A class is less than one hundred yuan, the gym "back wave" borrows flow expansion
More than 80 yuan for a class, buy more can be as low as 70 yuan, the gym "put down the body" is igniting an offline craze.
The new concept fitness space derived from the Internet fitness brand has become a "back wave" in the limelight.
As the weather is getting warmer, Liu Fang appeared in the Keepland exercise room on Dawang Road in Beijing for the first time in more than a year and jumped up Zumba to the rhythmic music.
"Summer is coming."
She is tall and thin, and still wants to get rid of the fat accumulated at home because of the epidemic. "My plan is to do Pilates once a week, and then come here to do exercises twice."
Before the summer, Pilates, fighting, spinning, samba... are favored by fitness people.
Recently, reporters from the Beijing News visited the Dawanglu business district and found that new gyms such as Keepland, Super Gorilla, and Kuaikuai have been launched. Low-cost group gymnastics classes, 24-hour self-service fitness, and mobile personal trainers have become selling points.
According to a fitness personal training studio, the number of new members reached a small peak in March. Its boss Jiang Hao (pseudonym) told the Beijing News reporter that it is currently preparing to open a second branch and has begun to select a location.
Under the blessing of popularity, brands under the online + offline model have expanded rapidly, and keep has developed into a unicorn in the Internet fitness industry at an alarming rate.
Since March, keep is about to sprint IPOs frequently. Previously, it announced the completion of US$350 million in Series F financing, and the overall valuation after financing was US$2 billion.
However, under the halo of "the first stock of fitness", how to make a profit is still a pain point in the industry.
In the future, just like traditional gyms with a single income model and homogenous competition, will they continue to reshuffle amidst difficult survival?
Visit
Low threshold: 89,300 yuan per lesson "monthly package"
At ten o'clock in the evening on weekdays, the traffic flow on Dawang Road, the core business district of Chaoyang District, has decreased significantly.
On the 4th floor of New World Mall not far from the subway entrance, more than a dozen vibrant urban white-collar workers are working out.
This gym named Le Ke is a “self-service” gym with strong Internet thinking.
After downloading the Leke Sports App, you can become a monthly member here for only 300 yuan. Not only can you take some free group courses, you can also enjoy 24-hour self-service fitness services.
On the fourth floor of Huamao Shopping Center, which is a few hundred meters away from Le Ke, is also crowded with Keepland, which is also an Internet fitness brand.
This is the first offline store opened by keep in Beijing in 2018. The entrance is hidden behind a restaurant and is not conspicuous.
The reporter saw in the Keepland WeChat applet that group gymnastics classes from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. can be booked throughout the day, including fat burning boxing exercises, barbell shaping exercises, trampoline, and hot dancing.
In the comments, some members posted exercise records. It is common for members to train more than 200 times, and some members have a total of 588 times of training.
Since its establishment in 2014, Keep has developed into a unicorn in the Internet fitness industry at an alarming rate.
At present, in addition to the earliest keep app empowering mobile fitness and social networking and providing online courses, it has also developed into an enterprise with clothing, sports equipment, outdoor equipment, swimming equipment, meal replacement food and other businesses.
The fitness boom is not hard to find in shopping malls in this area.
A few hundred meters to the west, there are super gorillas in the Gemdale Plaza shopping mall. The music played in the spinning bike room rang, and along with the slogans shouted by the coach, more than 20 members exercise at the same time.
In the exercise room, coach "Moon"'s Grammy dance class is about to begin. A dozen students began to scan the QR code to sign in.
The students in the class were still young, and when the moon asked who was the first time before they started dancing, only a few people raised their hands.
"You can jump at will, no one cares about me."
A girl who came here for the first time told a reporter from the Beijing News that the cost of such a class is 89 yuan, about 15 people each time, and the popular group gymnastics class still needs to "grab the class" by staring at the course release.
After jumping a 60-minute Grammy, there are members who waited ten minutes to join another course.
This kind of continuous sweating is a favorite way of exercise for many sports enthusiasts.
However, not all consumers pay for the group class-based business model.
Ms. Liang felt a little unsatisfactory after taking the "Dark Riding" course of Super Gorilla, "It's too boring, and the environment is not so good." She believes that this way, there is no exclusive coaching model for each class, and it is more difficult to stick to exercise. "Some stores are located in shopping malls, maybe they have just been renovated, and they can still smell some smells."
In a 300-square-meter fitness studio on Jintai Road, one stop away from Dawang Road, several personal trainers are giving lessons to members at the same time.
If time permits, the coach recommends keeping the pace of private lessons 4 times a week.
The boss told the Beijing News reporter that the store set a peak in the number of new members in March.
Currently, the youngest member in the store is a teenage elementary school student, and the older members have retired.
Out of circle
"Small but beautiful" expansion of offline stores for online drainage
Relying on online community operations on the Internet to gain popularity and open stores offline, it is becoming a channel for nuggets.
The Beijing News reporter sorted out and noticed that Super Gorilla, Lek Sports, Shape Fitness, and Kuaikuai all operate in similar modes, forming a fitness space with O2O platform + equipment sports as its core services.
This type of new fitness company usually has a small area when it landed. It mainly selects business districts and uses group classes as the entry point. At the same time, it launches some fitness courses online to jointly create a sports and fitness community to obtain more private domain traffic, and then lead to the line. Get off the gym.
Some brands under this model are expanding rapidly.
Take the creation of a small and beautiful gym and a part-time coaching model of LeKe Sports as an example. According to the official website, there are currently 5 million+ registered users and 8,000+ signed coaches.
In terms of store layout, it has successively settled in 14 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and Chongqing, with over 500 stores.
However, it is not difficult to find out that its ambitions are also secretly fading.
In 2016, Leke Sports publicly stated that it plans to open 1,000 stores nationwide in the next 12-18 months, and 5,000 stores in the next 36 months.
According to public reports in 2020, the reporter saw that Le Ke Sports adjusted its plan: by the end of 2021, it will complete the layout of 1,000 stores nationwide.
At the same time, Keepland went offline and encountered difficulties.
In 2018, Keep quickly moved to Shanghai after landing its first store in Beijing.
One year later, in November 2019, Keepland announced that the Beijing Youth Road Delta Store had ceased operations.
In March 2020, Keepland closed 3 Shanghai stores-Jing'an Joy City Store, Changfeng Joy City Store and Jinqiao Store.
At that time, Keep responded that the closing of the store "due to the consideration of the efficiency of the store's operation, it was decided to close the store for a temporary rest."
The reporter saw on the Keepland applet that it currently only has 11 stores in Beijing. Among them, the "Urban Activity Zone" in the Fortune Shopping Center is a cooperative store and no courses are arranged.
There is no group gymnastics class in the "online sports field" in Wangjing, Chaoyang District.
As a new fitness concept company, Super Gorilla once experienced the closure of stores.
Unlike keep, Super Gorilla mainly focuses on offline stores and was once called the "711 in the fitness field" by the market.
In 2014, Super Gorilla's first container self-service fitness cabin landed in Shenzhen, and this company was born.
In 2015, started to set up the first group class studio in Shenzhen.
In the following two years, Super Gorilla deployed in Shanghai and Beijing.
However, in October 2019, Super Gorilla Chongqing Beicheng Tianjie announced its store closure plan.
Xue Qiang, a fitness coach who has worked for many years, told the Beijing News reporter that he was not optimistic about this mode of operation with only group classes.
"Think about how much this class costs. According to 80 classes, there are less than 20 students at a time, which is 1,600 yuan in income. Even if the whole day is full, the monthly flow will not be much. ".
The Beijing News reporter noticed that Keep Land in Beijing Huamao Store has only one large exercise room. There will be 11 classes scheduled for the whole day on April 20. Each class has 16 to 24 students, and the price is also from the normal 89. It ranges from yuan/section to 129 yuan/section.
In addition, students can purchase course packages so that the cost of each class can be reduced to less than 70 yuan.
The Shell Finance reporter saw in the Super Gorilla Mini Program that there are not many courses in stores.
In the "Ciyun Temple Future Hui Quanneng Store" in Beijing, in the last week, except for 11 group gymnastics classes on Saturday, there are no classes or only two classes on weekdays.
Flow and profitability are the keys to success or failure for offline gyms to operate well.
Jiang Hao, the boss of the private education studio, told reporters that before, traditional gyms mainly relied on constantly recruiting new members to increase cash flow, but in fact this mode of operation did not have the ability to save funds.
"If you have money, you may use it for other things. Many gyms don’t think about how to make a profit. They just want to make more cash flow. There may be little or no profit. If one day cash flow is cut off, basically It's in debt," he said.
Pain points
Coach training can be on duty within 7 days?
Agency promotion for 1 month "Teacher"
In January of this year, Geng Ting had more than a dozen personal training courses left, but she was no longer able to go to the "Jike Fitness" class.
Geng Ting told reporters that in 2019, the annual card was issued at Jike Fitness. Although the annual card time was delayed due to the epidemic, the annual card membership has expired after she returned to Beijing.
"One class seems to be more than 300, I don't remember very much," Geng Ting said. When applying for the card, the staff told her that both the annual card and private lessons can be transferred.
In January of this year, when Geng Ting planned to transfer the remaining private training courses, the other party informed that he needed to buy the remaining ten private training courses and then buy a separate annual card.
The difficulty of withdrawing the card made Geng Ting feel that the longest way to go is the gym routine.
Liu Sheng (a pseudonym), a fitness coach who has been working for many years, told reporters that when he first sold classes, some gyms would teach a lot of routines. “For example, first ask if you live or work nearby. When you are asked to apply for a card later, you can't use the excuse of being too far away to refuse."
Liu Sheng said that "fancy" marketing is not the core issue in the industry. "Some fitness coaches have been trained for 7 days or a month to work. In the past, some of the coaching certificates were bought, and there was no private lesson at all. qualifications."
"At present, the fitness industry has no regulations that say which certificate must be obtained in order to be a coach."
A staff member of a fitness coach training institution told reporters that there are many types of fitness coach certificates in the industry, including international certifications, "national titles" certified by the State Sports General Administration, and certificates issued by some private organizations.
A reporter from the Beijing News retrieved the courses of various fitness coach training institutions and found that there are basically one-month training courses.
"0-based admission" and "quick entry" are the promotional labels of many training institutions.
In mid-April, the reporter consulted the staff of the Beijing Saipu Fitness Training Institute. He said: "The company mainly trains mid-to-high-end gym coaches. All students are assigned to work. As long as Saipu graduates from all parts of the country, priority is given to work. Gym sees It's whether the coach is professional or not. The certificate is definitely required, but this is just a stepping stone. The most important thing depends on how much professional the coach has mastered."
The reporter noted that in 2015, the National Sports General Administration's Vocational Skills Appraisal and Guidance Center issued a report that 48% of the "newcomers" who have been employed for 1-3 years in the private education industry have no professional background.
In addition, some of the training thresholds for group coaches in new gyms are not high.
A coach recruitment information released by Super Orangutan in March this year shows that Super Orangutan can help new recruits become excellent group coaches. For zero-based fitness enthusiasts, they can participate in the "zero-start group coach training camp", specifically "16+ Closed camp, master 1-3 courses"; new group coaches participate in the "Orangutan Strength Group Coach Training Camp", specifically "8 days + closed camp, master 2-3 courses".
Jiang Hao told reporters that in fact, many consumers do not ask to know the qualifications of the coaches when they apply for a card in a gym or purchase a private training course.
At the end of 2019, Jiang Hao and his partner opened a fitness studio together.
It’s not uncommon for people like him to start as a fitness trainer and open private training studios since then.
The reporter searched the "fitness studio" on the enterprise search and found 166,000 related results.
"The market is too messy," Jiang Hao sighed to the reporter.
The Beijing News reporter only searched for "fitness cards" and "service contract disputes" on the China Judgment Documents website, and retrieved more than 15,000 documents.
Among them, a civil judgment issued by the Judgment Written Network in April 2021 shows that in February 2019, Yuan Mou signed a membership agreement with a gym on Yuanda Road, applied for a personal 5-year VIP card for a total of 13,888 yuan, and successively purchased fighting courses. , Regular courses, fascia relaxation courses paid a total of nearly 80,000 yuan.
It's worth noting that Yuan, who bought a private education course, does not correspond to the coach he said when he bought the course.
The court finally ruled that the gym refunded Yuan's remaining expenses.
Wash the sand
Hosa Fitness is closed and retired, Qingdao Impulse is insolvent
In the past ten years, the fitness industry has been like a big wave.
According to the data from the company's investigation, looking at the fitness industry in 2020, after the epidemic has been hit hard, the current industry prosperity has gradually returned to the pre-epidemic level. There are 1,137,700 fitness-related companies in my country.
In the ten years since 2011, the number of registrations of fitness-related companies has been increasing year by year.
In 2011, a total of 15,000 related companies were registered. In 2020, the number of registrations reached 243,400, the highest point in ten years, a year-on-year increase of 9%, but the growth rate has slowed down compared with the past few years.
Over the years, it has been shut down frequently, homogenized competition, emphasis on sales rather than operation, and a single income model have made it difficult for traditional gyms to survive.
In 2001, Beijing’s Olympic bid successfully brought a wave of sports to the country. It was also at this time that Beijing began to have fitness brands such as Hosa, Jade Bird, and Zhongti Beili, and chain brands such as Wales, One trillion Wade, and Impulse appeared in the south. The card charges more than 10,000 yuan.
As a sportswear brand in Fujian, "Hosa" has become one of the first large-scale traditional gym brands in China.
The offline gym of "Hosa Fitness" expanded rapidly.
According to the listing documents disclosed by Hosa International in 2011, Hosa Fitness Club had 66 fitness centers located in 7 major cities. Beijing had 37 fitness centers, most of which had a floor area of more than 2,000 square meters.
Treadmills, elliptical machines, spinning bikes and different strength training equipment have become basic equipment, and some stores also have special swimming pools.
For people who want to participate in fitness, they can purchase secondary cards or quarter cards and annual cards for a certain period of time according to their needs.
Sales of annual cards also became the main source of income for traditional gyms at that time.
At that time, in some subway entrances or popular business districts, many people were able to meet the offline promotion "membership consultant" salesman asking: "Learn about fitness cards".
At that time, fitness had just been introduced to China from abroad, and consumers were more general about this concept, and applying for a fitness card became an "impulsive consumption."
Jiang Hao also entered the fitness industry in 2010. His first job was as a fitness instructor at a Hosa Fitness store in Beijing.
Jiang Hao recalled that at first, the main job was to promote on the street to attract consumers to apply for a card.
In the environment at that time, because he could not concentrate on providing professional private education services for members, he decided to resign and go to the private education studio.
Starting in 2019, Hosa fitness stores have been closed one after another, including Beijing Muxiyuan Store, Jinding Store, Tongzhou Store, etc.
On April 17, 2021, a reporter from the Beijing News searched for "Hosa Fitness Club". There were 71 related companies, but only 25 were active. The remaining 40 companies were in the state of cancellation or suspension, such as Beijing Hosa Fitness. The Wangjing branch of the club and the Kangdu branch of the Beijing Hosa Club.
In the second half of 2020, Hosa International, which was originally listed on the Hong Kong stock market, was cancelled its listing status.
As early as 2011, Beijing Jade Bird Fitness also fell into a tide of store closures.
Founded in 2001, this fitness brand with many celebrity members originally used more than a dozen stores across the country.
At the beginning of 2011, Jade Bird Fitness announced the closure of many stores in Beijing.
On April 27, a staff member of a Beijing Jade Bird Fitness store stated that Jade Bird Fitness currently has 5 direct-operated stores in Beijing, all of which were reopened in August 2020. They are gyms of other brands acquired after the epidemic.
Impulse is another gym brand that has dropped sharply during the wave. It is a well-known manufacturer of sports fitness equipment in China.
Initially, Impulse’s offline stores were mainly retail terminals selling fitness equipment.
According to Impulse’s prospectus, as of the end of 2015, Impulse had 10 directly-operated retail stores and plans to raise funds in the 2016 IPO to establish 47 terminal retail stores.
In 2002, Qingdao Impulse Fitness Management Company, which belongs to Impulse Fitness together with Impulse, started the operation and management of the fitness club.
Under the franchise and direct management model, the scale of Impulse gyms has increased rapidly.
After its prosperous period, news of Impulse Gym's closed and runaway continued to spread in the market.
In fact, Qingdao Impulse Fitness has also been in a state of insolvency.
The data shows that as of the end of 2015, Qingdao Impulse Fitness had total assets of 33.78 million yuan and net assets of -22.59 million yuan; the net profit in 2015 was -620,000 yuan.
At the end of 2016 and 2018, Qingdao Impulse Fitness's net assets were -30,949,600 yuan and -76,968,700 yuan, and net profits were -12,297,100 yuan and -27,577,500 yuan, respectively.
This state is still continuing.
According to Impulse’s latest 2020 annual report, as of December 31, 2020, Qingdao Impulse Health Management Co., Ltd. has total assets of 57,886,300 yuan and net assets of 135 million yuan; January-December 2020 will achieve the main goal Operating income was 52,844,500 yuan, and net profit was -25,527,100 yuan.
Beijing News reporters searched for Impulse Fitness Club in the enterprise search, and many of its companies have also been cancelled, such as Kunming Impulse Fitness Club, Jilin City Impulse Fitness Club Jiefang Middle Road, Baoding Impulse Fitness Club, Qingdao Impulse Health Club.
A staff member of the Beijing Impulse Gym told the Beijing News that the current Impulse Gym in Beijing is basically a franchise store. Yingdians are basically only available in Shandong."
It is worth mentioning that Hosa Fitness and Impulse Fitness are not alone in this industry.
In addition, since the epidemic, stores of brands such as Yizhao Wade and Zhongti Beili have also closed.
The reporter searched the "fitness club" on the enterprise search, and correspondingly 42,000 companies appeared, among which 12,000 were in the state of suspension, cancellation or liquidation.
Beijing News reporter Li Yunqi