Why we built Volt Box in NEOM — and what it means for KSA fitness

The most common question we get from international media is: "why NEOM?" The implicit second question is "why Saudi Arabia at all?" Both are fair, and the answer is the same.

The bet

In 2023, when we were planning Volt Box, the global EMS market was concentrated in Germany, the UK, and Italy. The technology was mature, the manufacturers were established, and the customer base was largely European wellness clinics and athletic clubs.

Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 was changing the country's health and wellness landscape faster than any other market we looked at. New cities being built ground-up. Massive investment in personal health infrastructure. A young, growing, tech-comfortable population. And — critically — a cultural shift where premium fitness was becoming aspirational rather than niche.

NEOM specifically had something unusual: a population of early adopters living in a city designed for wellbeing. People who would try EMS not because their doctor told them to, but because they wanted to. That's a different customer than the German rehab market.

Why studios first

We could have launched online-first, selling the suit straight to consumers. We chose studios because EMS works better as a learned practice than an unboxed product.

In studios, we get to do something an ecommerce site can't: watch someone's first EMS session, dial in their intensity, answer the questions they didn't know to ask. We see the moment when their body starts responding. We learn what doesn't make sense in our marketing copy when a real person is sitting in front of it.

Most of our suit customers today are people who started in our studios. They learned EMS works for their body, then bought the suit because they wanted to keep training without the booking friction.

KAUST, Jeddah, Riyadh — and the home suit

KAUST came second. It's a research community with high uptake of new wellness technology — once we set up at Al Khozama, the demand was immediate.

Jeddah and Riyadh came as mobile training: trainers travelling to clients' homes and gyms. The economics of a fixed studio in those cities are harder, and clients there valued the convenience of in-home training over the studio experience anyway.

The Onyx Suit — sold for home use anywhere in the Kingdom — was the natural conclusion. If you're in Tabuk, Dammam, Madinah, Mecca, or any of dozens of smaller cities, the suit gives you the same training a client in Jeddah gets, on your own time, in your own home.

What we've learned from KSA clients

A few things that surprised us:

Saudi clients value time efficiency more than almost any market we've looked at. The 20-minute claim isn't a soft sell — it's the primary draw. Clients here are busy, often running households or businesses, and the math of "20 minutes vs 60 minutes at the gym" lands hard.

Older clients (50+) adopt faster than we expected. Once one person in a friend group tries EMS and reports back positively, three more book within a month. Word of mouth is the dominant marketing channel here.

Female-trainer demand is high. We added female trainers to every team in the first year and have been at full capacity for those slots ever since. We're hiring more.

Couples and families training together is bigger here than in our European reference markets. That's why the Partner and Friendship bundles exist — they're responding to a real demand we kept hearing about.

What's next

More studios. Specifically, we're looking at Riyadh and Dammam for fixed studio locations in 2026/2027. The mobile model has worked, but a permanent space lets us run group sessions, corporate wellness contracts, and onboarding workshops at scale.

Better app. The Onyx App today is good for running preset programs and tracking workouts. The next version will personalise programs based on your individual response data — adjusting intensity, volume, and recovery automatically.

Local partnerships. We're working with KSA-based physiotherapists, sports doctors, and wellness clinics to integrate EMS into rehab and longevity protocols. The home suit makes us the obvious supplier for clinic-prescribed home use.

And — eventually — a Volt Box presence in NEOM's next phase as the city builds out. We'll be there.

A note to clients reading this

Most of what Volt Box has become has been shaped by clients telling us what they want and don't want. The product roadmap, the pricing structure, the bundle naming, the way we run sessions — almost none of it was on the original plan. It came from listening.

If you've been a client over the past few years and you've sent us feedback, complaints, suggestions, or questions — thank you. The company is better for it.

Train with us at NEOM, KAUST, or via mobile in Jeddah and Riyadh, or order an Onyx Suit for delivery anywhere in the Kingdom.