A $3,000 Bodysuit to Shock Your Way to a Better Body

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2:15Well, it's the jolt that tickles your muscles and suited up in the Catalyst Gen 4, you might look a bit like one of the Avengers. It's pretty cool. It is all part of looking and feeling your best as Bloomberg Pursuits editor Chris Rauser writes about the new issue of Bloomberg Business Week with pursuits devoted to the pursuit of wellness. Here with more is Chris Rauser, along with Brendan Kennedy, the CEO of Monty Mare. It's the owner of Catalyst, and they both are here in our studio. Welcome, welcome. A great Friday story. First of all, I'm going to start with you, Chris. How did this come on your radar?

2:46I mean, I know you are always kind of the king when it comes to things that you can try to feel better, to look better.

2:54Brendan Kennedy:Yeah, I'm a fitness person. I'm a wellness person. I'll try anything once. If you ask me to do a form of exercise with you, I will do it. So I have done everything. Solid core, physique 57, Zumba, you name it. I've done it. Hot yoga, hotter yoga. Something in a chair yoga? Yes, yes. There was briefly a Pilates studio in Manhattan called Shays 23 because you did all the exercises in a chair. And it was on 23rd Street. All right. So at the beginning of the year, I just was thinking about how overwhelming wellness has gotten. There's endless podcasts. The Manosphere podcasts are just like telling you so many different things every week to do.

3:27Brendan Kennedy:There's businesses where you can spend like seven thousand dollars a month where you go and you get, you know, go get tested for all this stuff every month. And you get AI to tell you what to eat and what to exercise. It just feels very overwhelming. And I thought, OK, what's the response to that? What is my response to that? I want to cheat. I want a cheat code. I want an easy way out. I want a hack. And so we got the whole Pursuit team together to think, to like go out and do research and figure out what are like the hot wellness hacks right now that makes it easier for you. Because at the end of the day, what you really need to do is exercise.

3:59Brendan Kennedy:You need to sleep. You need to talk to people and you need to eat well. That's basically all you need to do. So like what are the things that can sort of hack your way into doing those more easily? And so as I was doing my research, I discovered the Catalyst suit, which is an EMS suit. it's a stim suit like you uh like physical therapists use after you get an injury they kind of zap your muscles with electricity and it encourages your muscles to work harder more of it tenses up and then it heals it heals stronger and so that technology is now a suit that you can wear and you can do workouts and it like super charges your workouts okay i know the guy who owns the company is sitting right here but i'm still gonna put you on the spot chris because i see technology like this and i'm like yeah does it actually work i have to tell you it actually works you're not I'm just saying that because Brendan is sitting muscles through my blazer.

4:44Brendan Kennedy:But you're serious. But it really totally works. I did it for six months after having a pair of injuries. I had foot surgery. You guys remember I fractured my elbow. I do. I was like out of the gym for months. I felt kind of bummed about it. And it really got me back going. Yeah, you really see results. It helped my posture. I lost weight, gained muscle. All right. So Brendan, come on in. You are the owner of Catalyst. Talk to us about this device, kind of how it came to be. And tell us a little bit about the business. Yeah. So I joined EMS about four years ago, and I was a little skeptical at first, too.

5:18My wife had used it about seven years ago. EMS is electrical muscle stimulation. Exactly. And just like a doctor or physical therapist will put stim on you to heal a muscle, it's the same technology. And doctors have been using it for 60 years. If you go to Europe, there are EMS studios where there's thousands of them where people will go in and work out. I went in skeptically and tried it about four years ago during COVID. And it's amazing. For me, it compresses time. I can get a two-hour workout, a workout that would normally take me two hours in the gym. I can do it in 20 minutes. And it's a whole body workout.

5:57It hits the little muscles in your back that you might miss in the gym or skip leg day. It's your whole body, 26 pads at once. and it stimulates your muscle. Just like your brain sends a signal to your muscle to contract, the suit sends the same muscles, the same signals, and it hits 90 % of your muscles. And so it's amazing. And it works, it's efficient, it's fast, it's safe, and it compresses time for me.

6:29Brendan Kennedy:So you were a client. I was a client. And then you became an investor and now you're the owner. Yes. It's something I'm really passionate about. I use it three days a week. So 20 minutes each time, basically an hour a week. That little prep, little cleanup. But compared to changing and driving to a gym and working out for two hours, I can do it in 20 minutes. I can do it at home. I travel with it. It's spectacular. All right. So what does it cost? So the suit retails for$3 ,000. There's an app and there's trainers on the app. So you pick, I want to focus on strength. I want to focus on cardio.

7:04Brendan Kennedy:Yeah. Maybe I'm going to focus on my lower legs or my abs. I'm 50 years old. I've worked out in gyms for 40 years. This is the first. I've done Ironman. I've done marathons. I've done every kind of fitness activity you can do. I'm very active. This is the first time I've had abs at 53, right? It's never happened before. It's all because of the suit. I can turn up the abs and hit those muscles. $3 ,000, you follow a trainer on the app, And that person leads you through a 20 minute workout. People might know you from your days in cannabis, medical cannabis specifically. You were one of the co-founders of Tilray.

7:42You led the company. It's publicly traded now. You're no longer involved in cannabis. What was the process that got you to buying Catalyst? And talk a little bit about the challenges the companies had before you came on board and what you're trying to do now to get it away from those challenges. Absolutely. So I think cannabis, you know, I started in cannabis back in 2011. So 14 years ago. And back then, people thought it was crazy, right? Like, what is he doing? He went to Yale. He has an MBA. Why is he going into cannabis? And he's throwing away his whole career. But I could see the future. I could see what was going to happen.

8:18I knew that country after country was going to legalize and U.S. states were going to legalize. And so I saw the opportunity. I saw what was going to happen. I see the same thing in EMS. if you go to Europe, there's these studios everywhere with people working out in suits. And I think five years from now, everyone in the U.S. will be familiar with EMS. They'll either have a suit or they'll go to a gym and work out in that suit because it's the future of fitness. Well, Chris, I mean, you do cover so much about wellness and fitness. We talk about it with you all the time. I mean, how do you slot this in?

8:51What are you hearing kind of from maybe the industry about maybe is this kind of a next weight?

8:57Brendan Kennedy:Yeah, I mean, this is definitely we've done stories about EMS suits before. Plastic surgeons in New York City offer it. There's some startups that offer sort of similar things where you go to a studio. For me, this really fit into my normal system of going to Barry's Bootcamp. You know, I'm a big Barry's person and doing my normal weight lifts. And then I added this in two or three times a week, 20 minutes. And that's where I really supercharged everything else that I did. And especially on a day when, you know, like Brendan said, if you're too busy or you're traveling or whatever, you can just kind of toss it in.

9:26Brendan Kennedy:And although I have not taken it on a plane before. So I brought You brought it with me. So this is what it looks like. Is it heavy? It's quite big. It's not really. So for those listening on radio, Chris is holding up the vest portion, but there's also that sort of, there's another portion. So it goes all the way down. Yes, it goes around your legs and your chest. Vest and legs. And there's arms, there are armbands that go with it and you have to get it wet for the stim pads to really work. But you have to do that with a heart rate monitor too. It's kind of the same thing, right? Exactly, very similar.

9:54So what do you see as your market? Is it a case of selling directly to consumers? Is it about setting up places like the Peloton model to some extent where you could go and actually get on a Peloton and be at a physical location? I mean, Peloton kind of went back and forth. What's the model in terms of growing this business? So right now, there are thousands of consumers that own the suit and they work out at their homes or at the office or in their hotel rooms while they're traveling. And they work out with the app. There are also maybe 200 to 300 studios in the U.S. that use a suit. Many of them use the Catalyst suit.

10:31And so you can go to an EMS studio if you're mostly in a big city and try it. And so they use the Catalyst suit. And so it's both supplying to studios, and we're seeing more and more of those open, and then also to consumers. What's the moat that you have here? Because if this is big in Europe, you're doing it here in the U.S., people might catch on. they might see that it's working. Copycats could come in. What separates you? How do you protect the brand? I think there's two motes. I think the first moat is, oddly, an EMS suit is regulated like a toaster in Europe. And so manufacturers can just make them and sell them.

11:09Here, it's regulated by the FDA. And so this suit is FDA cleared. And so we went through the FDA process in order to sell it to consumers. That's one moat. I think the second moat is the content. There's hundreds of workouts online that you can engage in. The app actually is what sends the impulses to the two. That's what zaps you. The app zaps you. Yes. And so the app does it. Wait, can I use this for my family to get them to do other things? Just saying. No, forgive me. Go ahead. No, I think it's the content and the FDA clearance are really the two modes. What about competition or just the wellness world at large?

11:52Like it feels like, you know, we go through these fads and waves and trends. Yeah, you don't want this to end up in the same pile as the Thighmaster. I think that - Hey, everybody should have a Thighmaster. No, I'm just kidding. No, but how do you make sure? I think strength is important no matter what you do, right? And so I use my suit three days a week, 20 minutes. I run, so I have cardio. you can you know work out on a treadmill wearing the suit yeah people do that but i think strength will always be there strength will always be important it fixes your posture bone density for a lot of people is really important people on glp1 uh drugs lose strength and so this suit helps people of different demographics and ages very quickly you can work out while you're wearing the suit and also wear the suit independently while you're not working out or you're always working out while you wear there are people that do freestyle workouts which means the suit is is charging, impulsing, and they're folding laundry or doing the dishes or walking on a treadmill.

12:50I think you and I need these. You're still doing it real quickly. Yes.

12:53Brendan Kennedy:Yeah. Oh yeah. I'm in. I got to tell you, I go to a doctor and they say it's all about strength and getting your muscles and building muscle strength. So it totally makes sense. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Brendan Kennedy, chief executive officer of Monty Mare, the owner of catalyst joining us here in studio, along with our own Chris Rauser. He's editor of Bloomberg pursuits. You can check out and read more about Chris's experience. It was a really fun read. It's in the new issue of Bloomberg Business Week in the Pursuit section.

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