Fitness tracker sales don't warm up with fitness apparel sales

Fitness trackers and fitness apparel have become ubiquitous in society. Yoga pants and athletic shorts have become the go-to fashion item for men and women alike, and fitness trackers have become a must-have wrist accessory, supplanting the watch.

Conventional wisdom would have us think that those who buy fitness apparel also buy fitness trackers but that’s not necessarily the case. According to data from Slice Intelligence, people who own a fitness tracker spend around 10 percent less on fitness apparel than those who go sans fitness tracker.

There has been a little shakeup recently in the fitness tracker world with the revelation that Jawbone, at one time a major player in the space, is going out of business. That may allow for other fitness tracking companies to grab a little bit of the market, but the fact of the matter is, the big players seem to be going strong. Apple, as is expected, generates the most revenue from their fitness tracker—housing it in a $250 watch helps—followed by Fitbit, Garmin and Samsung.

Shoppers that buy Fitbit, Garmin, or Samsung fitness trackers tend to buy most of their fitness apparel from Under Armour while Apple fitness tracker customers buy most of their fitness apparel from Nike. As big as Samsung is, and as ubiquitous as Garmin’s ads are, they lag pretty far behind the big two with each accounting for less than 10 percent of sales in the category.

Though they don’t lead with any of the top four fitness tracker brands, Adidas proves once again that slow and steady wins the race. While Under Armour and Athleta bounce around in the top five, Adidas consistently sits at the second or third most bought fitness apparel brand by fitness tracker buyers, bringing in around 22 percent of all fitness apparel sales among tracker owners.

Fitness apparel would seemingly see no gender but all of the top five fitness apparel brands we looked at are bought primarily by women. Only Nike and Under Armour saw anywhere close to an even split between the genders.

While the gender skew is not as extreme as it is with fitness apparel, the majority of fitness tracker buyers are men. The one notable exception is Fitbit's female majority of 62 percent. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise when we remember that Fitbit buyers are also big Athleta buyers and Athleta buyers are 90 percent female.

With a panel of 5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.