I was interested to read your feature in HCM January 16 (p44), which looked in-depth at the ClassPass offering and asked: is it a friend or foe to operators?

1Rebel and ClassPass both launched in London in Q1 of 2015 and enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship. 1Rebel provides a range of fitness experiences (Ride, Reshape and Rumble) and ClassPass provides paying customers to participate in those experiences.

Our customer base is approximately 30 per cent ClassPass and, at this point in time, intentionally so.

Launching a boutique fitness studio is much like launching a restaurant. You have the certainty of fixed and controllable costs but, in the beginning at least, no certainty of revenue. Without customers you also have zero atmosphere, which from an experiential perspective makes it harder to attract more customers.

This, for 1Rebel, has been the central benefit of ClassPass. An empty seat carries cost and detracts from the experience. ClassPass, as a dedicated marketing machine, solves this problem by providing an immediate and paying customer base, which in turn provides atmosphere as well as positive word of mouth.

Then, as home-grown (non-ClassPass) revenues grow, it becomes the operator’s responsibility to manage the seats made available to ClassPass. One of the real benefits of ClassPass is the flexibility it offers: operators can make seats available in any number of combinations, from particular seats in particular classes to whole classes at particular times.

For these reasons, managed properly, ClassPass is definitely friend, not foe.

I wanted to respond to your article entitled ‘A New Way of Buying’ (see HCM NovDec 15, p44). The article looked at the proliferation of digital middlemen in the health and fitness industry yet, with its focus very much on the US market, failed to provide any real comment on what’s happening here in the UK.

While it’s absolutely right to point out the risks and threats of some of the models appraised in the article, I’d like to point out that there are other flexible membership models here in the UK that are designed to sustain operators rather than undermine them.

MoveGB is one of these businesses. We designed our model around operators’ needs and we focus first and foremost on supporting our partners. Our model brings our partners new income and we pay healthy revenues, rather than competing for the same members and devaluing their product as some of the US models do.

We want to work with operators to grow the industry, and believe the different digital aggregators need to be understood clearly rather than tarnishing them all with the same brush.