OPERATOR PERSPECTIVE
What are the biggest changes since COVID? Apart from the well-documented challenges of the ever- increasing cost of living and ongoing work-from-home culture, we have embraced new technology and introduced new partnerships to support demand. ClassPass is a great example. Pre-COVID, we weren’t on ClassPass. We didn’t need to be. In 2022, out of necessity, we joined – and actually we really like it. The majority of our attendance continues to be our own direct customers, but ClassPass helps us fill inventory that would otherwise not be filled. We allocate the inventory we want, manipulating demand and supply, to add footfall across all studios and times. The people we reach through ClassPass enjoy the flexibility of picking and choosing from a variety of studios and concepts. Nevertheless, we see really strong levels of loyalty in terms of them choosing Psycle over other products on the ClassPass platform. We love that it’s introduced us to an audience we might traditionally have missed.
We also now have a digital offering, initially launched in lockdown – in response to incredible demand from our community – following our decision to rent out our studio bikes to generate much-needed cash flow. It showed how incredible our community was that they reached out and asked us for content and the opportunity to stay connected. We will always be about studios first, supported by digital, but the digital product is available on its own, as well as being bundled with memberships for a truly omnichannel offering. Another change relates to our yoga offering. Sadly, demand was impacted significantly by the pandemic, exacerbated by an ongoing abundance of content available for free online, so although we still offer 1.5 days of yoga each week, we’ve also introduced a fifth concept – reformer pilates – which our community loves.
The future of boutique lies in the ability to reach scale. Consolidation under one brand represents a great opportunity to achieve that.
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LONDON BOUTIQUE STUDIO REPORT 2023
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