How AXLE Took the the Guesswork Out of JETSET Pilates Franchisee Marketing

With hundreds of franchisees to support, JETSET Pilates is leveraging AXLE to balance marketing consistency with the flexibility owners need to succeed

At JETSET Pilates, every movement requires precision, a certain level of control and purpose. Now with a growing franchise network branching out behind it, the brand knows it needs a similar, equally-responsible approach to marketing.

And, just like someone on a reformer, it knows it can benefit from having an instructor or teammate watching over them and assisting when needed.

For JETSET, that was AXLE, a technology platform that offers tailored solutions for businesses in the fitness, wellness and beauty industries. Thus far, it’s helped JETSET manage its 150+ locations, giving the right amount of support to empower them without infringing on the responsibilities best left in their hands.

Franchisees Face a Challenge

Every brand wants to expand and grow its footprint, but doing so doesn’t come without challenges. From a marketing perspective, more sites means requiring more owners to interpret how campaigns should be run or assets utilized. With that, the opportunity for misalignment across the network grows.

“In a lot of franchise models, corporate rolls out an initiative and each location is left to understand and execute it on their own using a toolkit, with wildly different results depending on the operator’s time and marketing know-how,” said AXLE founder Nolen Young.

Nolen Young (credit: AXLE)

This pain point prompted AXLE to evolve a platform that streamlines corporate-level initiatives across brands without increasing operational burden, no matter the number of sites. JETSET represents just one of the many brands currently benefiting from it.

“JETSET franchisees don’t run into that problem,” Young said. “AXLE lets corporate launch a challenge, seasonal promotion, or campaign once and have it scale across every location automatically, tracking, automations and follow-up built in from the start. The brand look and feel stays locked, but each location can still have personalization at the local level.”

“There is no competitive advantage in having every franchisee independently figure out Meta targeting, build their own CRM logic or design their own version of the JETSET brand,” said Natalie Straub, Chief Strategy Officer of JETSET Pilates added. “We can do those things once at a very high level, use data from across the network and give every studio a stronger starting point.”

Impacts with JETSET

Tamara Galinsky, JETSET Pilates Founder and a JETSET studio owner based out of Miami, FL, experienced AXLE’s benefits early on in her franchising journey, leveraging it throughout her pre-sale and early launch stages.

Already with her hands full, juggling all the other day-to-day tasks that being a studio owner requires, she had little to no time to concentrate on marketing and oversee the lead-to-conversion process. AXLE, however, was happy to scoop up those responsibilities. Nova, the company’s AI agent designed to answer location-specific FAQs and provide guided responses, helped out as well.

“A studio can generate hundreds to thousands of leads during presales and continue generating leads after opening,” Galinsky said. “AXLE gives us the infrastructure around that journey, and Nova helps make the next action much more obvious and immediate. Instead of an operator spending their day sorting through a database and deciding who needs attention, the technology can do more of that thinking and organization for them.”

“Nova lives inside AXLE, so bookings, memberships, conversations and location data are already there,” Young added. “There’s no need for an extra login or to paste context into a chatbot. Each morning, Nova delivers a briefing on the needle-moving actions that matter most, so the studio starts with a clear plan instead of a pile of tabs or a cluttered desktop of Excel files. Nova reads the ad metrics and explains them in plain language, so owners know what’s working without living in the reports. And, when a conversation needs judgment or a relationship, Nova hands it to a human with the full context attached.”

Whether you’re the founder of AXLE or the founder of JETSET, both roles see equal value in the tech’s immediate operational improvements and the time it saves operators to handle other, more personable responsibilities.

“Nova is a teammate, not a replacement,” Young said. “The franchisee keeps the local knowledge and the final say; AXLE just makes sure the next best move is already on their desk when they walk in.”

“The goal isn’t to turn our franchisees into CRM managers or data analysts; it’s to get them back in front of clients,” Galinsky added. “The technology should tell you who to talk to and when. The human still has to be good enough to convert them.”

Galinsky also shared that her location has seen an uptick in both speed-to-lead and member acquisition metrics since implementing AXLE.

“The combination of automation, better visibility into the funnel and thoughtful prompts around the next action means fewer leads are simply sitting there waiting for someone to figure out what to do with them,” she said. “And, when you multiply that improvement across hundreds or thousands of leads, it has a very real impact on member acquisition.”

Even More Important Today

In an evolving industry where marketing tendencies can become outdated almost instantaneously, Straub argues that having an efficiency-boosting partner like AXLE matters to an even further extent.

“I think the biggest misconception is that franchise marketing means posting on Instagram and sponsoring a local event,” Straub said. “That world is gone. RIP.”

Having a strong grip on platforms or concepts like Meta and Google, local SEO, automations and more is now table stakes.

“A franchisee today is expected to understand creative performance, lead costs, attribution, CRM, text and email compliance, reviews, local SEO, conversion rates and what is actually happening to a lead after they submit a form,” Straub said. “That’s before they open the studio that morning.”

JETSET encourages other brands with ambitious growth plans to prioritize these concepts which led it to AXLE. It hasn’t been alone in recognizing the value of that approach either.