The fitness products and supplements platform has recently garnered millions – and is now taking over the fitness food brand GymQueen.
What has been going on
For Vitafy, 2018 was an eventful year: in August, the start-up announced its investor ProSiebenSat.1 quit, and just four months later, the nutritional start-up raised € 10m from Cipio Partners and Venture Stars to strengthen its own brands.
As WirtschaftsWoche founder learned in advance, the start-up also used the investment to go on a shopping spree: Vitafy takes over GymQueen, the fitness food brand started in Siegen in 2015 by Steffen Reppel and Markus Seekamp, which targets women in particular.
Expanding presence in the market
With the acquisition, the founders want to expand their presence in the market: “Vitafy’s vision is to build a House of Brands of brands in fitness, slimming, nutritional supplementation and functional food. GymQueen optimally complements our own brand portfolio and gives us access to the growth market of ambitious fitness athletes. In addition, GymQueen has great growth potential both nationally and internationally, “says Vitafy co-founder Georg Bader in an interview with WirtschaftsWoche founder.
The core team of GymQueen will be taken over in the course of the acquisition, founders Steffen Reppel and Markus Seekamp will continue to support Vitafy in its corporate development.
Purchase price remains secret
Currently GymQueen is available among other things in the drugstore chain Müller and the Austrian counterpart BIPA. “With the new partners, further sales cooperations for their own brands are conceivable,” says Bader. About the purchase price he did not want to give information.
Vitafy was founded in 2013 by Georg Bader, Christian Boehm, Jürgen Englisch and Venture Stars partner Florian Calmbach and sells fitness and diet products as well as dietary supplements such as weight loss shakes, protein powder and superfood. The products can be found on the Internet and in stationary stores, including drugstores DM and Rossmann, as well as the organic market Alnatura.
Further acquisitions planned
GymQueen should not have been the last takeover. “The highly fragmented fitness market offers us strategically very interesting opportunities to specifically expand our brand portfolio through acquisitions and thereby consolidate the market,” says Georg Bader. “By integrating brands, we have the opportunity to realize enormous synergies online and in brick-and-mortar retail while at the same time driving our own brand strategy forward”.
Going international
The internationalization in other European countries is planned in the medium term. But the focus is currently the German-speaking region – and the way into the black: “As a growth company, we deliberately invested in growth and losses in the first few years as a venture capital-financed company . ”
Basically, the founders and the investors are very satisfied with the company’s development, says Bader. In January, sales grew by 70% compared to the previous year. “We will be profitable and are heading for annual sales in the mid-double-digit million range,” says Bader.
Also published on Medium.