How Gym Plus built an eight-figure Australian fitness brand by equipping the whole household

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Australian families rarely buy all their fitness gear from one place. A parent shops for a power rack in one store, a gymnastics bar in another and a soft play set somewhere else again. Gym Plus has built its business on closing that gap.

The Melbourne-based Gym Plus sells to homes across the country, and to the gyms, schools, clubs and community organisations that train Australians outside them.

Its catalogue shows the strategy plainly: a business that refuses to sell to only one person in the house.

A bar that parents could trust

Gym Plus started with gymnastics. Founder Lois Xie, a former financial auditor at Ernst & Young, has said the idea came to her while watching the 2016 Rio Olympics, when no Australian gymnast reached the podium. She saw wobbly, unsafe home equipment on the market and decided to build better gymnastics bars.

“So many Aussies love gymnastics and train so hard,” Xie said. “Maybe they just don’t have the right tools at home to train safely and consistently.”

Xie has said she launched the business from a small garage in Perth with her wife, Cherie, and handled the early work herself, from media buying and photography to customer service, warehousing and international freight. Then the pandemic hit. Home workout demand surged while stock and shipping became scarce and expensive. “Quitting wasn’t an option,” she said.

That gymnastics range now trades as MEMAX. It covers a child’s progression from a beginner folding balance beam and an inflatable air roller up to elite high bars and uneven bars. The MEMAX Foldable Gymnastics Training Bar, designed for children roughly five to twelve, pairs a fibreglass rail with a powder-coated steel frame, adjusts in height as the child grows and folds away in about 30 seconds. Gymnastics clubs including Zodiac Gymnastics, Skylark Sports and JETS use MEMAX equipment, according to earlier coverage of the brand.

Six aisles, one household

What sets Gym Plus apart is breadth. Its range now runs across five categories: strength, gymnastics, kinder gym, mats and padding, aerial, and a combined aerial, pilates and dancing range. In practice, one family can order a power rack for the parent who lifts, a MEMAX training bar for the child in a gymnastics club and a soft play climber for the toddler, all from one checkout.

That breadth changes the economics. Every category brings in a different first purchase, and every first purchase gives the brand a reason to sell the next one. A parent who bought a MEMAX bar for a seven-year-old has a reason to look at Gym Plus years later when it is time to build a home gym.

The business side reinforces the consumer side. Gym Plus runs a dedicated B2B team, trade accounts and a Pro Series range of beams, bars, rings and springboards built for clubs and schools. It also makes custom mats and padding to order, with no minimum spend.

Equipment designed for the room

The second advantage is design. Gym Plus treats how a piece looks in a room as part of the specification. Its strength range comes in forest green, matcha green and pink alongside black and chrome, and its kinder gym soft play comes in vivid, pastel and forest colourways.

“Our products look beautiful in homes, schools, and studios,” Xie said. “We consider interior aesthetics as much as functionality.”

Growth manager Victoria Li puts the shift more bluntly. “We’ve redefined what gym equipment can be by making it lifestyle-compatible rather than just functional,” she said. “We’ve shifted the industry conversation from ‘no pain, no gain’ to ‘movement as joy.’”

Gym Plus backs that pitch with low-risk buying, including a 90-day money-back guarantee and click and collect from its Cranbourne West facility in Victoria. A rewards program, The Movers Club, sits underneath the whole range.

What comes next

The 2026 launches suggest Gym Plus now wants the serious lifter as much as the gymnastics parent. In September the company announced Icon, a compact all-in-one functional trainer that fits dual cables, an angled Smith machine and half-rack functionality inside a 1.54m by 1.24m footprint. Alongside it came plate-loaded machines usually found in commercial gyms: a belt squat, a dual-position linear row and two hip thrust machines.

Xie’s account of the company’s culture helps explain how it keeps launching across this many categories. “I hire adults who know what they’re doing,” she said. “Everyone has freedom to own their work without micromanagement.”

Most fitness brands chase one buyer. Gym Plus is growing by giving every member of the household a reason to buy from the same brand.