The Challenge: A Respected Name With No Common Look
Spirit Fitness began in Jonesboro, Arkansas, in 1983, and its equipment has long been known for being built to last. Dyaco International, founded in Taipei in 1990, made fitness equipment for other brands, Spirit among them, and later bought the company. Dyaco now designs and makes Spirit products in its plants in Changhua, Taiwan. By 2016 Spirit sold three lines, Home, Commercial and Medical, in many countries, with marketing handled by teams in Taiwan, the US and Germany.
Each team made its own materials, and there was no brand book to keep catalogs, sell sheets and brochures consistent. The logo was a heavy italic wordmark next to a chrome oval badge. Most of what Spirit said about itself came from the factory side: specifications, programs and build quality. Very little spoke to the people who would put the machines in their homes or gyms, and in fitness people buy into a way of life as well as a machine.
Dyaco wanted Spirit to become a full-line global fitness brand: one name for home users, gyms and clinics, with a look every market could use and websites that local teams could run. It also wanted its own staff and distributors to understand the new direction and get behind it.
What We Found
In January 2016 we studied how fitness is shown to consumers and gym owners in US magazines, trade media and industry reports, and compared other fitness brands’ guidelines. Through 2016 we reviewed the work with Spirit’s marketing teams in Taiwan, the US and Germany.
- The old badge had the right attitude but no movement. Its S looked bold and strong, which suited the brand. Nothing in it suggested motion, and motion is what Spirit sells.
- Buyers want to see people like themselves. The images that work in fitness show people who are fit without being extreme, training at home, in the gym or in the city. Bodybuilders, elite athletes and remote mountain scenes feel out of reach for most of them.
- Three lines needed one brand. Home, Commercial and Medical reach different buyers, but each is stronger as part of one Spirit than as a separate look. A shared master brand with a color for each line could hold them together.
- Spirit’s values were already in the company. Performance, perseverance and endurance described Dyaco’s own people and its machines as well as the customers who use them, which made the values believable to staff and buyers alike.
What We Did
In 2016 we built Spirit’s brand strategy, designed its new visual identity and website and made a brand film to launch the work inside Dyaco.
Brand DNA and a Kick-Off Film
We wrote Spirit’s brand DNA: a brand that aims to improve the quality of life for everyone, with customer experience and product innovation at its center. The mission, vision and three values, Performance, Perseverance and Endurance, follow from it, and so does the strapline we set in 2016, “Move Your SPIRIT.”
The strapline we set in 2016
Move Your SPIRIT.
To launch the direction, we made “The New Spirit of Spirit”, a short motivational film for Dyaco’s employees and distributors. It was ready in early March 2016 and shown at a Dyaco event at the Taipei International Sporting Goods Show (TaiSPO). The film starts from Dyaco’s heritage and shows the three values in the people who make the equipment and the people who use it.
Logotype and S Icon: Built Around Movement
We redrew the SPIRIT logotype with tapered strokes and a sweeping S, and designed a new S icon. The icon’s open curve stands for the long road of perseverance, and the cuts through its upper stroke suggest speed. The logotype can stand on its own on equipment and print, and the icon works alone on websites, presentations and apparel.
A blue-gray master color carries the Spirit brand. Each line gets its own color for the icon and for brochures: red for Spirit Home, blue for Spirit Commercial and teal for Spirit Medical. Hanzel Extended sets headlines and Futura Std sets text.
A Brand Book for Every Market
The 46-page brand book, delivered in October 2016, explains the brand DNA and values before it gets to the rules. Its imagery guidelines ask for documentary-style photos of real people of different ages, backgrounds and abilities, with three in four images showing the products in use. The rest covers the logo and its misuse, colors, typefaces, the S band pattern, stationery, brochures, sell sheets, email signatures and the site icon. We handed over the editable files so Dyaco’s designers in each country could produce their own materials.
We also redesigned Spirit’s Home Fitness catalog in October 2016, which Dyaco adopted as the template for its catalogs and added to the brand book.
A Global Website That Local Teams Run
We planned the site map and wireframes, designed the pages and built the site. It has sections for Spirit Home and Spirit Commercial, product pages with videos, and a content management system that lets each country publish in its own language. Dyaco’s European team went live in German on spiritfitness.de at the end of October 2016, and the English global site followed in mid-November. We trained Dyaco’s in-house designers to update it and hosted and maintained the site into 2017.
Project Timeline
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| January 2016 | Brand proposal; research into fitness media and benchmark brands |
| February to March 2016 | Kick-off film “The New Spirit of Spirit”, shown at a Dyaco event at TaiSPO |
| July 2016 | Identity and website projects start |
| July to August 2016 | Mission, vision and values; logotype and S icon concepts; website wireframes |
| September 2016 | Brand book draft reviewed; website design approved for build |
| October 2016 | Brand book and logo files final; Home Fitness catalog; German site live at the end of the month |
| November 2016 | Global site live |
| December 2016 to February 2017 | Product video feature, launch fixes; editable brand book files handed over |
Results
Spirit still uses the brand we built.
The brand at work:
- The logotype. The SPIRIT logotype we finalized in October 2016 is the logo on spiritfitness.com and on Dyaco’s brand pages.
- The S icon. It is the site icon of spiritfitness.com, in the red the brand book gave Spirit Home.
- The typefaces. spiritfitness.com sets its headlines in Hanzel and its text in Futura Std, the two typefaces the brand book chose.
- The brand DNA. Dyaco introduces Spirit with the brand book’s statement: customer experience and product innovation at the heart of the brand, and one goal, to improve the quality of life for everyone.
- The catalog. In October 2016 Dyaco made Geber’s Home Fitness catalog redesign the template for its catalogs and added it to the brand book.
The business since the rebrand:
- In 2018 Dyaco set up a global Commercial and Medical division and opened an office in the UK, with Spirit as its core commercial brand (Health Club Management, 2018).
- Commercial equipment grew from about 10 to 15 percent of Dyaco’s revenue before 2024 to 18 percent in the first nine months of 2024, a rise Commercial Times (工商時報) credited to Spirit’s marketing.
- In August 2025 Spirit Fitness partnered with EGYM to connect its 1000 series cardio equipment to the EGYM app.
- In 2025 Dyaco’s commercial fitness revenue grew 8 percent and its rehabilitation revenue 16 percent, while home fitness fell 23 percent (Dyaco group figures, Economic Daily News, March 2026).
Is your company better than its brand suggests? Many Taiwanese manufacturers lead their category and still introduce themselves as a supplier. Talk to us about closing that gap.
