CEO Corner: Strong Pilates’ Michael Ramsey on Winning in a Crowded Market

Michael Ramsey believes Strong Pilates has a leg up in the Pilates arms race that’s currently sweeping across North America.

As the brand’s co-founder, Ramsey points to Strong’s blend of traditional reformer Pilates with cardio and strength training elements as a key differentiator in an ultra-crowded market for Pilates studios.

So far, he’s been spot on. Strong Pilates celebrated its 100th global studio opening in August, and it has plans to roll out an additional 150 studios across the United States alone, with expansion also continuing in other markets including the U.K., Canada and the brand’s home country of Australia.

Ramsey sat down with Athletech News to discuss his journey in creating Strong Pilates with business partner Mark Armstrong, why Strong’s unique take on the modality sets it apart from competitors and what’s coming next in the franchise expansion pipeline for the fast-growing brand.

Michael Ramsey: Mark and I have been in partnership for about 11 years now; Mark is very operations-led, and I’m marketing-led. We started in the F45 space — we owned six F45 franchises in Australia, including having the number one studio globally, three years running.

In 2019, I broke my ankle and was rehabbing when I fell in love with reformer Pilates. But I always felt like I needed to do a little bit more, like going for a run, doing a HIIT workout, or lifting heavy weights. When Mark and I were looking for what’s next, we saw the rise of Pilates, so the idea of fusing cardio and strength with Pilates made so much sense.

We then discovered the “Rowformer,” a guy out of Orange County in LA created the machine. We jumped on a flight and tried the workout. It was the most incredible, interesting, excruciating, beautiful workout we’d ever done in our lives. And we said, “We need to take this back to Australia.” Long story short, we negotiated the global rights for the machine and built a franchise model around that concept, launching it at the end of 2019 in Australia to create Strong. The brand blew up very quickly. Today, we’re sitting at over 100 locations — people seem to love the hybrid style of training.

MR: We go heavy (on the strength training side) with progressive overload blocks, so we follow the science. The conditioning element isn’t for dropping body fat, but for heart health, and we combine those with all the amazing benefits of Pilates.

What we’re seeing is our consumer doesn’t want to just do Pilates five to seven days a week. For them, the value proposition is higher to be able to say, “Okay, I’m going to just sign up for Strong and I’m going to get everything.”

But I think what separates us completely from other boutique concepts is that we’re 100% low-impact. There are no treadmills, no box jumps, nothing like that, so people are able to push themselves to a very high level with minimal to no risk of getting injured. We get a lot of ex-athletes who have sore low backs or knees.

MR: We actually launched first in Canada, where we saw incredible utilization and our studios were performing exceptionally well in pre-sale. We saw the appetite within the U.S. market, which is the biggest fitness market in the world; Pilates is growing exponentially here. Based on some of those data points around our Canadian studios, we just had to come in and explore the market. Thankfully, we did.

All of our studios that we’ve launched here to date have opened with 300 to 500 active members, or people training on a pack. The pre-sale average in the U.S. has exceeded Australia, and every other market, substantially. The opportunity just seems endless here. Mark and I have both moved here, and we’re really excited.

MR: Today, we have over 100 locations (open globally). In the next four years, we’re shooting for 150 in the U.S. and 300 globally. I think that’s pretty conservative, to be honest. Based on projections, we’ll probably open around 40 in the U.S. next year alone.

MR: You’ve got the big four that we look at: California, New York, Texas and Florida. We’ve opted to do Florida for ourselves, so all Florida studios will be corporate-owned, which is really exciting for us. We want 30 to 50 of our own in Florida. Initially, we were hoping to just focus on those four, but there’s been so much demand that we’ve opened it up, and we’re effectively taking inquiries all around the U.S.

It’s also about building brand equity quickly. Strong is a household name in Australia, but in the U.S., we’re still very new. There are a lot of moving pieces, but I would say the success so far is coming down to finding the right partners and working really hard — it’s a lot of networking, relationship-building and brand-building.

MR: The U.K. is doing exceptionally well. We’ve got a studio in (continental) Europe, which is a huge growth opportunity. The Middle East is quite incredible — we’re in Bahrain and Dubai, and those studios are performing exceptionally well. And again, Canada is such an incredible market for us, particularly Toronto.

We’ll also continue to expand in Australia and New Zealand, although we don’t want to over-saturate the Australian market.

MR: Pilates is the number one fitness genre for bookings right now, per ClassPass data, and it’s compounding year on year at 11-12%. So the research tells us there’s still a lot of white space.

But what I’m more confident in is our approach to hybrid training. We don’t purely sit within Pilates; we also sit within strength and conditioning. I think with the rise of strength training, the rise of conditioning concepts and things like Hyrox taking off, we sit in a really great niche within the market.