Whoop, a fitness service technology company, has been growing incredibly quickly. They needed a logistics partner - they chose Arvato - to help them scale their supply chain to meet this challenge.

When people hear “fitness device,” they think of a Fitbit, Garmin Watch, or Apple Watch. These wristwatches display the time, along with things like heart rate, distance traveled, and daily steps.

Whoop is different. It does not display time. In fact, the device displays nothing. The sensors collect fitness information, which is then displayed in an app on a smartphone or computer. You can wear this small device on your wrist or slip it into a small pocket in a Whoop shirt, shorts, or underwear.

This premium-priced service began as a solution for serious athletes. The company’s founder, Will Ahmed, was a collegiate athlete who wanted to know how training impacted his body. He was prone to overtraining, missing sleep, and not prioritizing recovery, and thus he was not getting the results he wanted.

The Whoop device doesn’t just display health metrics; it puts them into context. They measure resting heart rate, heart rate variability, steps, heart rate zones, strength activity time, calories burned, and more. With those measures, it can provide insight into sleep quality, recovery, and strain.

You can get Whoop and try it out for free for a month. The app turns a person’s sensor data into personalized advice. Surprisingly, for example, it recommended that I go to bed later to improve my sleep quality.

The solution does more than optimize training. They argue it helps people feel better and make better health choices. In short, while the solution’s initial target market was athletes, their current market is far larger.

The company is headquartered in Boston. They have more than 1,000 employees. The company has raised over $900 million in venture capital. The last round was $575 million in March 2026, valuing the company at over $10 billion.

Manufacturing is done in Asia with contract manufacturers in Vietnam and China. Whoop does the supply planning for those CMs. A procurement and materials program management team ensures their manufacturing partners have what they need to meet projected demand.

From there, the product is forwarded to four different Arvato warehousing locations globally. Arvato handles all outbound fulfillment. These distribution centers are in Sydney, Dubai, Dorin, Germany, and Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin.

These warehouses ship finished products, including three core hardware stock-keeping units and roughly 500 other complementary SKUs. Those other products include watch bands, chargers, garments, and other items that let users tailor the product to their needs. Whoop ships those finished goods to 56 different nations.

Marie Fodness, the assistant vice president of operations at Whoop, explained that when she joined about three years ago, Whoop used three third-party logistics providers operating six facilities globally. “I was being asked to scale into new markets as quickly as possible,” Ms. Fodness explained, “and be able to support our growth internationally.

Since 2023, our international market has grown over 11x!” “We would not have been able to do that at the same speed and at the same cost as if we had continued our previous relationships” with smaller, regional 3PLs.

About 60% of their membership is international. The word “membership” is important. This is not a one-time device sale. Customers must pay an annual fee to keep the service. Customers must be kept happy, or they leave.

Whoop ran a request for proposal with seven different global logistics providers. Arvato, Fodness said, “was very clearly the frontrunner” based on their technology and understanding of the high-tech industry.

Arvato belongs to the German media company Bertelsmann. Besides media, Bertelsmann has arms for financial services, and Arvato provides logistics services. Roughly 97% of Arvato’s revenue comes from external clients rather than from providing logistics for Bertelsmann. Arvato has approximately 21,000 employees worldwide and generates nearly $4 billion in global revenue. The company currently operates 108 warehouse facilities worldwide, including 25 in the U.S.

Arvato is organized by verticals, including the technology sector where clients include Google, Apple, Microsoft, Logitech, and Samsung. “Usually, we don’t do fulfillment activities only in one region for them,” according to Mitat Aydindag, president of Arvato’s Tech vertical, “but in multiple regions.”

One common need in this vertical is the ability to scale. For example, Mr. Aydindag’s career at Arvato began 25 years ago when a key contract included Microsoft for the Xbox product line. This product had a huge surge in sales. “We are a German company, but (culturally) we are not German at all.” From a mindset perspective,” Ayindag added, “we act very fast with urgency.” The “culture fit” with Whoop was immediate.

Whoop agrees. As one clear sign of Arvato’s investment in the relationship, “their executive team, their entire executive team, actually now wears our product and uses it,” Ms. Fodness said. The service allows users to make their readings public to their chosen community. During the high-stress product launch, all the Arvato operations managers working with Whoop shared their data with Fodness, and she could see “what the launch was like for them.”

The Whoop Arvato Relationship

“Our goal was to roll out incredibly quickly and to make a change to our network as quickly as possible,” Fodness explained. They implemented three new facilities and closed five in the 12 weeks from when the contract was signed until the warehouses were shipping. This is incredibly fast. “They met our pace and allowed us to be in that new network before the 2024 holiday season.”

Winding down 3PL relationships does not always go smoothly. “We didn’t see an overwhelming amount of pushback from the existing providers. They understood the scale that we were seeing. The biggest friction point we saw was consolidating inventory,” she explained. “How did we make sure that it was as seamless as possible?” They did not want any stockouts as they consolidated product into the new warehouses. “But they were all on cyclical contracts, and we were able to manage that wind down pretty smoothly.”

Fodness felt Arvato provided their A team, skilled at executing complex programs. Initially, the focus was international fulfillment. The US Arvato facility did not join the network until 2025. New tariffs and instability at the US-Mexico border necessitated moving the business away from a 3PL with a warehouse in Mexico.

If launching the international warehouse sites in 12 weeks was challenging, the US launch was daunting. Whoop was bringing out their Generation 5 products in April/early May of 2025. This would cause a much larger surge in shipments than rapid sales growth did. Garrett Bastable, Whoop’s chief of operations, said the Gen Five launch was by far the company’s biggest. It required forward-deploying between 800,000 to a million devices across the global network. This transition had to happen in 8 weeks!

To support the launch, the U.S. distribution center was operating 24/7. They surged to 2.5 times capacity for four weeks.

That dramatic increase in throughput still wasn’t enough to meet the huge surge in sales that occurred at launch. But the systems integration between Whoop and Arvato gave customers detailed visibility of when deliveries would occur.

“Think about all the (sales) channels, and the staging of that, the secrecy around it,” Mr. Bastable said. “Arvato was at the nexus of that.”

I asked both Arvato and Whoop if robotics was part of what allowed them to scale. The answer was “no.” Bolted-down automation, like robotic shuttle systems, works best when the throughput is consistent. For cobots or man-to-goods robots, which can scale, the turnaround time was too short. The robotic providers couldn’t deliver them that quickly.

In the supply chain arena, you can never escape cost. “In a world where all costs continue to go up. Arvato is helping us manage this through efficiencies and optimizations,” Bastable, the COO, said.

But customer service is critical for growth. On average globally, with the new network, Whoop has reduced delivery time by five days. In the United States, deliveries occur within one to three days in most cases. Globally, Arvato is performing at 99% on its service level agreement.

Whoop measures perfect orders. This metric combines on-time shipments and the quality of communication with members. 94% of the time, they achieve the perfect order. Whoop wants the perfect order metric to reach 99%. They are making technology investments they believe will help them improve.

Strong customer service is key to growth. For Whoop, the free trial program helps drive growth. Refurbished units help power this program. They inspect returned units, test for quality defects, clean them, and then reuse them.

Growth is also driven by expansion into new countries and channels. A global partnership with a strong 3PL is critical here. “They are able to combine the scale of Arvato as a logistics provider,” Fodness explained, “and Bertelsmann as a global publishing company, to have incredibly powerful relationships with freight forwarders, with carriers, with local distributing companies. We’ve been able to leverage their partnerships to enable global growth.”

Successful fulfillment has helped the company to continue to grow. From 2025 to 2026, Whoop saw over 100% growth in bookings and over 85% growth in new members.