Every Other Boutique Workout Is Shrinking. Pilates Is Booming. That Still Won't Save the Wrong Studio.

The Zorzee Report | Issue #16 | Boutique Pilates, Part 1 of 4

Note: figures are from each brand's most recent 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document, cited by Item. Category figures are attributed inline to their sources (IBISWorld, ClassPass, SFIA, BizBuySell, Franchise Times, Athletech News). Performance periods differ by brand.

For a decade, boutique fitness sold one pitch: monthly dues that hit the card whether the member shows up or not, and a 6 a.m. class people plan their week around. For most of these workouts, that pitch is running out. Indoor cycling participation is down 33.5% since 2019 (SFIA, reported by TheStreet). CycleBar sits at 171 units and a negative 35% growth rate (Entrepreneur Franchise 500 directory). SoulCycle closed about a quarter of its studios in 2022 and shut six more in June 2026 (TheStreet). High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is shrinking too: 9Round lost a net 79 studios in its most recent filing (Franchimp).

Pilates is going the other way. It was the most-booked workout in the world on ClassPass for the third year running, up 66% year over year across more than 27 million searches (ClassPass 2025 Look Back Report). Participation is up nearly 40% since 2019 (SFIA). Reformer studios are filling up while the spin studios close.

That's the tailwind, and it's real. It's also the half that sells. The half that decides whether you make money is in the franchise disclosure document (FDD), and most investors never finish reading it. I pulled the current 2026 filings for the loudest names in franchised Pilates: the dominant national chain, a younger high-revenue concept, and a smaller studio brand still early in its build. All reformer Pilates, three different businesses, and three different answers to the one question that matters.

What does a single studio actually make?

At the largest chain, the average studio rang up $987,810 in sales last year. The best did $2,301,954. The weakest did $146,258 (Item 19). Same brand, same year, same equipment, and the top studio out-sold the bottom by more than fifteen to one. The tailwind lifts the whole category. It doesn't fill any single room.

This issue is the category context you need before you evaluate any of them.

When someone tells you to buy a Pilates franchise, they're describing one of three different businesses that look identical from the sidewalk.

The national chain. The name almost everyone in the category can say, well past a thousand studios and still opening. A single studio runs $413,289 to $1,029,811 (Item 7), a mid-size box built around a room of reformers running back-to-back group classes. Scale is the pitch: brand recognition, a deep bench of operators to call during validation, a system refined across more than a thousand units.

The premium concept. Younger, fewer than fifty studios open, built to bill more per member in a smaller room. It costs more to open, $543,440 to $752,375 (Item 7), and asks for roughly double the category-typical liquid capital, around $200,000 (Athletech News). Its average studio also rings up more, which is the trade on offer: a higher bet for a higher number.

The emerging brand. Smallest of the three, barely a dozen studios, still proving the model. It opens for the least, $320,532 to $752,335 (Item 7). It's also the one that hands you the least to underwrite with, for a reason I'll get to.

Across the three, the cost to open a single studio swings by $709,279, and the bigger number isn't the safer one. A bigger, nicer buildout impresses on a tour, but it doesn't hold a single member, and every extra foot is rent you pay for the life of the lease. A smaller room keeps the fixed bills lower. Paying more to open doesn't make a studio harder to compete with. Often it only costs more to carry.

Forget the brand for a moment. Every membership business turns on one number: how many paying members it holds once it matures, against the fixed bills that come due whether the room is full or empty. Rent and payroll cost the same in a dead 2 p.m. class as a packed 6 a.m. one.

What most people get backward is how heavy those bills actually are. I've run a boutique cycling studio for nine years, and Pilates is the more forgiving box to own. The labor is light, one instructor to a class. The equipment is a fraction of a cycling studio's bike spend, and reformers last about ten years, so the cost spreads thin. The room is smaller than a standard cycling or HIIT studio, so the rent runs lower. That lower fixed nut is a big part of why money is leaving cycling and HIIT for this.

The supply and demand sits in your favor, too. A typical Pilates studio runs 12 to 14 reformers, so a class seats a dozen people, not the forty-plus a cycling or HIIT room packs in. Fewer seats, against demand that's still climbing and a demographic far wider than those formats reach: Pilates pulls across ages and fitness levels a high-intensity class never will. Run that analysis on the studios near you: pull up the prime 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. classes and see how many are already on a waitlist. Where demand outruns the seats, you hold your price, then you raise it, and you grow revenue without adding a reformer.

That demand concentrates in the prime hours. The rest of the schedule is where you earn the rest of the nut, and the rent is the same for every hour on the calendar, prime or dead. You have to fill the week, not just the 6 p.m. The pricing rewards you when you do: in a 369-studio industry survey, 65% of city Pilates studios charged more than $200 a month and a third charged more than $250 (BFS Network, via Athletech News). A low nut and real pricing power clear faster than any other boutique format. Fall short on members, and a smaller nut is still a nut.

The fee floors are where a slow month gets expensive. The premium concept's royalty is the greater of 7.5% of sales or $1,000 a month (Item 6). The national chain's local advertising requirement is the greater of $1,500 a month or 2% of prior-month sales, on top of a royalty and brand fund that run about 10% combined (Item 6). A percentage falls when your sales fall. A floor does not. Both cost the most, proportionally, in the worst month you'll have, which is the month you can least afford them.

That points to the first questions for any franchisor in this category. How many members does the average studio hold at month 12 and month 24? What are the dues, and what is the annual churn rate? If they have the numbers, they'll hand them over. If they don't, that's your answer.

Franchisors aren't required to tell you what a studio earns. Under the Federal Trade Commission's Franchise Rule, the financial performance representation in Item 19 is voluntary. What each brand chooses to disclose is the clearest signal in the category, and no two of these three chose alike.

The national chain shows the most. Its Item 19 prints the full range across 1,005 studios: average $987,810, median $978,332, a high of $2,301,954, a low of $146,258, with 48% of studios at or above the average (Item 19). Most brands in the category won't show you their worst studio. This one puts it in the same table as its best.

The premium concept shows something rarer still. Its Item 19 discloses a studio-level profit figure, not sales alone, drawn from a small cohort of franchisee studios that ran the full year (Item 19). A brand willing to print what an owner keeps is worth a closer look. How few studios stand behind that number is worth a closer one still. That's its Part 3 story.

The emerging brand shows nothing. It discloses no Item 19 at all, which is legal and which is information. A missing Item 19 isn't a lie, and it isn't a red flag on its own. It's a menu with no prices. The moment a brand declines to show the number, the entire burden of proof shifts to you, to the Item 20 call sheet, and to the operators you reach before you sign. No Item 19 is only a green flag if you actually go find the number.

None of this is a case against Pilates. The category is growing, the demand is documented, and the best studios in these filings do real seven-figure sales. Smart money agrees. A private-equity firm took a majority stake in a 34-studio operator of the largest chain in June 2025, then rolled in two more franchisee groups, at prices nobody disclosed (Franchise Times). L Catterton bought control of Solidcore, a Pilates-style studio chain, at a reported $600 million to $700 million enterprise value in 2024 (Athletech News). Money doesn't move into a dying category.

It's not all tailwind. Even the category leader's North American same-store sales turned negative 3% in the fourth quarter of 2025 (Franchise Times). A growing category doesn't hand any one studio its members. The leader's parent is its own story, and that's Part 2.

Then there's the exit. Across 400 gym and fitness businesses sold between 2021 and 2025, the median sale price was $210,500 on median owner earnings of $99,389, a multiple of 2.42 times what the owner took home (BizBuySell). That's the broad gym category and single-unit studios, not Pilates alone, so carry both caveats. It's also a real closed-transaction number rather than a broker's asking price, and it's roughly what a studio is worth on the way out.

That's the entire use of an FDD. It won't tell you which brand to buy. It tells you what a winning studio looks like, what a losing one costs, and what to ask before you sign. The operators at the top of the range did the boring work: picked the right corner, sold memberships before they opened, and kept them past the January drop-off. The tailwind gets you the first call. The rest is on you.

Part 2 covers the national chain, the one name almost everyone in this category can say. Its average studio rings up $987,810, nearly half its studios land at or above that average, and a private-equity firm is buying its operators by the dozen (Item 19). It also posted its first negative same-store quarter while its parent shopped itself to bankers.

The filing shows you the boom and the strain in the same document. It doesn't tell you which one is waiting in your zip code. Part 2 sits in that gap.

If you're looking at a Pilates brand, or just want to understand the category before you take a Discovery Day, that's what I do. I've read every FDD in this series. I can tell you in 15 minutes whether the numbers support the pitch. My consulting costs you nothing. Book the Free Zorzee Clarity Call.

I also wrote a free eBook titled the The 12 Seat Advantage which you can download for free here.

Every Pilates brand in the category has a full dossier on Zorzee, each one read across the 2026 filing and the Five Signals. Compare them at zorzee.com/compare, or go straight to one:

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