Real engagement · The Axle Workout · 2020–2023

A B2B fitness business, pivoted to direct-to-consumer, 400% revenue growth.

A 3-year engagement with The Axle Workout as Chief Marketing & Revenue Officer. When 85% of North American gyms closed in March 2020, the company's B2B group-exercise revenue evaporated overnight. The pivot to a direct-to-consumer subscription home-fitness model — built around the proprietary Axle Barbell hardware — produced 400% YoY revenue growth in the first 12 months and a $400K ARR virtual coaching subscription line by year three.

400%

YoY revenue growth in year one of the B2B-to-DTC pivot during COVID

Named client engagement, published with the consent of the client. Specific revenue figures aggregated for confidentiality where appropriate; growth multiples and conversion lifts reflect actual results.

The starting situation

March 2020: the floor falls out

Company: The Axle Workout — proprietary Axle Barbell hardware paired with group-fitness programming sold B2B to gyms and studios across North America.

The constraint: 85% of North American gyms closed in March 2020. The B2B group-exercise revenue model became impossible essentially overnight. The hardware existed and was great; the customers were gone.

What Treetop was asked to own: Chief Marketing & Revenue Officer role. Pivot the business model from B2B group exercise to direct-to-consumer subscription home fitness. Build the DTC acquisition motion from scratch. Architect a virtual coaching subscription that monetized the hardware in a recurring-revenue model. Hire the performance marketing team. Own consumer pricing, branding, and B2B sales strategy for whichever B2B partners remained viable.

What we built

The 12-month pivot, then the 24 months that compounded it

Year 1 (2020): The pivot

Shopify + Amazon storefronts built and optimized. Twin DTC channels, each tuned for the discovery + purchase patterns of their respective audiences. Conversion-rate discipline from day one.
Paid social acquisition motion built from scratch. Meta-led performance marketing, sequenced top-of-funnel and retargeting, tested aggressively against the new DTC consumer audience.
Shopify conversion rate: 0.45% → 1.27% in 6 months. ~2.8x conversion lift through customer-question-led friction removal — surveys identified specific blockers to purchase, which then drove the store's restructuring sprint by sprint.
DTC revenue: $150K → $775K in 18 months. The combined effect of expanded paid acquisition, conversion-rate lift, and Amazon distribution.
Result: 400% YoY revenue growth in year one.

Year 2-3: The subscription monetization

Virtual coaching subscription launched. A live two-way coaching model built on top of the Axle Barbell hardware — converting one-time hardware buyers into recurring-revenue members.
$400K ARR in virtual personal training revenue. Pure subscription revenue layered onto the hardware business, with materially better unit economics than the underlying DTC product sales.
Performance marketing team built and ran. Hired specialists for Meta, Amazon, and content; led the team with cadence + creative discipline + conversion targets.
B2B partner program rebuilt for the post-COVID gym landscape. Partnerships with surviving and emerging fitness studios — Manduu, HiiT Lab, Smarter Fitness Gyms, GFX Fitness, VIBEZ Fit, Flo & Co — that distributed Axle as part of their offering.
Embedded acquisition wins for partner studios. Flow & Co Yoga (Janesville WI): 112 new customers at <$20/customer over 6 months. VIBEZ Fit (Chicago): 67 customers at $25 each on a $49 intro offer.

What we'd tell you about this pattern

What worked, what this means for crisis-pivot engagements

What worked

Customer-question-led conversion optimization. The 2.8x Shopify conversion lift didn't come from theory; it came from running customer surveys, identifying the specific friction points blocking purchase, and rebuilding the store sprint by sprint to remove them. Most DTC conversion work fails because it's untethered to actual customer voice.
Hardware + subscription as a unit, not separate businesses. The pivot worked because we treated the Axle Barbell hardware as the acquisition product and the virtual coaching subscription as the monetization product. Companies that sell hardware separately and subscription separately leave most of the lifetime value on the table.
Channel diversification (Shopify + Amazon) from day one. Discovery and purchase happen in different places. Building both surfaces simultaneously expanded the addressable market in a way that single-channel DTC operators can't replicate.
Crisis as forcing function. COVID was the worst possible context for the B2B model and the best possible context for forcing the DTC pivot. The company that would have taken three years to consider the pivot under normal conditions was ready to make it in three weeks.

If you're considering a B2B-to-DTC pivot

This pattern — fractional / embedded chief marketing + revenue leadership through a business-model transformation — fits companies that have product credibility in one channel but need to build a different commercial motion. The work isn't "add DTC alongside B2B"; it's "redesign the company around the new monetization model."

Whether your forcing function is COVID-style external shock, a competitive disruption, or a deliberate strategic decision, the pattern is the same: senior revenue leadership owning the architecture, the team, and the customer-acquisition motion as a single thing.