WeightWatchers uses Axios HQ to keep a team of 5,000 informed, inspired, and connected.
Where are they now — WeightWatchers 2025 update
Jump to read WeightWatchers’ original case study further down this page. Recently, we caught up with Internal Comms Lead Claire Holland and Employee Experience Manager Jinny Lee to hear how things have been going since that original story. A few of their thoughts are below.
After the org-wide success of “The Bite,” a weekly communication for corporate staff sent through Axios HQ, WeightWatchers’ team established their next recurring newsletter:
- “On Point,” sent weekly to 3,000+ hourly employees in markets around the world, covering critical company updates as well as essential job tools — like new trainings and guides. “It’s more intuitive, clearer, more direct, more succinct — all the things communicators want to drive, we've been hearing from our readers. That’s a win.”
Why Axios HQ is their force-multiplier: “I've been in corporate comms my entire career, and to really do it well and thoughtfully, it requires a lot of hours in the day to sit down and write well. Sometimes you just need a shortcut because we are all being asked to be more efficient and resourceful. Axios HQ and Smart Brevity are that extra muscle to get things across the finish line and take information from one source and flip it to sound more approachable, more succinct, clear, and more direct.”
How they track comms success: “The biggest metric is, ‘How would people react if we got rid of our newsletters? People would feel like there is a missing piece to their week in terms of just being informed. We try to make it a roundup of everything that's happening the week prior or coming up, and it just punctuates the week.”
WeightWatchers story, as of 2024
The challenge: WeightWatchers was doing a health check on its own internal comms. They’d been using an internal messaging board but found it clunky and overwhelming. As a global team, they needed staff comms to better reflect a global mindset, spotlighting their community, markets, and teams' successes. They also had to deliver their news and stories in a consistent way that staff could read, revisit and relate to. It had to be:
- Direct: Internal updates were hard to follow. WeightWatchers needed a straightforward format that communicated priorities to all employees in a digestible way.
- Unified: With multiple collaborators supporting staff comms, WeightWatchers had to ensure its style, tone, and voice were consistent and engaging for readers.
The solution: WeightWatchers uses Axios HQ to write and send multiple editions of The Bite. One version gets sent to corporate readers weekly and features important initiatives, team achievements, employee highlights, and more. Another version goes to global employees monthly — keeping them aligned no matter where they are. With open rates as high as 80%, The Bite is now the blueprint for WeightWatchers’ internal comms — and they’ve launched additional series with the same style and format.
💭 Anna Paskow, Employee Experience Senior Lead:
- On Axios HQ: "People underestimate how much time it takes to write communications. Messaging boards and social intranets can be a firehose of information, and hard to extract what’s important. I’ve struggled with past tools like Marketo and Mailchimp. Axios HQ makes team communication the easiest possible.”
- On Smart Brevity®: “Our employees have never seen anything like Smart Brevity. With The Bite, they feel represented and are reminded why WeightWatchers is a great place to work. It’s all about engagement, motivation, and recognizing top tier work when it happens. When you do it right, people are blown away.”
How it works: WeightWatchers created a simple but effective content calendar to ensure each edition of The Bite includes the company’s most essential updates. Once their lineup is set, collaborators log in and contribute their updates — making editing fast and efficient. It’s also creating a content flywheel. Now that a half-dozen WeightWatchers newsletters are crafted and delivered using Axios HQ, Anna and her team can pull stories from other updates, tailor them for The Bite, and save even more time.
🧠 Anna’s words of encouragement:
- “People need to see Axios HQ to understand it. I created a sample of what The Bite would look like using Smart Brevity that really impressed upper management. Our new CEO even said, ‘This is amazing!’ Try it yourself because then you understand what it takes.”
- Make your communications “simple, repeatable, scalable. That involves asking for contributors from across the company. It involves mixing evergreen content with timely news that you can use again and again. It means coming up with series that you can continue — and also leveraging existing content within the company.”
WeightWatchers earned Axios HQ's 2024 Best-in-Class award for Best All-Staff. See our other award winners: