OPERATOR PERSPECTIVE
What are you doing differently now? Our move into franchising is very new news. We’re on a mission to get more people moving more often, and we believe that – provided we can bring passionate people onboard who share our ethos – franchising will be the fastest way to achieve that goal. We also launched a Community Raise in October to fund our next phase of growth. It’s extremely important to us that we grow in a sustainable way, preserving the Frame magic and putting our Framers at the heart of everything we do. It’s why we decided not to launch on a crowdfunding site, keeping our fund intimate and exclusive to our Frame community and Friends of Frame. Yet much of what we do now is unchanged from our very early days. We have the same mission, same approach, same product, same sense of fun. If anything, our feelgood ethos –‘Getting fit shouldn’t be a chore’ – resonates even more with people now, post-pandemic. The way we explain it, we’ve proved our business twice, both before and after COVID. We’ve always offered so many different classes and product types – including reformer pilates – that although usage has swayed slightly in different directions here and there, people can mix and match and we’ve maintained strong overall usage and high lifetime value. Our big studio spaces with minimal equipment also allow us to be very flexible. For example, straight after lockdown when people just wanted to be free, we did a lot of fun cardio dance classes. We also launched online content during the pandemic – at its peak, it generated revenues of £100k a month – and although the whole market has seen digital use drop off fairly sharply, both livestreaming and on-demand continue to be strong revenue drivers for us.
What we don’t do is look back at pre-COVID and draw comparisons. That feels like another world. In any case, we’ve had two years now since lockdown, so we can measure performance year-on-year. We feel it’s healthier to go from where we are now rather than looking back. What’s next for London’s boutiques? As I mentioned previously, franchising is a big trend now. Our view: if you can find the right franchisees with the right passion and ethos, it should be easier to grow the estate and stay true to the brand than if someone at head office were trying to manage multiple sites. The biggest change of all is that lots of people now exercise close to home, favouring studios in residential locations – another reason why the franchises are doing well, as they’re often in these locations. City-based studios need to work out how to get a share of people’s wallets while they’re at work, and building a strong sense of community is key. Some of our customers deliberately travel into the office so they can come and do a class with us. Finding quality staff is another challenge for operators, with fewer people travelling into London and many instructors having left the sector altogether; it’s been a really tough time for freelancers. We’ve certainly found ourselves training a whole new team at Frame.
The biggest change for us – and this is something we’ve seen across the London boutique sector – has been the hit on lunchtime participation.
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LONDON BOUTIQUE STUDIO REPORT 2023
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