Pure Barre, a barre studio franchise business, themselves have over 600 branches around the country, with over half a million people using these studios. Similarly, Barre3 is another brand with more than 170 studios in the US alone.

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One of the main reasons why barre has become so popular is because it is possible for people of all ages to do barre, and get fitter. In fact, people often say that while practicing barre often does not feel like an exercise at all, the benefits are undeniable.

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3 successful barre studios to inspire you

Here are 3 barre studio success stories to inspire you.

1. Pure Barre

Pure Barre started off as a boutique studio in 2001 in Michigan. Founder Carrie Dorr had no idea how her idea would grow until people started asking her about opening new Pure Barre studios.

From those humble beginnings, Pure Barre now has over 600 studios across the country and an estimated half a million users. The company, now owned by Xponential Fitness Inc., has a yearly turnover of around $61 million.

Pure Barre has tied up with Apple, so users can track their performances accurately using Apple watches and the Apple Health app. Their Instagram account has 137 thousand followers.

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2. Physique 57

Physique 57 was started in 2006 by Jennifer Vaughn Maanavi and Tanya Becker. They were one of New York City’s first boutique barre fitness studios.

They are now a global chain of barre studios, boasting a revenue of around $13 million per annum. Among their international branches, Physique 57 has branches in Thailand, Dubai, and Mumbai.

The brand also has an on-demand video app, making barre fitness available to people anywhere and at any time. They currently have 58.5 thousand followers on Instagram.

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3. Barre3

The first Barre3 studio was opened in Portland, Oregon in 2008 by Sadie and Chris Lincoln. They have grown to more than 170 franchisee studios across the US and Canada, with over 69 thousand users every month.

Barre3 boasts a revenue of $13.4 million dollars. They offer online classes at $29 a month and have 156 thousand followers on Instagram.

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How to open a successful barre studio

Here’s a quick overview of what opening a barre studio entails.

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1. Find your location

The right location is everything when it comes to setting up a new barre studio. Here are some things to remember while choosing a location for your new studio.

• The ideal size for a barre fitness studio is around 1500 square feet.

• Look for a space that is easy to spot from the street. This will help create brand awareness and make it easy for customers to find you.

• Be sure to choose a space in a neighborhood that has your target customers either living in or frequently. Also, it would help to locate your barre studio in a neighborhood where people can afford your services.

• Choose a location that is easily accessible by public transportation. It should also ideally have plenty of parking so people do not need to pay a hefty premium every time they want to work out.

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2. Find out who will attend your classes

The first thing you will need to do is define who your future customers are going to be. Barre as an exercise form has a lot of takers because it helps people lose weight, strengthen their cores and become healthier without strenuous activity.

This makes it popular with specific sections of society, including pregnant women, senior citizens, people with ailments like sciatica, tendonitis, and arthritis, as well as people recovering from injuries.

Of course, that isn’t to say that people without these conditions do not practice barre. They do, but branding your business and bringing in paying customers is always easier when you know which niche you want to service.

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3. Define your brand

A large part of setting up our own barre studio involves defining your brand. Branding creates a unique identity for your studio, something that people will remember your studio by.

Here are three aspects of branding for your barre studio that you should pay attention to.

• Your branding should tie in with the focus of your studio. This again leads back to defining your niche. If, for example, you’re targeting pregnant women as your customer base, then all branding activities, the colors you use, and even interior themes should revolve around appealing to that audience.

• Build a brand kit that revolves around your brand vision. This kit is basically a visual representation of your brand. This includes your brand logo, colors of choice, typography, and imagery that represent your brand.

• Define your brand’s messaging language. This means setting the tone of voice for brand communications as well as using important keywords and phrases consistently in all written communications.

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4. Set up your space

Here are some considerations for you while setting up your new barre studio.

• Barre is derived from ballet, and setting up ballet barres is essential. Be sure that the barres are at waist level for users. Keep in mind that barre users range from children to the elderly, so you will need barres in three sizes.

• The ideal flooring for your barre studio is traditional dance flooring, which is a slip-resistant rolled vinyl flooring.

• Resistance bands, dumbbells, and exercise balls are used while practicing barre to tone the body, so don’t forget to buy these. Keep in mind that weights used should not weigh more than 5 lbs.

• Mats are also used, but you could encourage your members to bring their own. In fact, we at Bookee could set up an e-store for you where you could sell branded merchandise, including exercise mats.

• Other essential facilities you need to consider are a reception area, a waiting room, changing rooms and toilets.

• Be sure to pay attention to the color scheme inside your studio. Ideally, it should be consistent with your branding colors.

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5. Hire the right staff

Even if you do start small, you’re not going to be able to run classes and administration all by yourself. Here are some hiring tips for your barre studio.

• While hiring barre instructors, remember that the ideal candidates have a good mix of certifications and experience in the style of barre that your studio offers classes in. However, knowledge and experience in other forms of barre will be an added bonus, since it will allow you to offer more.

• Never hire in a hurry. Take your time to define the ideal candidate, and then find the time to look for them.

• Every time you meet a barre professional, treat them as possible employees and build a database of their contacts. That way, you will not need to struggle whenever a resource leaves to find suitable candidates again.

• Irrespective of whether you’ve hired new administrative staff or instructors, spend time and effort in training them to embody the values your barre studio stands for. These people are the ones who are going to be making the largest impact on your members.

• Always treat your staff well. Remember to appreciate and reward their efforts, while also making allowances for them to upskill and improve. If they are happy to be working with you, it will show in how they treat your members.

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6. Set up and automate processes

Manually running your barre studio is both time-consuming and inefficient. Here are some back-end automation that can help streamline your operations.

• By automating your onboarding process, it becomes easier for you to save all the important information about your customers for future use. This includes payment preferences, billing cycle, contact information, choice of exercises, and maybe even pet peeves.

• A good studio management software will also make it seamless for either you to register and schedule classes for members, or for them to do it themselves remotely.

• A good barre studio management software will also make it easy for you to automate communications with members.

Be it sending out promotional emails, messages about schedules, congratulatory messages when they achieve fitness milestones or even push notifications for payment reminders, all of these should have templates, and sending the communications themselves should take no more than a click.

• An added bonus that we at Bookee can add to this list is that we can build a branded app for your customers to receive these communications, manage their bookings and do a whole lot more with their smartphones.

This will make it easy for them to manage their relationship with your barre studio even when they’re on the go, creating a more immersive customer experience for them.

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7. Set up an online presence

A strong online presence is an important extension of your barre studio, considering people spend large parts of their time online.

Here are some pro tips to help you set up an online presence for your barre fitness studio.

• Build a professional website in a way that becomes the one place anyone who wants any information about your barre studio visits.

Must haves on your website include pictures of the interiors and exteriors of the studio, a detailed description of the courses you offer, who your instructions are, what their qualifications are, the facilities available, the address to your studio, and contact information.

Bookee can not only build you a website with all of these, but our websites will also help your customers register themselves, make payments, schedule appointments, and more. And the best part is, the website will be built featuring your unique branding.

• A strong social media presence is also essential in today’s day and age to build awareness about your new barre studio and bring in paying students. The four social media platforms most likely to get your brand traction are Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

Keep in mind that each of these platforms requires content to be customized to fit the platform. Also, video content has been proven to have 12 times the engagement pictures and text do.

While Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok all work great for short video formats, you could have all these short videos leading to longer ones on your YouTube channel.

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8. Begin marketing your studio

Now that you’re done with setting almost everything up, it is time to start marketing your brand-new barre studio. Here are some handy tips to help you get some much-needed visibility.

• Paid promotions on social media platforms are a great way to reach out to your target audience. Be sure to use keywords and hashtags to improve your reach.

• Other than posting on your own social media pages, another effective way to increase reach is to post on barre as well as dance forums and community pages on these platforms. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if you found local community pages from your area dedicated to dancing and barre.

• Register your barre studio on Google my business. That way, whenever anyone looks for a barre fitness center anywhere close to you, your studio will pop up.

• You can also register for Reserve with Google, which will allow people to register for sessions at your studio directly through the Google search engine results.

• Email marketing is another old-school but effective way to generate leads for your barre studio. Sending out mass emails can be quite a task, but service providers like Mailchimp have extremely fast, efficient, and cost-effective solutions to this.

• Probably among the oldest marketing methods in the book, word of mouth and referral marketing is among the most effective ways that you could market your barre studio.

Set up a referral campaign that rewards your customers for evangelizing your studio. One of Bookee’s customers, Booster Transform, saw an increase in revenue by almost $51,000 by offering a referral reward of a free month’s subscription to their customers.

Bookee enabled this referral program from a billing perspective, and our easy registration process ensured Booster Transform saw an increase in the number of new registrations.

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9. Get ready to launch

Now that you have everything ready and in place, you’re ready to launch your brand-new barre studio. A launch party that involves other local businesses, including other dance and fitness businesses. This is a great opportunity for networking as well as cross-marketing.

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Read more about marketing here

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Give your barre studio the flying start it needs with Bookee

You’ve now got a pretty in-depth idea of what it takes to set up a barre studio. There is, however, one thing that you can do that will take a lot of the load off of your shoulders, and help you grow your business faster. Choose Bookee as your studio management software.

We’ll help with every aspect of setting up your business. We’ll streamline your hiring process, and automate payroll management. We’ll build you a branded website and smartphone app, replete with payment options, scheduling, and more.

We’ll give you more control over your social media campaigns while automating messaging and emails as well. Video-on-demand and online classes are taken care of when you come on board with Bookee.

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Book a free demo today, and find out why fitness businesses the world over are choosing Bookee as the most complete fitness studio management solution in the market.

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