different language for hardware startups. That that does kind of exist if you're working with a very intelligent investor who does hardware, but there will always be people who do their first hardware investment and think they know what they're talking about.
Nate:And
Kaleen:that's that's okay, but you that's the importance of having the right advisers. I do think one of the side effects of that is that because so many hardware companies that make it through the typical VC paths, the most innovative products don't always get funded. They shouldn't.
Nate:Right.
Kaleen:And that is because the venture game is about sales and appearances and FOMO. Mhmm. I have a real problem with the pressure people put on CEOs to be amazing fundraisers and amazing operators.
Nate:Yeah.
Kaleen:Let's not delude ourselves that just because you're good at one means you're good at the other.
Nate:Totally. I just feel like the expectation of being able to get your money out in, like, five to seven years is physically impossible with hardware. The physics just don't work. Right? In order for you to reach a point where unless you're exiting.
Nate:Right? But that that assumes that the market is ripe enough where acquisitions are happening. Like, a a real a real hardware product is not gonna make an impact for ten years. You know what I mean? Just like you think about how much time it takes just to even get your first product to market, and that's your first pancake.
Nate:It's gonna suck. You know?
Kaleen:Yeah. I don't think equity is a problem. I don't think venture is a problem. I think maybe some of the expectations of venture are a problem. Statistics show it takes seven to ten years to see an exit in a startup.
Kaleen:So anybody who's expecting an exit earlier than that, they would be lucky. Right? But I think the venture world in itself is built upon many principles that I find problematic and contradictory to running a intelligent business.
Chris:So what's next for you, for the business? Like, what does the future look like?
Kaleen:I want to be known for running a really smart business, and we keep getting better and better at learning and iterating and making incremental changes. So I have really enjoyed basically going into more detail about all the different levers and things in the business. I really, really, really wanna get into studios and change the way that people talk about Pilates. So everything I do is in that direction.
Nate:I love it. Sounds like you're you're well on your way to to all those things.
Chris:Are you are you hiring? Are you raising? Where where can people find you?
Kaleen:We're at flexiapilates.com. Flexiapilates on Instagram. I'm always up for meeting interesting people. I love hearing stories about weird things people are into. So
Chris:Be careful what you ask for. The Internet is a very
Nate:weird place. Weird things that you're into. Get ready. Just buckle.
Kaleen:Hardware. Hardware people. I'm talking to hardware people. Oh my god.
Chris:That's the that's the best ending.
Nate:It's so good. So good.
Chris:This is a lot
Nate:of fun,
Chris:Kaleen. Thank you for indulging us. Of course.
Nate:Yeah. It was a blast.
Chris:TRADEOFFS is hosted and produced by Chris Rill and Nate Padgett. Editing done by the illustrious Alex Michael. Our logo is designed by the talented pixel alchemist, Tanya Chica. If you'd like to be a guest on the show, reach out to us on our website at tradeoffs.fm.
