NordicTrack is a fitness brand headquartered in Logan, Utah. It was founded in Chaska, Minnesota, in 1975.
NordicTrack was built to win a ski race against a Swedish friend. Ed Pauls, an engineer in Chaska, Minnesota, usually got home after dark, and in 1975 he built a ski machine in his garage to train on. Several of the first ones were branded Nordic Jock. NordicTrack is now run from Logan, Utah, where it landed after a bankruptcy.
Ed and Florence Pauls ran it on cash and never borrowed money while they owned it. Florence, the business manager, oversaw phone sales, which is how each ad got judged. The ads were mostly walls of text in Smithsonian and The New Yorker. Their son Glenn estimates the family sold half a million machines before the sale.
CML Group bought it for $24 million in 1986, and sales reached $455 million in 1994. In November 1998 NordicTrack filed for bankruptcy, and ICON Health & Fitness of Logan paid $9.5 million for its patents and trademarks.
ICON, renamed iFIT in 2021, began in 1977 as Weslo, a Cache Valley import business whose first fitness product was the mini-trampoline. The machine built to beat a Swedish friend now belongs to a company that started in fitness with something you bounce on.
In 2009 NordicTrack introduced the incline trainer, a treadmill that tilts up to a 40 percent grade.
There's a NordicTrack in my basement and I actually use it. Simple, and it folds up nicely.
Alex
