OPERATOR PERSPECTIVE
I see the future of boutique as positive, but only if we stop discounting and are honest about our challenges. We need to work together.
What’s your advice to the sector? This is a hard business. Many people perceive boutiques to be highly cash-generative, but costs are high if you want the best staff, the best facilities, and to offer great instructor training and development. You must be committed to a relentless pursuit of class excellence – and even then, there’s no guarantee of success. In fact, it’s even harder now than pre-COVID, with ever-increasing rents, rates and service charges alongside consumer behaviours that have fundamentally changed. It’s super-positive for Psycle that the majority of the people who used to train with us still do, but they’re coming 40 per cent less often due to changing working patterns and the ongoing impact of working from home. The cost of living crisis is another factor. We’ve seen customers move to lower-frequency products and have introduced a new lower-frequency membership tier to allow for this. We’ve also introduced an under-27s membership, targeting younger customers on lower incomes who used to come more often than they do now. But product quality must still be consistently high. Pre-COVID, I would argue that there were too many operators charging premium prices for average products. There is no space for that now. As market conditions continue to bite, the number of boutique operators overall continues to contract, dominated by a handful of multi-site brands alongside ClassPass-led, one-stop shops that are driving prices to the floor, to the point that audiences are unsure about what boutique really is. Boutique is about beautiful spaces, great service, best-in- class instructors and delivering consistently high-quality classes – but it gets increasingly hard to deliver that when there’s so much discounting going on. The sooner we stop the downward price spiral, the sooner we’ll all feel we’re building sustainable businesses. I do see the future of boutique as positive, but only if we can stop discounting, and only if we create a healthier, more transparent environment in which we talk to each other and are honest about our challenges. It’s a small industry and we need to work together.
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LONDON BOUTIQUE STUDIO REPORT 2023
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