Business & Tech

Mansfield's Koko Fitclub and Fulfilling a Dream

Mansfield residents take dream of owning a business after 17 years of working.

The Koko Fit Club in Mansfield is a locally-owned franchise business, but it might not have started that way.

Owners and Mansfield residents Christine and Andrew Johnston were originally in the corporate world in Boston, but the stress of responsibilities between kids, commuting to Boston and staying healthy were just not for them.

“We had been corporate executives in Boston for 17 years,” Christine Johnston said.

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Andrew said that, despite working for Fortune 500 companies and Fidelity Investments over a 17- year successful career, he has always wanted to own his business.

“We began investigating it in the summer of 2010,” Andrew Johnston said. “A couple of the things that were really important to us was something that was much more local than what we had done in the past. We wanted a business that would allow us to be in the community that we lived in and provide something valuable to the community that we live in. Healthcare is such a big issue right now in our country, and at the end of the day one of the biggest problems is that people do not get enough exercise.”

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Christine said she was in the corporate world as well, but, more for her kids, wanted to work in a location that would reprieve her from the long commute to Boston.

“For me, I wanted to spend more time with my kids,” Christine Johnston said.

The couple said that, of all the businesses they looked into, the Koko Fitclub seemed like a good fit for them. It allowed them to stay close, be in town and provide a service to the local community.

“I had always wanted to own my own business, and I realized that it was kind of now or never,” Andrew Johnston said. “We just felt disconnected to the community where we lived. Commuting into Boston every day and having three young kids wasn’t working. We wanted to be more involved with what they were doing and more involved in the town that we lived and feel like more a part of it.”

Koko Fitclub is a digital workout station that records your strength and endurance initially, and every 12 workouts after that, and determines what you should next and how many reps of each exercise. Each member has a Koko Key, which is essentially a USB drive that stores all the personal fitness data of each member, and guides the user through his or her workout depending on the level of training they are at.

Andrew and Christine said that this was their fitness solution as well as their bread and butter.

“We went to Discovery Day, which is a corporate interview process, and as soon as we met the people there and talked to them about Koko smart training it was obvious that it was our fitness solution that we had been looking for forever and also that it was an awesome thing that we bring to everybody else as well.

Christine and Andrew opened their first club in Plainville in June of 2011, and then promptly opened their Mansfield location in September of that year. They just opened a Walpole location in December as well.


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