SnapFit corporate fitness platform video

Snapchat already spent money on employee wellness before SnapFit existed. The trouble was that the spend was fragmented. Employees had generic gym memberships they rarely used and third-party fitness apps with no connection to company culture. People worked out alone, with no social accountability. Instructors had no direct relationship with the employees they were meant to coach. Resources differed from one office to the next, and HR had no way to see engagement or measure what the wellness budget was returning.

Chiheb S., Director of Operations at Fairfax Training, a premium fitness studio in Los Angeles, brought the project to Frenchy Digital. That made it a three-party build. Snapchat supplied the requirements, the branding guidelines and the enterprise security bar. Fairfax Training supplied the fitness programming, the challenges and the instructors who would teach live. Frenchy Digital handled design and full-stack development across mobile, web and backend, plus project management through to launch.

The requirements document ran past one hundred items, but ten of them shaped the product. The platform had to feel like a Snapchat product, with Snap Yellow as the primary colour. Access had to run through single sign-on with a corporate @snap.com address, with no public sign-up at all. Classes had to stream live in HD with a visible live-now indicator and real-time interaction, alongside an on-demand library covering beginner to advanced sessions of ten to sixty minutes.

The social layer mattered as much as the video. Employees needed chat, company-wide challenges, leaderboards and a way to share achievements, plus direct messaging with Fairfax instructors for questions, form checks and motivation. HR needed an admin dashboard showing participation rates, engagement and the most popular classes. Scheduling had to sync with Apple Calendar and Google Calendar and work with Apple Watch, and the whole system had to serve a global workforce across time zones.

Discovery backed those priorities with evidence. Interviews covered Snapchat HR, Fairfax Training and Snapchat IT security, and five employee focus groups ran across Los Angeles, New York and London. The findings were consistent: employees wanted live classes rather than only recordings, team challenges, short workouts of fifteen to thirty minutes, and a mobile-first experience.

The employee app is React Native, shipping to iOS and Android from one codebase. The choice was about cost and consistency: one shared codebase for both platforms rather than two native teams maintaining the same features twice. React Native CLI was used instead of Expo because the build needed native modules. HR and instructors work in a separate web dashboard.

The backend is Node.js with Express and MongoDB, with Redis for sessions and caching. Snapchat sign-on runs over OAuth 2.0, and access is role-based across three roles: employee, instructor and admin. Socket.io carries everything that has to feel instant, including live class chat, instructor typing indicators and leaderboard updates during a challenge. Video streams with adaptive bitrate at 1080p, 720p and 480p through a CDN, so an employee in London gets the same class as one in Los Angeles without buffering.

Security was held to an enterprise standard because it had to pass Snapchat IT review. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt, tokens rotate, login attempts are rate limited, all API traffic runs over TLS 1.3, sensitive database fields are encrypted, and every data access is written to an audit log. The architecture was designed around a SOC 2 compliance path, with GDPR handled for employees in the EU.

Six people built SnapFit: four developers and two designers, with leadership on top. The developers split into a lead mobile developer on React Native, two full-stack developers covering the backend, the web dashboard, the database, video and real-time features, and a junior developer on frontend support and testing. One designer owned the mobile app and the other owned the admin dashboard. The work took eight months from discovery to launch.

Design went through three review rounds with the Snapchat design team and two with Fairfax Training, then user testing with fifteen Snap employees. The decisions that came out of that were practical ones: bottom navigation that works with one thumb, card-based browsing of workouts, a full-screen video player, and a dark theme so the screen does not glare during a workout.

If you are weighing a corporate wellness platform of your own, the lesson from SnapFit is that the video player is the easy part. What makes employees come back is the social structure around it: live classes with a start time, challenges that put colleagues on the same team, and an instructor who answers a message. What makes the buyer renew is the dashboard that proves people used it.

The walkthrough above shows the finished product. The case study covers each phase in detail, including the design system, the API structure and the security work, and it is the place to start if you are scoping something similar.