Walk into most fitness marketing and you’ll notice who it’s talking to. The already-converted. The people who own the trainers, track the macros, book the class before the alarm’s gone off. The people who were always going to turn up anyway.
Train Electric was built for the other lot.
The ones who tried the gym and stopped. The ones who can’t find the time, or the energy, or the nerve to walk back in. Not people making excuses — people with real reasons. That’s a harder audience to reach. It’s also a more honest one.
EMS — electrical muscle stimulation. Twenty minutes, twice a week, no gym required. Gareth was launching it into a market where most of his potential clients had never heard the term. The science is solid. The results are real. But none of that counts for anything if someone scrolls past before they’ve worked out what they’re looking at.
So the brief underneath the brief was this. Explain something unfamiliar without losing the person you’re explaining it to. And build a website that turns a curious visitor into a booked client.
That’s not straightforward. You have to earn the explanation before you can make the case.
Where I came in
I’ll be straight about what was mine and what wasn’t.
The brand identity and logo were Martin Winslade’s — a design colleague whose work I have a lot of time for. Bold. Dark. Red. Nothing like a typical fitness brand, which was the whole point. It had an edge to it, and that edge suited a product promising the kind of results most people have stopped expecting from exercise.
My job was the website. And when an identity’s done properly, that job gets easier, not harder. The hard decisions had already been made. Mine was to honour them — to build something that felt like an extension of the identity, not a softer, watered-down version of it. Same tone. Same weight. Same edge.
That’s what a strong identity gives you. A foundation you don’t have to argue with.
Naming the objection first
The homepage doesn’t open with the pitch. It opens with the reasons people don’t exercise.
Too busy. Too tired. Too old. Too inactive. The “too syndrome” — every objection Gareth’s audience has ever reached for, said out loud before the site offers a single answer.
That’s deliberate. Most fitness websites skip straight to the sell. They talk past the doubt because the doubt is inconvenient. Train Electric does the opposite. It names the thing you were already thinking, and only then earns the right to respond to it.
It’s a small move. It changes how everything after it lands.
Letting the interesting thing be interesting
The science section could have drowned. EMS is technical, and technical is where a lot of copy goes to hide — long paragraphs, jargon doing the job plain words should be doing.
We went the other way. Each point stands on its own. Short. Clear. And the idea itself is genuinely interesting: the body responds to electrical stimulation the same way it responds to voluntary muscle effort. You don’t need to dress that up. You need to get out of its way and let someone find it interesting for themselves.
Booking runs through a Booksy integration. Gallery, pricing, FAQs — everything a prospective client needs to move from curious to committed, without the clutter that usually gets in the way.
Built on WordPress. Clean, fast, and simple enough that Gareth can maintain it without a designer on speed dial. A site that works for the business rather than the other way round.
What we made
A brand and a website for a business launching into a corner of the market most people hadn’t stepped into yet.
Train Electric doesn’t try to beat the gyms on their own ground. It speaks to the people who already walked off that ground and didn’t look back. That’s a strong position — narrow on purpose, and clear because of it.
The work Martin and I did gave the business what it needed to make that case from the first touch point on. An identity that held its nerve. A website that carried it through.
That’s the job.
For more on how strategy and identity fit together on a project like this, pattendesign.co.uk/brand-strategy-vs-brand-identity/ walks through the relationship. And if you’re weighing up whether your own brand is doing the explaining it needs to, pattendesign.co.uk/what-is-a-brand-designer/ is a decent place to start.
