Valerie Bures-Bönström, VAHA: How to get into the flow
When Valerie Bures-Bönström founded the Mrs.Sporty fitness chain at age 20, few women pursued sports in a studio environment in their free time. Two decades later, fitness training is no longer male-dominated. The target audience has changed — and so has the entrepreneur, who has reinvented herself and started a new company: With VAHA, she brings a personal home training experience into our living rooms — with innovative software and hardware packaged in a stylish mirror.
Sports is more than the promotion of fitness and health, sports enables people to develop self-confidence and participate — whether it’s children or adults. Valerie Bures-Bönström knows this from her own experience. “Sport has always been the time for me to gather energy, it was a special moment for me.”
In 2003, together with Niclas Bönström, she founded the fitness chain Mrs.Sporty to offer this energy to women, who previously had no access to sports. From its beginnings as an early player focusing on women’s fitness, Mrs.Sporty is today one of the leading fitness chains for women in Europe and one of the most respected franchise systems in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland — offering a unique combination of personal and small-group circuit training to 115,000 members in 370 gyms in five countries. However, Valerie Bures-Bönström not only brings 18 years of expertise in the health and sports industry, but she also has extensive experience in starting tech companies.
“As a computer scientist, I’m motivated by solving problems. I even love the word ‘problem’. Because if you see a problem, that’s your chance to give a solution.”
Getting into the flow stage
“Having a business, means to grow with your customers,” says Valerie Bures-Bönström. While in the beginning, Mrs.Sporty was about motivating women in the first place, the picture changed after the first successful ten years. Now the target group was all about achieving their own goals — be it losing 30 kilos, reducing stress, or running a marathon. So, in 2011, the idea was born to offer individual functional training to each customer. Not a completely new idea at that time with a challenge: How to give feedback and supervision on exercises? Luckily the technology was already there and Valerie Bures-Bönström, despite the doubts of everyone else, was convinced to solve this problem. Since 2012, with her company Pixformance Sports she develops software-supported sports equipment for fitness clubs, rehabilitation facilities, and companies.
With VAHA, she has been bringing this idea into our living rooms since 2020. The interactive home training experience provides customers fully personalized and immersive training with personal trainers, live classes 24/7, more than 200 workouts on-demand, nutritional counselling as well as mindfulness and meditation exercises for every type of sports and fitness level. The mirror looks stylish in living rooms and bedrooms. With the touch of a button, it can be transformed into an interactive display on which the user can see himself and the personal trainer at the same time thanks to an integrated camera. However, VAHA is intended to be more than a space-saving gym for your own four walls. “vahā‘a means flow in Punjabi — and that is our vision: We want to catch our customers in the right moment, offer them actively what they need, and deliver them the flow experience,” says the German entrepreneur and computer scientist.
“With our training offers, we support customers in their challenges and personal abilities and thus enable them to develop sustainably — on a physical as well as mental level.”
The future of home training
The VAHA experience is built on Pixformance Sports’ technology and is an exciting combination of hardware and software. To track motion through algorithms, VAHA is taking an innovative approach: Instead of feeding in every single exercise and movement, the company works with movement maps. First, a map of movement patterns is made of each exercise. The box systems in which the movements are bundled are implemented — with the great result that the algorithm detects automatically new exercises and finds out what kind of movement pattern is missing to provide feedback.
But at VAHA, innovation is not all about the software. The rising market leader in the fitness tech segment sees a huge potential in future hardware like sensors, e.g. recording emotional reactions in a video stream, and the resulting data that can be made usable for the software.
Listen to REWRITE TECH with Valerie Bures-Bönström, founder of VAHA
You can listen to the whole Story of Valerie Bures-Bönström and her companies in our podcast REWRITE Tech — available on all audio streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Amazon Music.
