The Beachbody Company Group is merging with connected fitness company Myx Fitness Holdings went public today (June 28) via a collaboration with the special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Forest Road Acquisition Corp. to create a new health and wellness subscription service for the mass market.
The Beachbody Company Group announced its intentions to go public in February. Headquartered in Santa Monica, California, the company will become the parent of Myx, Openfit and Beachbody On Demand (BOD) upon the closing of the merger.
The combined company — The Beachbody Company — started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbols “BODY” and “BODY WS,” respectively, according to a press release.
“This marks an important milestone in Beachbody’s mission to help more people achieve their goals and lead healthy, fulfilling lives,” said Beachbody CEO and Co-founder Carl Daikeler. “As a public company, we aim to accelerate our growth and introduce many more people to our proven fitness and nutrition solutions. With this transaction, we will deploy capital to grow our platform, add connected fitness hardware through the acquisition of Myx and continue to create the most exciting and innovative in-home fitness content.”
Daikeler will continue to head up the company and its on-demand platform. Beachbody’s Co-founder Jon Congdon, who also is the CEO of Openfit, will continue heading up that platform. Heberto Calves will remain Myx president and will report to Daikeler, according to the release. Forest Road Strategic Advisor Kevin Mayer will join the board of directors. Mayer previously was TikTok’s CEO and Disney’s chief strategy officer.
“Beachbody is a company that has been on the leading edge of content creation since its inception 22 years ago, and has built a complete solution that brings together fitness and nutrition subscriptions and delivers results for customers as well as value for the company,” Mayer said. “With a subscription base that is the largest in connected fitness, supported by a founder-led management team that has proven its ability to innovate, I could not be more thrilled to join the board and help guide this company in its next chapter of growth.”
PYMNTS’ 2021 Subscription Commerce Conversion Index, done in collaboration with sticky.io, showed that consumers in the U.S. value convenience and speed when signing on to new subscription services.