Saturday June 12, 2021, Scotland: Georgie Delaney, Co-Founder of The Great Outdoor Gym Company (TGO) and has been awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for her services to international trade and exports.
Georgie Delaney is the co-founder of family business The Great Outdoor Gym Company Ltd and has led on innovation and vision with an aim of making a difference to people and planet. Wholly made in the UK, TGO exports worldwide. With over 2000 outdoor gyms worldwide, TGO has since become an export champion delivering eco-friendly gyms to most of the major cities throughout the world. Georgie has led on developing outdoor gyms that generate power, safety standards, work on the Olympics, COP21, COP22 and now a whole new digital side to the business helping to create healthy people and planet.
“This is an incredible honour and I am extremely grateful to have received this recognition. I’d like to thank the Department for International Trade, in particular, our representative Andrew Mapstone. I’m hugely committed to addressing both health and environmental issues and I’m lucky to work with an enthusiastic team who share these values. Hopefully this is an inspiration for other businesses to focus on having both a social and environmental impact to create great business and great export.
“I’d also like to thank my co-founders, my husband Matt Delaney and late father John Tarrant who was very proud of us manufacturing in the UK. He mentored me about good business ethics which led to some of the good work we did in establishing a standard for outdoor gyms where none existed and how doing the right thing is good for business. I also want to thank my mother and grandmother for supporting my education and being the first generation to go to University in the family, alongside my sister.”
- Georgie Delaney MBE, Co-Founder of The Great Outdoor Gym Company (TGO)
- Matt Delaney, Co Founder of TGO said ‘I am incredibly proud for Georgie to be honoured in such a way. Georgie really is the heart and soul of the business and has been instrumental in all of TGO’s products that we now sell globally. She is also the ethical conscious of the business and ensures that we do the right thing for people and planet over profit.’
Georgie Delaney studied at University College London and the Milan Politecnico and gained a First Class Honours Degree in Industrial Design and Italian in 2004. She joined the Communications Department of Sport England in 2005 and supported projects including their national fitness campaign ‘Everyday Sport’.
In 2007, Georgie set up the Great Outdoor Gym Company (TGO) with her father and husband. Georgie worked alongside safety experts and engineers to create the world’s first outdoor gym designed to safety standards. Georgie incorporated Inclusive fitness, playground safety standards and indoor training standards into this first range of outdoor gyms.
In 2008, Georgie designed an Olympic legacy gym for adidas. Adidas sponsored the project and TGO rolled out 70 of these giant outdoor gym spaces bringing legacy of the Games to ordinary communities across England.
TGO’s products have helped people get more active and tackle lifestyle diseases through movement. It is estimated that over 10 million benefit from TGO’s gym installations. Their efficacy is backed up by independent research. In Dudley, TGO gyms were the single most effective intervention in Dudley’s Healthy Towns Programme, helping to get more people into sustained physical activity.
Between 2008 and 2012, Georgie led the innovation of TGO’s energy generating range. This range converts people’s workouts into Watts. The innovation attracted much international interest and TGO has begun to export its product to Australia, Singapore, UAE, Malaysia, Mauritius and many other countries.
Georgie was invited to the Global Climate Change Conference COP21 in Paris as a Pioneer to showcase the energy generating range. In 2015, TGO was then commissioned by the United Nations to install an energy gym in Marrakech as part of COP22.
Georgie has led the business on sustainability, incorporating tree planting for every piece of gym equipment installed supporting charities such as NHS Forest and Eden Reforestation Project. Georgie also led a project with Terracycle and Right Guard, creating a gym out of recycled aerosol cans – installing one into the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
Georgie recently created TGO’s innovation of smart activator screens pioneering the world’s first outdoor gym with free classes in slough. In 2020-21, Georgie has been working on the development of an innovative new digital health and well-being experience called TGO-Activate.com, which will be officially unveiled on the 16th June at the opening of London’s St Thomas’ Hospital’s new outdoor gym called The Movement Garden.
