BODY-SOLID CELEBRATES 25th ANNIVERSARY
A year of celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the founding of Body-Solid culminated in a great party in late September. Almost 200 people enjoyed a beautiful fall evening on Chicago’s lakefront at the Adler Planetarium. Attending were guests from over 15 different countries. Entertainment was provided by musicians provided by Howl at the Moon with food catered in a Chicago theme with Chicago style pizza and hot dogs, a specially concocted “Chicago” cocktail (similar to a Manhattan), followed by desserts provided by Eli’s Cheesecake (based in Chicago) and local candy manufacturers Ferrara-Pan. Thanks to everyone who has contributed to making Body-Solid the 25 year success story that it is.

BODY-SOLID OPENS WAREHOUSE IN CHINA
Body-Solid has always enjoyed a strong international component as part of our customer base. The logistics of serving those overseas clients is complicated by the many moving parts and expenses of getting a product from our Chinese manufacturing facilities to these dealers. Typically, our larger dealers are able to order in container quantities from a single factory at pricing better than we can offer out of our US based warehouse due to lower transportation, customs, duty and other logistical costs. However our smaller international dealers have found it hard to take advantage of this due to minimum order quantities and other requirements of a full container program. To address this, Body-Solid has opened a warehouse in Nantong, China that will stock many of our most popular products for consolidation into LCL or container shipments offering flexibility not available to our customers previously. This is a limited program to start, however with success we hope to expand our stocking there to better serve our international customers.

BODY-SOLID PRODUCTS AWARDED EN957 CERTIFICATION
For years, we have all been familiar with the required product certifications for electrical equipment like treadmills. Typically these are tested and issued by third party authorities such as Underwriter’s Laboratories or similar. Now strength equipment is catching up with its more complex brothers with certifications of its own. While strength product certifications have existed for many years, they have in general been treated as voluntary standards to which manufactures should adhere. Increasingly, particularly in the EU, these standards are becoming more of a requirement, particularly in the commercial environment. Body-Solid has worked hard over the last year to review, analyze and test each of our pieces of equipment and we can now say that the majority of our products are certified under the EN957 standards – arguably the most commonly applied and restrictive of the strength equipment standards that exist. We have yet to see these standards in common use in the USA, however depending on the country and the institution involved, they are increasingly important in the EU. It is hard not to believe that the rest of the world will be far behind. If you need further information on our certifications, please contact your salesperson.