Inside the $164m Kayla Itsines empire and the great rebrand

The BBG began as posts for friends but it didn’t take long for Itsines, encouraged by her then-fiance and business partner Tobi Pearce, to turn her no-nonsense exercises and accessible charisma into a business.

The success of the BBG made her an international fitness superstar whose followers feel they have her as a friend. Women sent in before and after photos in their activewear – Itsines says they were always called “progress photos” – to show what she had helped them achieve.

But in 2015, in line with the strengthening body positive movement, she dropped the bikini brand and launched Sweat with Kayla, a more general workout app that reached 142 countries within the first year. Today, the Gold Coast-based fitness trainer has more than 16 million followers. There were big life changes too. In the past five years she has had two children, Arna, four, and Jax, one, and motherhood up-ended her life. And in another significant change, she is moving to the Gold Coast for a year with the encouragement of Pearce, who is Arna’s father, and his fiance, Rachel Dillon.

Pearce and Dillon have just bought a $7.3m home at Mermaid Waters and while Itsines and her new husband, Jae Woodroffe, are only renting in Queensland, and have kept their recently renovated Adelaide house, the move could turn out to be permanent.

At 32, Itsines has grown up a lot and knows more about what she wants out of life. She is also much more forgiving and compassionate in her approach to fitness.

“Prior to having kids, when others would come up to me and say, ‘I’m losing motivation, I don’t have time’, I would struggle to understand what that really meant for them,” she says. “I didn’t understand how you couldn’t still get to training; everyone can make time. I would never, after having kids, say that now!”

Itsines, who had Arna when she was with Pearce, was unprepared for how much pregnancy and motherhood would change her. She has athlete-level fitness and was assured by everyone her body would bounce back.

“I got told, and I believed everyone, ‘You’re so lucky, you’re already so fit, and you’re going to recover like this (finger snap) because, you know, muscle remembers’,” she says. “They would tell me these stories about how they worked out before and then had a baby and were up the next day. So, I thought, ‘This is going to be great’.”

She was sick during the pregnancy then had Arna in a caesarean delivery and it was not great at all. She reacted badly to the epidural which triggered uncontrollable, seizure-level shaking, then her milk failed to come in.

When she got home, she could not even walk. “I can’t move, I can’t get up without someone helping me, what’s going on? You’ve got to remember I could box jump a few months earlier,” she says. “When I started saying to people, ‘I don’t feel good, my stomach is really hurting’ they’re like ‘Yeah, it’s going to take so long and it’s really hard’.”

After getting her six-week medical clearance to resume modified exercise, she went back to the gym. She felt uncertain of herself physically and says her brain was “fried”. She attempted a push-up on her knees and came nowhere near achieving it. Crying, she tried squats and thought she was tearing apart.

“I was so lost and so confused,” she remembers. “This whole experience sucks and I wasn’t afraid to say that. I didn’t enjoy pregnancy, I didn’t enjoy the recovery.”

Ten months later she was on stage leading a mega bootcamp for thousands of followers but she was still only doing a modified version of what went before.

Then came more changes. In August, 2020, she and Pearce split but they co-parent Arna amicably and he stayed on as her Sweat business partner.

In 2021 she became romantically linked to the man she has since married, Jae Woodroffe, and with Pearce sold Sweat to a leading health and fitness platform iFit, which specialised in on-demand training programs. The sale was estimated to be worth $228m, although not all of it cash, and it put Itsines on the Rich List, worth about $164m, with Pearce not far behind.

Despite what she went through with Arna, Itsines in 2022 wanted a second child and with Woodroffe became pregnant again. It meant sacrificing the fitness she had built back up but this time she knew what to expect.

“It felt like (risking it all again) but I wanted a baby,” she says. “And I said early on to Jae ‘it’s a boy’ because I was not sick at all, I felt great, I ate salads and I trained through the whole pregnancy.”

Even as the epidural needle went in and the shaking returned, she was calm because she knew it would pass. After the birth, she did nothing for six weeks then went back to the gym and started slowly. She was able to release her first pregnancy training program, and felt closer to her followers who struggled with parenthood.

“I’ve related so much to other women,” she says. “They would write to me on my DMs (direct messages) and say the most absurd stuff and I had thought that exact thing.”

Her new book, Reboot with Kayla, is a four-week “toolkit” for women who for whatever reason are looking to reprioritise their health and fitness. It includes nurturing and inspirational advice along with the no-nonsense exercise drills that are the basis of the Sweat approach. Itsines says the book is not around motherhood as such, but has a deeper understanding of the obstacles many women face. “When it comes to the last few years, especially through Covid, the thing that kept coming up was motivation. Even younger girls would be saying ‘I keep losing motivation, I don’t know how to do it’,” she says.

Apart from strength and fitness routines, the book includes meal plans, tips for self-empowerment, and encouragement to start journaling, something Itsines had never believed in. She says the book is about “living your best life” and is still rooted in fitness but in a more expansive, forgiving way.

It contrasts with her 2016 PDF guide, BBG, which launched her career. She loves how hardcore it was, and it represented where she was at that time with a focus on regular 28-minute, high-intensity, transformational training.

“That was a viral program that went worldwide and it’s still where I am at, but not everyone goes back to that,” she says.

“Before, it was quick fixes and fads. Now it’s ‘how can I live my best life, my healthiest life, for as long as possible?’.”

She is back to peak-level training but says 99.9 per cent of women with children would not be, and she is speaking to a bigger audience now.

Her new emphasis is on mindset and community, and a philosophy of wellbeing that revolves around family, food and health, with exercise an essential component for keeping the body in good working order.

Endometrial surgery threw out another challenge for Itsines and her world view. She has been public about undergoing surgery that dealt with symptoms including painful cramping and heavy bleeding, but they returned after Arna’s birth. She has had three laparoscopic surgeries so far and will manage it as a lifelong condition.

Along the way, she lost her belly button. Itsines, who was reluctant at first to share her endometriosis condition with her followers, posted last year that a laparoscopic site after surgery had become infected and in fixing that, her navel was removed. “Have I considered finding a doctor that will make me a new belly button? Yes (laughing emojis) … will I ever do it … probably not because I don’t want any more time off,” she wrote.

She has a scar where her navel once was, and a liking for high-waisted workout gear.

Intrinsic to the appeal of Sweat is Itsines’s personal image which has always focused on strength and fitness, not on how you look, even when the Bikini Body Guide title implied otherwise. She designed her workouts around what other athletes were doing and they included hardcore squats, lunges, push-ups, planks and box jumps. It was all about becoming fit and strong. Her branding and fitness from the start were completely desexualised. Itsines doesn’t pout, nor does she have a Brazilian style rear and her exercises have never been about getting one.

She is an athlete, not someone who flaunts her body to her followers.

“I’m very straight, I don’t fit into the … yeah, anyway … you don’t have to sexualise yourself to sell a product or sell yourself, you don’t gain followers that way,” she says. “I know there’s a lot of people in this industry or the fashion industry that will sexualise themselves and show off every part of their body and gain a following to sell whatever it is.”

She is brutally aware of the body image pressures and marvels now at how three years ago everyone wanted curves like Kylie Jenner; not that she wants to call out the Kardashians but she is wary of the influence they wield.

“I hope never to influence anyone in any way like that,” she says. “I hope always to be healthy, fit and strong.

She tells an amusing aside about a bootcamp in America where obsession with looks and role-model bodies hit a cultural peak. Women followers would come up to her and marvel at how different she was and how she did not fit their idealised (sexualised) version of a female body. They found her “cute” but hers was not the body they wanted.

“I went somewhere else and I remember this guy, a gay guy came up and to me, ‘Ah, Miss Kayla, I love your body … it is straight like a little boy’,” Itsines says. “What! I was crying with laughter and my mum couldn’t breathe she was laughing so much. So, how boring would it be if everyone looked the same?”

In defence of the Bikini Body Guide brand, she says it was never intended to be about aspiring to any one particular shape or size.

“We wanted everyone to feel like they had a bikini body,” she says. “It was just a name, and everyone called it BBG, and it sort of stuck. And then we changed.”

Now she has a daughter, body positivity is even more important. She has never been photographed in a bikini and there is no subliminal messaging about sex. To her 16 million followers, she is head athlete, personal trainer, cheerleader, guide and confessor. She speaks to women no matter what their body type and she is there to help them train. Her relationship with food is also untroubled and has never revolved around dieting or holding back. On her way home from a recent bootcamp in Dubai, she had a McDonald’s burger with chips at the airport – and marvelled at how beautifully the chips were cut.

Although her workouts are used in 145 countries with vastly different cultures, religions and norms, there seem to be no obstacles to getting physical. Everyone wants to feel healthy, fit and strong. That’s why Sweat is so big, she says, because fitness is everywhere and pregnancy is pregnancy.

In person, she radiates health and wellbeing and is surprisingly warm and down to earth. A week or so earlier, she was at her local coffee shop and they were desperately understaffed and she asked the overwhelmed barista if she could help. “I washed dishes in the coffee shop and it felt so good,” she laughs. “I delivered coffees and I was like ‘Are you the latte?’ and they would go ‘Kayla?’.”

She says she feels no pressure to live up to an ideal because she has only ever been online as herself. When people meet her, she is what they expect … maybe a bit shorter, she laughs. Her warmth and self-belief feed the charisma that can command a crowd of 6000 people in a communal workout, leading drills from the stage or moving among the audience, all to a pounding beat.

That part is easy, she says, she has trained for it and knows what to do. The important work is in staying back, meeting everyone and hearing personal stories from women who might have struggled to be there. After she leaves, she goes back to her hotel room to cry.

“Because it’s too much, in a great way, I mean you hear stories about people who have come and they’ve got ovarian cancer and it’s their last year, or breast cancer, or they’ve got fit for their kids and brought them too,” she says. “Story after story after story and you leave there and you cry. It’s too much, it’s beautiful and it’s the best.”

She thrives on the personal contact and has no problem being approached by women who want to share a story, or ask after Jax or Arna. She says they love the fact she is Greek and still has an Adelaide connection and they approach her like a friend they have grown up with.

Family is everything, and coming from a big Greek family makes it matter even more. They are so close that when she left home to live with Pearce, her family wanted to know what they had done wrong. Her grandparents laugh now that they would follow her to Queensland but for the mosquitoes. Her parents are teachers and every night there would be cousins, aunts and uncles around the dinner table sharing food and stories.

Part of her immunity to body image pressures lies in this upbringing. The women in her family are comfortable with themselves and that easy acceptance became part of who she is.

“We celebrate with food. I know whenever I did something good my dad would take me to Hungry Jacks and we would get a caramel sundae,” she says. “That’s how I’ve grown up and I’ve never listened to the other stuff.”

Family also share the burden of juggling work and home and she is the first to acknowledge they took the pressure off navigating a multimillion-dollar business with parenthood. She is close to her sister Leah Itsines, a well-known cook and author, who lives only a street away.

“I call my sister and my sister lives in the next street, not even kidding, and she goes, ‘Your dog is barking’,” Itsines says. “Then Jae’s sister lives there (pointing) and Jae’s parents live behind us and my parents and grandparents live there (points again). I’m not going to lie, I wouldn’t be where I am, going to Dubai, if I didn’t have any help.”

Meeting Woodroffe, who manages disability accommodation, has made her very happy. In contrast to the Greek girl stereotype, Itsines did not want a big wedding and was planning to virtually elope until family intervened. She spends so much of her life in front of cameras where everything is recorded that the thought of doing that on her wedding day, dressed up, hair immaculate, cameras trained on her, was too much. Luckily, Woodroffe opposed a big wedding as well.

“So, both of us were like, ‘We won’t have a wedding’ … and everyone lost it,” she says.

As a compromise, she was married at home in her back yard in a ceremony she did not even organise. Snippets on Instagram show plates of hummus and dolmades with Itsines in a simple white gown with a back drape, from Melbourne designer Mariana Hardwick. “Just married my best friend and we couldn’t be happier,” she posted under a photo of herself and Woodroffe sharing a kiss. Another photo shows her later in gym shoes and a two-piece white dress, eating a burger.

She and Woodroffe have moved to the Gold Coast for a year with the encouragement of Pearce, who is Arna’s father, and Dillon, who Itsines admires as “a beautiful role model” for Arna.

They will set up their own family base and her mother has already visited. She says the business will not be affected and they are testing the waters by renting for a year.

“Arna’s dad is up there with Rachel and they’re like, ‘Come, just try it, it’s really good’,” she says. “We have still got a house here, nothing changes here. We will go back and forward, it’s a two-hour flight.”

There have been major changes with Sweat which, after it sold to iFit, posted an $80m loss in its first full year, triggering staff lay-offs. In a full-circle manoeuvre, she and Pearce bought it back, reportedly at a much lower price, and will strip it back to its core business which is Sweat and its 50-plus fitness programs and 13,000 workouts.

“The decision to regain ownership is about ensuring the best future for Sweat,” she and Pearce said in a statement.

“We have always been a platform built for women, by women, providing a secure and encouraging space for them to share their transformation journeys. Our commitment to this community remains unwavering.”

Itsines and Sweat are here to stay. Asked where she sees herself in 10 years’ time, she says health and fitness has no end, even if she steps back over time from the high-intensity athlete space. She would never let Sweat just fizzle out and will bring in a variety of trainers who can help women at all stages of life.

In the crowded online fitness space, Itsines has a secret weapon. Her emphasis on community and relatable persona connects her strongly to her followers who contact her directly with their hopes and fears, their thoughts on the Queensland move, and their requests for what they want next. She says it sets Sweat apart from a brand like Nike that has to employ people to go out and try to predict the next big thing. The information she needs comes directly to her.

“We go backwards and go into the DMs and go into the comments,” she says.

“We watch what our clientele are saying and then we grab that and we build them what they want. It’s like a cheat sheet – here we go, let’s do it!”

REBOOT with Kayla by Kayla Itsines; Penguin Life, $33 is out on January 23