This Alberta mountain town plays a big role in the fitness watch craze

In a small Alberta town, an eclectic group of engineers and athletes are helping to fuel the explosive growth of fitness watches and wearables.

Just off the highway en route to the Rocky Mountains, the Cochrane headquarters of Garmin Canada is where the company develops the technology that pulls biometric data out of a person’s wrist and plunks it into their watch.

These days, there’s plenty of demand for that. Sales of fitness tracking devices are up, and south of the border, U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has floated a vision of the future where every American is using a wearable within the next four years.

Garmin makes everything from bike computers to GPS devices for boats and airplanes, but has carved out a niche for itself among athletes and runners with a wide-ranging catalogue of ultra-specific sport watches and wearables.

The company’s latest earnings, released this week, saw its revenue from fitness devices climb 30 per cent in the latest quarter and raised its 2025 revenue growth estimate for the fitness segment. The stock dipped slightly Wednesday as broader sales came in a little light, and its outdoor segment saw a year-over-year decline.

“It’s doing really well,” said Ivan Feinseth, partner and director of research at Tigress Financial Partners in New York, who sees the current stock dip as a buying opportunity.

But growing in a particular sector means pressure to keep it up. The company, which has built out its Canadian footprint in recent years, needs to keep coming up with new iterations of its devices while fending off lawsuits, staying ahead of the competition and keeping customers interested, especially when a slowing economy has many tightening their spending.

Garmin Canada started as another company altogether: Dynastream Innovations. In 1998, four engineers in a Cochrane garage started the company with a basic device that could clip to a person’s shoe and tell them how fast they were running and how far they’d gone.

In those days, said Dynastream co-founder Jim Rooney, if somebody wanted that information, their only option was to get in the car and drive their running route with an eye on the odometer.

From there, the company had to figure out how to get that data into a watch — and to convince people that a watch was worth wearing.

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“People had stopped wearing watches; they used their phones for everything,” said Rooney, who is now managing director for Garmin Canada. “We had to give people a good reason to put those back on their wrist again and use them.”

For years, Rooney said, Dynastream made products for other major players, like Suunto, Adidas and Timex. Garmin went from being the company’s biggest competitor to being its biggest customer, said Rooney, and ultimately acquired Dynastream in 2006.

Dynastream became Garmin Canada in 2018. Since then, the company’s Canadian headquarters has undergone a massive expansion to a three-storey building in Cochrane that employs a staff of about 280 people.

Despite its growth, Rooney said they’ve chosen to keep their home base near the mountains so its many product testers can easily jet off to the mountains to try out the latest running or biking device.

Whether you’re an ultramarathoner or a casual jogger, interest in fitness devices is ramping up.

According to market research firm Circana, U.S. year-to-date sales of fitness trackers are up 88 per cent compared to last year and are expected to keep climbing.

The devices are also getting a boost from people using their workplace health spending accounts to buy them, a trend that analysts think is likely to continue.

“The health-care industry is gradually transitioning from seeing their purpose in life as addressing people's illnesses to trying to incent wellness,” said David MacGregor, an analyst with Longbow Research, in an interview earlier this month.

He said there is some speculation the U.S. is eyeing legislation that would allow people to expense these watches without a doctor’s note.

“If that happens, then that total available market is going to expand dramatically.”

As with any company that makes consumer products, Garmin’s most pressing challenge is figuring out how to come up with new iterations of its devices to keep customers coming back.

At Gord’s Running Store, a longtime staple in Calgary, salesperson Nigel Lauchlan said they don’t stock Garmins anymore. While he believes the company is currently leading the pack as the most popular device among runners, he said there are plenty of other options available.

“We can sell people the same thing for $400 less,” said Lauchlan, who himself wears a Polar brand running watch.

The company also doesn’t make smart rings — a category that’s driving a lot of growth in the broader fitness wearable market these days.

A recent lawsuit from fitness-tracking app Strava over alleged patent infringement and breach of contract presented a PR challenge. For a short period of time, the spat led to a lot of online buzz among runners and cyclists, though it was recently dropped.

Finally, the state of the economy could pose another hurdle. The U.S. and Canada have been teetering on the verge of recession, though so far the company has managed to convince people to keep shelling out for their fitness watches.

“It’s just not clear how far into that experience Garmin could remain resilient,” said MacGregor with Longbow Research.

But in a crowded marketplace, Garmin has set its sights on the real outdoor nerds. Whereas Apple, for example, has a few different watches aimed at everyday fitness lovers and more serious runners, Garmin has dozens of different devices aimed at specific sports with niche data points and an ultra-long battery life.

“If you're really a running enthusiast, cycling enthusiast [or], now, a horse enthusiast, you're going to favour Garmin,” said Feinseth with Tigress Financial Partners.

Rooney couldn’t say what particular projects the company is pursuing next, but said it’s paying attention to both form and function.

One possible area of growth? The animal kingdom.

Feinseth noted that owners of horses regularly spend thousands on animal care, making the company’s new equine wellness tracker a relative bargain at $840.

“Believe it or not, rodeos are a big growth spectator sport,” he said in an interview earlier this month.

“When you're out there riding that horse, trying to rope that cow, that calf, you're going to want a Garmin tail monitor.”