OPERATOR PERSPECTIVE
far, plus one in Leicester, but six of its 11 upcoming UK & Ireland locations are in London. And franchising is a growth area generally in the boutique fitness market. Although many of London’s big boutique brands are multi-discipline – Frame has always been, for example, ever since we launched in Shoreditch in 2009 – the rise of the owner-operator, single genre franchised boutique means there are still more single-discipline studios than you might imagine. What’s been the story at Frame? Back in 2017, we secured private equity funding and were on a strong growth trajectory, including outside of London. We were trading seven sites at the beginning of COVID, but 12 months of closure put everything pretty much back to the beginning. My co-founder Pip Black and I bought the business back in February 2022, albeit we bought just five of the seven sites: Shoreditch, Kings Cross, Victoria, Hammersmith and Angel. We had to do some hard restructuring and make tough decisions that year and didn’t buy Fitzrovia or Farringdon, as those central London locations had zero footfall. We also re-sized head office for a smaller company.
And in many ways, it’s been like starting again. Customers had moved or changed jobs and work locations, so we’ve had to work hard to organically build and rebuild our communities. The biggest change for us – and this is something we’ve seen across the London boutique sector – has been the hit on lunchtime participation. London used to have the best lunchtime participation globally, because people used to take lunch breaks; in cities like New York, by contrast, they didn’t. Now, with people only in the office a couple of days a week, that’s all changed. The ongoing train strikes are also impacting pay as you go attendance. However, Frame is recording strong usage at weekends and Tuesdays–Thursdays, high customer frequency and more members than ever: around 40 per cent of our customers are now members, compared to 25-30 per cent pre-pandemic. Around 7,000 people currently come to us on a monthly basis across our five sites and we’ve been profitable since January 2023. That was our objective for this year: not pure growth in terms of booking numbers and revenues, but making our business organically sustainable. 2024 will be about returning to growth in terms of studios, both company- and now also franchise-owned.
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LONDON BOUTIQUE STUDIO REPORT 2023
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