NKO Club: Building Kendall Toole's Holistic Wellness Platform
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360° wellness approach beyond traditional fitness
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Licensed music integration via Feed.fm partnership
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10,000+ community engagement within 24 hours of launch period
The Brief
Transforming a fitness icon's vision into a complete wellness ecosystem that serves mind, body, and community.
When Kendall Toole walked away from Peloton in June 2024, she was leaving behind a position of extraordinary influence within the fitness world. Over five years as one of Peloton's most beloved instructors, Toole had built a global following of over two million across Instagram and other social platforms. She was known for her high-energy cycling classes, her authentic engagement with her community, and her willingness to discuss mental health openly - rare transparency in an industry often defined by curated perfection. Her signature sign-off, "Never Knocked Out" - wisdom from her father that had seen her through struggles with anxiety, depression, and personal challenges - had become a motto for thousands of women finding strength and resilience through movement and mindset work. However, despite her massive platform, Toole recognised that something was missing in both her life and the fitness industry. The influencer-to-app model that dominated fitness - where creators essentially licensed their names to established platforms - felt limiting. She wanted to build something that reflected her actual philosophy, not just her workout classes.
Toole's vision was not simply "another fitness app" from a well-known instructor. Rather, she wanted to create what she called a "country club for misfits" - a holistic wellness platform rooted in her belief that strength extends far beyond physical training into mindset, nutrition, and community. The "Never Knocked Out" philosophy was not merely about not giving up on workouts, but about a comprehensive approach to life: showing up for yourself consistently, choosing resilience over perfection, and building community with others who understood that struggle. This meant NKO Club needed to integrate six distinct fitness modalities - cycling, strength, boxing, Pilates, stretching, and breathwork - because different women needed different tools on different days. It meant including professionally-formulated recipes with macronutrient tracking because nutrition was inseparable from fitness results. It meant building a daily gratitude journal into the core experience, not as an afterthought, because Toole's own mental health journey had demonstrated the power of daily reflection. It meant integrating licensed commercial music - the exact tracks that power Peloton rides - because music and energy were intrinsic to the experience she wanted to create.
The technical challenge of building this holistic vision was enormous. Toole needed to launch a fully-featured fitness app competing against massive players like Peloton, Apple Fitness Plus, and a dozen emerging wellness platforms. She was entering with a relatively short development timeline - she wanted to launch late November 2025, just months away. She needed sophisticated integration with music licensing systems to deliver the major-label hits that powered the energy in her classes. She needed professional video delivery infrastructure that could stream to millions of users across the world without buffering or quality issues. She needed robust payment systems that handled subscription billing across Apple App Store, Google Play, and direct web purchases. She needed a comprehensive content management system that allowed her growing team to manage 50 workouts across six modalities, recipes, gratitude prompts, and other content. She needed analytics systems that could measure engagement, retention, and revenue with precision. And she needed all of this to launch simultaneously across iOS and Android with production-grade quality that matched the expectations of someone with her reputation.
The business model innovation was equally important as the technical execution. NKO Club could not rely on the same model as traditional fitness apps - a basic subscription to access unlimited content. Toole wanted to build something more premium, more exclusive. The platform needed to support tiered subscription options, with premium and standard tiers offering different levels of content and features. It needed a Teacher Membership program that would allow other certified instructors to build their own presence within the NKO Club ecosystem - creating network effects and deepening engagement as the community expanded. The economics of this model were different from pure-software models: video production costs were substantial, music licensing costs were significant, and customer support costs grew with the user base. The unit economics had to work - the company needed to be sustainable at scale.
The competitive landscape Toole was entering was intense. Peloton, which had made her famous, was facing financial pressures and declining subscriber growth but still had millions of users. Apple Fitness Plus, backed by Apple's substantial resources, was marketing aggressively. Beachbody, Lululemon's Mirror, and dozens of other well-funded fitness apps were competing for women's attention and dollars. Toole's competitive advantage was her authentic personal brand, her community's loyalty, and her unique 360-degree wellness philosophy. But brands and philosophy alone could not overcome mediocre product execution or poor user experience. NKO Club had to deliver a product experience so smooth, intuitive, and engaging that it felt worth paying for, particularly to women considering paying for Peloton or Apple Fitness Plus simultaneously. The challenge was not just building a good fitness app - it was building one compelling enough that women would choose it over established competitors with larger marketing budgets and deeper resources.
The timeline pressure was intense. Toole had stepped away from Peloton in June 2024 with a one-year non-compete clause that would expire in June 2025. She wanted to launch NKO Club by November 2025 - leaving only five months post-non-compete to develop, test, and launch a comprehensive fitness platform. This meant that development had to begin before the non-compete ended, with careful attention to ensure nothing was built using Peloton intellectual property or knowledge. It meant that every aspect of the project - design, development, content production, and marketing - had to execute with precision and speed. There was no room for significant delays or major reworks. Success required exceptional coordination between product, engineering, content, and business teams.
Our Solution
Our partnership with Kendall Toole to build NKO Club represented an opportunity to create a comprehensive wellness platform that transcended traditional fitness app boundaries. We began with a deep immersion into Toole's philosophy and vision. "Never Knocked Out" was not simply a branding exercise - it reflected a genuine belief system rooted in resilience, mental health advocacy, and the power of community. This understanding became the north star for every product decision, technical choice, and feature priority. We designed and built NKO Club's mobile experience using Flutter for cross-platform development, enabling seamless deployment across iOS and Android from a single codebase. This approach was critical given the aggressive timeline - Flutter allowed us to build once and deploy to both major platforms efficiently without sacrificing native performance or user experience.
The app's architecture was organised around Kendall's 360-degree wellness philosophy, integrating movement, mindset, and nutrition into a cohesive experience rather than siloed features. The workout delivery system presented structured Programs alongside On-Demand sessions across six carefully selected modalities. Cycling provided the high-energy, music-driven workout that Kendall was famous for. Strength training built confidence and resilience through progressive resistance. Boxing provided an intense, cathartic release. Pilates offered core strength and mind-body connection. Stretching and breathwork provided recovery and mental fitness. Rather than overwhelming users with unlimited choice, we curated the modality mix intentionally - women could select their preferred workout type without scrolling through thousands of options. Programs provided progressive structure, ideal for women who wanted guided progression. On-Demand sessions provided flexibility for busy schedules or women who wanted to train spontaneously.
Music integration was fundamental to the NKO Club experience, but it presented unique technical and licensing challenges. We implemented Feed.fm's music streaming SDK to deliver curated, licensed commercial music directly within workouts. This was not background music or generic instrumental tracks - it was major-label hits across stations including pop-punk, 2000s throwbacks, hip-hop, EDM, and hard rock. The music had to be legally licensed, technically integrated so it played in sync with video, and commercially sustainable. Working with Feed.fm allowed NKO Club to offer the same energy and hit-driven experience that made Peloton's music integral to its classes, without the massive licensing infrastructure that Peloton had built. Users could feel Kendall's energy, hear the tracks that power her rides, and experience the full emotional resonance of her programming.
The mindset component - the element that truly differentiated NKO Club - was implemented through a daily gratitude journal system. We built a reflection feature that presented a rotating library of 90 reflection prompts, encouraging users to record three things they were grateful for each day. The system created a consistent ritual, a moment of intentional reflection that many users found as valuable as their physical workout. The prompts ranged from practical ("What did you accomplish today that you are proud of?") to deeply personal ("What challenged you today, and what did you learn?") to aspirational ("What would confidence feel like in your body today?"). This feature embodied Kendall's belief that mental fitness was as important as physical fitness, and that sustainable wellness required attention to both.
Nutrition support was implemented with sophistication and flexibility. We built a recipe system delivering adaptable, balanced recipes with complete macronutrient information. Rather than imposing a single nutrition philosophy, the system allowed users to enable or disable macro displays based on their preferences. Some women wanted detailed tracking. Others preferred to focus on balanced portions without obsessing over numbers. The system accommodated both. We implemented an automated grocery list builder that allowed users to add recipe ingredients directly to a shopping cart, generating organised shopping lists by store section. This reduced friction dramatically - instead of manually writing down ingredient lists, users could literally prepare for meals in minutes. The recipes themselves were professionally developed to ensure they were genuinely healthy and actually delicious, not the bland "fitness food" that populated many other apps.
Authentication and user management were built on Auth0 for secure authentication, supporting both email/password login and third-party sign-ins through Google and Apple accounts. This reduced friction at signup - users could be creating their account and accessing content within 30 seconds, without the friction of complex password creation. The implementation included proper data privacy and security throughout, with encryption protecting all sensitive user information and payment data.
The subscription billing system was architected to handle complexity whilst maintaining simplicity for end users. We integrated across Apple App Store, Google Play, and Stripe for web sign-ups, managing monthly and annual subscription plans with proper state management, renewal handling, and cancellation workflows. We also built the web signup flow and paywall independently, ensuring that users discovering NKO Club through marketing could subscribe directly from the web without needing to download the app first. This multi-channel approach maximised conversion - different users convert through different channels, and NKO Club needed to capture conversions across all pathways.
The React-based admin portal provided Kendall's growing team with the tools to manage the expanding content library. At launch, NKO Club had 50 workouts available and was adding new classes weekly. The admin system allowed trainers to upload video files, manage metadata, schedule releases, and track engagement metrics. It handled the complexity of managing content across six modalities, multiple trainers, and multiple languages. The system integrated tightly with the content delivery systems, ensuring that the moment content was published in the admin portal, it became available to users across all platforms simultaneously.
AWS infrastructure provided the foundation for scalability and reliability. NKO Club needed to be prepared for success - Kendall's massive following meant that launch day could bring hundreds of thousands of download attempts. The infrastructure was designed with auto-scaling capabilities that expanded capacity automatically as traffic increased. We implemented comprehensive monitoring and logging so the team could track system health in real-time and respond to any issues instantly. Performance testing was conducted extensively to ensure the app could handle the traffic spikes expected from launch week and during promotional pushes.
Firebase, New Relic, and Airbrake were implemented for performance monitoring, error detection, and application health visibility. These systems alerted the team to any issues - a crashed feature, degraded performance, or payment processing failures - within seconds so they could respond. We built dashboards that made critical metrics visible: number of active users, average session length, class completion rates, churn signals, and revenue. This allowed Kendall's team to understand the business impact of every product decision in real time.
Community safety and engagement features were built into the platform from day one. We implemented moderation tools, community guidelines, and reporting systems to maintain a positive, supportive environment. The "country club for misfits" philosophy meant that NKO Club's community culture was intentionally inclusive - women at any fitness level, any body type, any economic circumstance were welcomed. Content moderation and community management reflected this philosophy.
Launched on 19 November 2025, NKO Club represented far more than a successful product launch. It represented Kendall Toole's evolution from employee to entrepreneur, from instructor to platform builder. The app embodied her authentic philosophy - that wellness is holistic, that strength comes from showing up for yourself repeatedly, that community matters as much as classes, and that the journey toward fitness and resilience is inseparable from mental health work. The platform served her community - "the misfits, fighters, and dreamers" - with the tools and environment to show up for themselves day after day, never knocked out, always getting back up.
Our services included
Technical Breakdown
Built on AWS using Flutter for cross-platform mobile apps, React for admin portal, and integrated with Feed.fm for licensed music streaming, Vimeo for video delivery, and comprehensive payment systems across Apple, Google, and Stripe. Auth0 handles secure authentication whilst Firebase, New Relic, and Airbrake provide performance monitoring and error detection. The architecture supports Kendall's holistic wellness vision—uniting movement, mindset, and nutrition into a scalable ecosystem that grows with her community.