BollyX :: Branding, Product Design, Dev, UI UX

Where It Started

BollyX runs more than a thousand weekly classes in over sixty countries, plus a streaming platform that turned a Boston dance class into a global community. In 2013 though, it was just three founders and a handful of gyms.

Minal Mehta first heard our name at a talk by one of the Tough Mudder founders. We'd done their branding and web work, and Minal was building something with the same kind of physical, communal ambition: a dance fitness format in the lineage of Zumba, except the DNA comes from Bollywood. Hindi film music, real South Asian choreography, all of it set inside a legitimate high-intensity interval workout.

We met the three founders (Minal, Shahil Patel, and Mayuri Bhandari) in Brooklyn. They were growing fast in Boston and preparing to enter New York, where they'd be up against every fitness brand in the country. They needed to improve their branding.

Research You Can't Do From a Desk

Our discovery process usually involves archives and interviews. For BollyX, it involved sweating.

We started taking classes because there was no other way to fully understand BollyX. Two things were immediately apparent. The first is that we can't dance, at least not as good as they can, second is that BollyX is a serious workout. Fifty minutes cycling between high and low intensity sequences, burning up to 800 calories a session.

We learned that Bollywood dance is expressive in a way Western fitness formats simply aren't. The movement is big, and the expression extends past the body into the face, the eyes, the hands. Every class ends with the room splitting in two and performing for each other. People cheer. BollyX calls it unleashing your inner rockstar, and it is difficult to leave in a bad mood.

Solving for X

The mark we landed on centers around the X in BollyX, drawn as a single swashy, painterly gesture, as if someone loaded a brush and swept it across the page in one motion. The reference is the dance itself. Organic, unwilling to stay inside its lines. For color, we built the most vibrant palette we could defend, because a muted identity would have been a misrepresentation of the workout and of the people behind it.

Growing With the Brand

From there the brand grew the way the company did. An evolving website, collateral, a merch store, their first music video. Over the years our role changed too. We went from designing how BollyX looked to building how it worked: the platforms behind the business, including a custom portal for an instructor certification program that was scaling faster than anyone had planned for. We designed and built these platforms ourselves. The same team that drew the logo shipped the code.

In 2018 we were approached about putting Keepers, a CPG brand we'd started as a side project, on Shark Tank. We passed, but suggested BollyX instead. Shahil appeared on Season 10 that December and did the only reasonable thing, which was to get the sharks dancing. There was no deal, but there was national exposure and a real jump in sales. A few million people met BollyX for the first time.

Becoming the Tortoise

Not every year was a good one. Like most startups, BollyX went through years that tested it. The founding team split up. The investor money ran out. They had to remake themselves into a company that paid its own way. Nobody writes press releases about becoming profitable, but it's harder than raising a round.

The community never noticed any of this, because the community never stopped. Classes kept filling. Instructors kept certifying. The base grew a little every year, and we were there for all of it. BollyX had started out as the hare. It survived by becoming the tortoise.

Ahead of Schedule

BollyX put their profits into solving their oldest problem: reaching people who had no class nearby. So we built BOD, BollyX On Demand, a streaming platform for taking the workout at home. At launch it was a modest experiment alongside the live business.

Then came 2020. When the world went home and went looking for online workouts, BollyX already had a finished, working platform. BOD became the bulk of the company's recurring revenue, and subscriber growth has run 400% year over year for five straight years. A workout born in Boston gyms is now something people do in living rooms on six continents.

We didn't predict a pandemic. But there is an argument for building the thing before you need it.

Still Showing Up

We have now been BollyX's brand, design, and dev partner for over a decade.

"Condensed is just as much a part of the team as any employee we have. They process 90% of our company's revenue and are responsible for our 400% year-over-year subscriber growth for the past five years. They've been there since day one."
— Shahil Patel, Co-Founder, BollyX

This engagement started with us taking a dance class. Thirteen years later, we're still showing up.