Thank You For 12 Years…
Update 3/5/24: Click here to contact our new support service.
I’m sitting down to write this email with a somewhat heavy heart, but a heart filled with gratitude nevertheless.
When I decided to start Armored Fitness over twelve years ago, I knew it would be a learning curve but I truly didn’t know what we were signing up for. Sure, I had a ton of experience fabricating one-off projects for myself and others, but the previous 3 decades of my life were spent in software development. I had no idea what it took to produce physical products targeting the end consumer.
It turns out that it’s more complex than making a copy of your software and giving it to someone. It also bears little resemblance to the process I used to make a prototype or a unique item. I was ignorant in ways I didn’t even understand at the time.
Now I know. And while it was a trying journey, we eventually delivered thousands of XPO Sleds and XPO Trainers based very closely on my very first prototype in 2011.
My gratitude is everywhere. I’m grateful for business partners who pushed and persevered. I’m grateful for the businesses we partnered with to figure out production. I’m grateful for everyone who encouraged us to see it through, and most of all I’m grateful for our customers and development partners who saw a unique idea and were willing to become part of it.
For all of those people, I say “Thank you!” from the bottom of my heart. You made the painful times worth it.
Which now brings me to the heavy heart part. Armored Fitness has had a successful time. We created a class of exercise equipment that didn’t exist, brought it to market, and had a good run. We inspired our competitors and helped bring a more creative and outside the box approach to traditional sled training. I’ll always be proud of that, but now is the time to acknowledge that we are bringing it to a close.
Like many companies, Covid affected us in both good and bad ways. Unfortunately it severely limited our ability to get work done globally and the investments we had made up to 2020 in developing other similarly unique and groundbreaking products could not be realized. We have never fully recovered from that loss of inertia and investment and we decided this is the right time to step away.
To add insult to injury, about a month ago our Instagram account was hacked and we have so far been unable to recover it. We’ve lost our primary way of being in contact with our customers. We have spent quite a bit of money trying to address the problem, but at this point it seems to be a lost cause.
I will always be grateful for the experience and the amazing people that showed their support.
We are currently working on a way to provide continued support, as well as replacement consumable parts (tires, etc.), for existing XPO owners. That information will be on our website as soon as we have a solution in place. We can’t continue business as usual, but we are working hard to ensure ongoing support and maintenance for your XPOs!
If you have any questions, feel free to reply to this email and it will be sure to get to me personally. We will keep this and our support@armoredfitness.com email address fully functional and monitored until we have gotten a new process 100% in place for ongoing support and maintenance issues.
Sincerely,
William Strahan and the entire team at Armored Fitness Equipment