El Segundo-based exercise and nutrition supplement firm Beachbody Co. Inc. is changing its brand name to BODi. But whether the new branding will be enough to change the company’s fortunes remains to be seen. Last month, Beachbody announced the name change to better reflect the company’s focus on health esteem. According to the announcement, “Health esteem specifically rejects the legacy fitness and diet industry playbook of pursuing a healthy lifestyle based on self-criticism – a playbook Beachbody used to abide by.”
Even the name Beachbody represented an ideal to which most of the company’s customers could only aspire to, according to Carl Daikeler, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.
“We felt it was important to change the name of the platform from Beachbody because it was actually focusing people on an outcome and an ideal,” Daikeler said in the announcement. “People don’t care about the outcome if it’s at the expense of their self-esteem or lifestyle.”
The company intends to use the new brand name BODi in its marketing materials, nutrition supplements and exercise programming.
The change does not appear to affect the publicly traded company’s legal name as used in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 earnings filing, made a few days after the name-change announcement, retained the name Beachbody Company Inc., as have subsequent “Form 4” filings detailing share transactions.
As for that earnings filing, it paints a bleak picture for Beachbody’s finances. The company reported a net loss last year of $194 million, only a slight improvement from the $228 million net loss recorded in 2021. Last year’s total revenue of $692 million was down 21% from 2021.
Daikeler tried to put the best face on these numbers.
“While 2022 was a challenging year in many ways, I am proud of our team’s efforts to continue delivering incredibly effective fitness and nutrition solutions to millions of people, while dramatically reducing costs,” he said in the earnings announcement.
