Are long-term gym memberships a thing of the past? Gone are the days of commitments and contracts. Now, with ClassPass, clients can experience a wide variety of fitness options without committing to a long-term membership.
Through ClassPass, participants receive access to some of the best boutique fitness classes including cycling, Pilates, yoga, dance, martial arts and more for only $99 per month. Members can take as many classes as they would like during the month, but are restricted to only three visits per month to the same studio.
As a dancer, Payal Kadakia, the CEO and co-founder of ClassPass, always strived to stay active, but she became annoyed with the process of finding dances classes to take in New York City.
“I was miserably frustrated by the experience of searching on multiple websites, not knowing what class was right and then spending more time searching for a class than in the class itself,” said Kadakia. “I really wanted to help other people connect with the active lifestyle that they should be living every single day.”
ClassPass first launched in June 2013, featuring around 20 fitness studios in New York City. Eight months later it launched in Boston, and now ClassPass is available in 20 cities, featuring close to 2,000 providers.
“We are continuously looking to make the product more available so it is not just something for people who live in large cities,” explained Kadakia. “We are building capabilities to offer it in more suburban areas as well. Then we will continuously launch in any major city that has gyms and studios.”
Kadakia began by targeting studios that needed marketing support and had extra capacity in their classes that could be filled with ClassPass members. Studios are incentivized to participate in ClassPass because they gain incremental revenue, as well as access to new customers who would not normally have entered the studio.
“That is what we have been able to do by creating a product that customers really felt engaged with and is a more accessible way of consuming fitness,” said Kadakia. “55 percent of our users are new to fitness, so we are introducing a growing market.”
Customer experience is a priority for Kadakia. She wants to make sure every client has a pleasant experience at each studio featured on ClassPass. “We collect ratings for every studio that is on our platform and we make sure they are getting a good review or rating from our customers,” she said. “We want to provide a better fitness experience for our clients.”
ClassPass couldn’t have launched at a more opportunistic time. Recently the fitness industry has seen a big resurgence of smaller, boutique workout experiences. “The environment is becoming more and more fragmented every single day,” she explained. “There are more and more studios opening and it is becoming harder for each one of them to market their own businesses. We have created a platform where we can find them customers.”
However this new platform does not have to mean the demise of the traditional gym. Kadakia believes small studios and big-box gyms should work together since they all have the same mission, which is to get more people to be engaged in fitness.
According to Kadakia, ClassPass actually helps to market larger gyms. Since many of their users are new to fitness, they start by taking a variety of classes through ClassPass, but soon fall in love with exercise and want to workout everyday, which leads them to pursue a full-time gym membership.
“A lot of our users supplement their ClassPass with gym memberships,” said Kadakia. “ClassPass is for the fun classes they want to try, but they also have a gym membership, so there is a potential for many of these gyms to get members.”
What’s next for ClassPass? In the near future it will begin incorporating larger, more traditional gyms and personal trainers onto the platform.
By Emily Harbourne
