Wahoo: 2 Stories – Rebranding & new Route Share

I’ve stumbled across both of these somewhat by accident today, so here goes.

Digital Platform Rebranding

Wahoo recently announced the purchase of RGT and almost immediately it seemed that Wahoo’s digital platforms, Wahoo RGT and SYSTM, became united under the Wahoo X subscription coverall.

There is new branding and the new branding seems to have crept further afield in the Wahoo ecosystem. Perhaps we are in the midst of a full corporate re-branding programme?

The image above, I think, cleverly shows the “>” and “<” chevrons overlaid with each system’s name that join to become the “X” in Wahoo X. It looks good and I think it works well. The chevrons, of course, are also found elsewhere – on the Wahoo KICKR ROLLR flywheels as shown below and reviewed here. So the logo and chevrons develop something already existing in the brand.

That’s all well and good and was public domain info last week.

However the chevrons also now appear on both app stores for the ELEMNT app, albeit in a different orientation.

Other than being digital, I don’t really see where the ELEMNT app comes into the merger last week.

Even the Wahoo RGT remote control app gets in on the game with a further, even more, imaginative use of the new chevrons. This might be taking things a little too far but still looks nice.

So it seems that Wahoo’s digital presence is being entirely rebranded along the lines of the selected imagery, above.

I’ve asked Wahoo for comment.

It will also be interesting to see if this branding makes it onto the hardware. I think I might have an issue if it does. Garmin, Wahoo and others keep their on-device branding just to their name. If Wahoo were to add a multi-coloured chevron to my ELEMNT, I’m not sure I’d be happy. Add it to the KICKR Trainers? Yes, do that. But add it to my ELEMNT?…No thank you

Wahoo Route Share

Released: 3 May 2022

I vaguely remember that Garmin devices can tap one another and share routes ahead of your Sunday morning group ride. That sounds good, though I’ve never tried it.

I’ve persuaded (almost) everyone on our Sunday morning group ride to use Wahoo ELEMNTs and everyone is tech-happy as a result. Never has there been cursing along the lines of “S£$%t, my Wahoo’s just lost my ride”. Garmin EDGEs seemed to do that in the past but not so with our combined Wahoo experience.

Anyway, as a group we don’t seemed that organised when it comes to sharing the Sunday route on the evening before. The route seems to always be on RwGPS ‘somewhere’ but we don’t necessarily all take the initiative to actually look for it and favourite it. I suspect there are some of the group that don’t even have RwGPS accounts! Although, anonymously, we all have Strava accounts. During my route-less Sunday rides, I follow someone else until I find a road that I’m familiar with and then ask ‘How long is this hill?’. Off we go.

How to get it to work…it’s easy

If you update your ELEMNT app you should now be able to send an existing route to lots of other people via various apps and methods. Here is the screenflow from my Wahoo Bolt 2 where I find this year’s new Ride London Route, already synced from RwGPS. Next, I push it to the WhatsApp group we have just for those of us going on the Ride London. You can send it to other places too of course…AirDrop could be an interesting option if you all have iPhones present at the start of a ride.

Then when you receive the FIT file you choose to open it with the ELEMNT app (not the Wahoo app nor the SYSTM app). Voila.

I’m sure you could do something very similar before but I think Wahoo has just tidied this up a little.

Thoughts

I’ll report back if there is more branding coming other than to Wahoo’s digital platform.

As far as the “new” route sharing goes, I should probably say that I prefer some super-synchronised generic catch all solution. But I don’t. It’s kinda OK like this and just takes a few seconds. The samrt bits were already there when your starred/favourited routes on RwGPS/Strava simply magiced their way to your device. This just makes sharing them a tad easier.