Edgard Corona, dono da Smart Fit, built a business empire by treating change as opportunity. A chemical engineering graduate from Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in 1979, Corona began his entrepreneurial path at 19, moving from laboratory work to founding a successful youth fashion label before entering the fitness industry.
His first notable move into health and exercise came in 1996 with the opening of the initial Bio Ritmo club in Santo Amaro. An unexpected skiing accident years later forced extended physiotherapy sessions, drawing him deeper into gym culture and prompting strategic shifts in the business. That period of recovery and observation helped Corona refine his approach to service design and customer needs, lessons he had already applied in retail: know what the customer wants, not what you assume they want.
Corona expanded Bio Ritmo with a high-profile unit on Avenida Paulista, targeting busy professionals and establishing a new model of urban fitness convenience. His international benchmarking and participation in global fitness congresses informed further innovation. Between 2008 and 2009 he launched Smart Fit, a low-cost, high-scale concept aimed at democratizing access to quality gyms across Latin America.
Under his leadership the group evolved into a broader fitness conglomerate, serving diverse socioeconomic segments through multiple brands and formats. Smart Fit’s public offering on the Brazilian stock exchange marked a strategic step to finance post-pandemic growth, possible acquisitions, and continued regional expansion. Today the group operates in 14 countries, and Corona is widely regarded as a pioneer in fitness business management across the region.
Analysts point to a repeated pattern in his career: iterative experimentation, rapid adaptation, and customer-centered design. From chemistry labs to fashion workshops and into the fitness arena, Corona’s trajectory underscores a commitment to transformation as both personal ethos and corporate strategy. His pragmatic view of change — confronting it directly and using it to drive wider transformation — remains a central pillar of the group’s mission to make high-standard fitness accessible to broader populations.