Jane Fonda

Pioneered home fitness as a packaged media product: turned a 1981 bestseller and her exercise studio into Jane Fonda's Workout (1982), a buy-to-own VHS priced at $59.95 when home video was rental-only. ~17M copies across 23 titles; drove VCR adoption and funded other ventures.

Jane Fonda is an actor and entrepreneur who pioneered the home-fitness video category with Jane Fonda's Workout (1982). Building on her 1979 Beverly Hills exercise studio and the 1981 bestseller Jane Fonda's Workout Book, she partnered with home-video distributor Stuart Karl to release the routine on VHS as a buy-to-own product rather than a rental. It became the best-selling home video of its era, selling roughly 17 million copies across a 23-title series through 1995, and is credited with helping drive consumer VCR adoption. The Workout assets were owned by the Campaign for Economic Democracy, which received the profits, making the franchise a deliberate funding engine for her other ventures. She remains active and recounts the period in her 2005 memoir My Life So Far.