“In World Gym, we have the best of both worlds,” says Jon Davie who in 2006, along with his business partner Mike Nysten, acquired the Australian master franchise rights for the
US-based brand. “World Gym has a strong, global brand and a great brand story – that’s something we were very much looking for – but we were also given the autonomy to take that story, shape it for the Australian market and create a model that works here.”

He continues: “The World Gym story is a really nice one. It was founded by Joe Gold, who had previously created the male-dominated, body-building mecca that is Gold’s Gym. Having stepped away from that, he wanted to create something that was accessible to everyone. The result was World Gym.

“We liked that story and wanted to evolve it for the Australian market. We’ve kept the ‘Seriously fun fitness’ strapline, which is all about offering seriously good fitness opportunities that deliver results, all with a great sense of community and camaraderie. However, we’ve been able to design our own clubs and drive our own positioning.

“We’re keen to be family-friendly and to attract women. We build all our gyms to be non-intimidating for these audiences, and in our newest club our membership is 51 per cent female. Our marketing reflects this. Our view: the quality of our gyms will mean we attract the serious exercisers anyway, without skewing our marketing towards them.

“Because we do offer the best of the best at our gyms: the best equipment, a great
environment, excellent programming, group exercise timetables that typically offer 50–60 live classes a week plus virtual, studios that can each rival any equivalent boutique offering locally. With us, you get the best of everything you need in one place – everything you could want for your fitness regime – and all for around A$20 a week. Not only that, but we offer plenty of crèche and childcare facilities too, so your children can be looked after while you train, and wonderful social café spaces to enjoy with friends afterwards.”

our goal is to create an environment where everyone can find their thing and enjoy their hour of fitness.

Best in class

Davie adds: “We didn’t want to start going down the route some operators have done, whereby they’ve narrowed their offerings to appeal to very specific audiences. We offer everything from traditional group exercise to heavy lifting, because our goal is to create an environment where everyone can find their thing – where anyone can come in and enjoy their hour of fitness, whatever their chosen form of fitness might be.

“As a result, although our core target market is 17- to 38-year-olds, we also have younger members coming in – some of our gyms are located in schools, and teachers tell us the kids enjoy their PE lessons more when they take place in the gym environment – right up to those aged 80 and above who are looking to improve quality of life and stay mobile. We have women doing Olympic lifting; there’s roughly a 50/50 male/female split on our World Gym Athletics Foundation Levels 1–3, which teach technique to allow you to lift properly and avoid injury. We have men doing yoga to improve their flexibility; we do a lot of social media around ‘athletic yoga’, the importance of stretching for weight lifting and so on.

“But as I say, although ours is a big box model with all these different facets to the offering, the crucial difference in our gyms is that each and every aspect is designed to be the best in the market. We never do anything half-heartedly. Our functional CrossFit-style areas have bespoke World Gym Athletic programming and, we believe, rival the likes of Barry’s Bootcamp and F45; many of our yoga studios are kitted out to offer hot yoga; and our cycling studios draw on what we’ve seen during numerous visits to boutique studios in the States.”

Cycling is thriving

He continues: “In our Burleigh club, for example, the cycling studio is designed like an auditorium. We have a curved room with three tiers of Body Bikes, a sloped roof, a raised pedestal for the instructor. We put a lot of detail into the mood lighting, the textures and design, the sound. We’re fanatical about this – about ensuring instructors don’t have to scream to make themselves heard and that everything blends well with the music.

“But we’re always looking to improve every experience in our clubs, and I can quite see how the studios in the clubs we open next year will be even better, including large screens at the front to run virtual classes. We find virtual to be a great addition across the board of group exercise, but with indoor cycling specifically it adds a new, immersive dimension to the experience.

“So, we’ll push our cycling studios to the next level, and the next, as standards and expectations continue to rise across the sector. We’ll develop more programming and styles of class to complement the classes we already have – RPM and SPRINT, freestyle, DJ nights and marathons – and we’ll add more virtual classes. We’ll find new ways to create a great atmosphere. We’ll build on the sense of club-in-club, potentially creating dedicated areas for cycling-only lockers that will be ready with people’s cleats, towels and water when they arrive.

a while ago people were saying indoor cycling would die out, but if anything, it’s getting more important.

“Across all our clubs, cycling is already our most popular class: we typically offer 10–12 live classes a week and we have some members who come to us just for this. We invite feedback through social media that then shapes our timetables: what do you want more of and when do you want it – what day and what time? That often leads to more cycling, or scheduling cycling to be followed immediately afterwards by yoga.

“You know, a while ago people were saying indoor cycling would die out, but our experience is that, if anything, it’s getting more important. We just need to keep evolving to meet consumer demands. Honestly, if I only had space in a club to build one studio – general group exercise or cycling – I’d opt for cycling.”

Big box vs boutique

So, with rumours that SoulCycle is eyeing up Australia after a successful entry into the UK, what does Davie think of the pending threat from the boutiques?

Interestingly, he views the situation not as ‘boutiques versus big box’, but as ‘boutiques + low-cost versus big box’ – and for the Australian market at least, he remains confident in the World Gym model. “Rents and staff costs are so high in Australia that it’s hard to make a real success of the low-cost model,” he explains. “Neither is there the density of population, outside of areas like the Sydney CBD, that boutiques generally need to succeed. So, where in the US people are paying US$10 a month for their gym and US$25+ per class at a boutique on top of this, I don’t think this will happen as easily in Australia.

“Our view is therefore that, provided we can create experiences in our clubs that rival the boutiques, we will likely retain our members.”

But while Davie may not see boutiques as a model suited for roll-out across Australia, there is another model he does see as a strong contender, and that’s the satellite club – the smaller footprint model designed to sit between big box clubs.

“We’re just in the process of taking our World Gym Athletic brand and creating a spin-off satellite model,” he explains. “We’ve already been creating separate areas for this functional training offering within our clubs, to create a club-in-club feel, but our first fully standalone World Gym Athletic studio will open on the Gold Coast later this year. It will be a 400sq m site offering the best functional classes you can do, but for A$30 a week you will also be able to access the nearby World Gym clubs. That’s great value for the members.

Our first fully standalone world gym athletic studio will open on the gold coast later this year.

“It’s an interesting model for potential franchisees too, as it’s obviously a lower cost of entry: lower rent and all you really need is functional equipment – free weights and so on. Plus we’ve spent a lot of time creating really great programming. I can envisage this appealing to personal trainers who want to take the next step and own their own training space. We hope to open four or five of these studios over the next 12–18 months.”

Shared success

Meanwhile, plans are to open between seven and 10 World Gyms a year over the next few years – and Davie admits he is “still pinching” himself at the idea they will soon reach 50 sites.

“Our original plan was simply to be gym owners ourselves, with a club in Sydney for Mike and a club on the Gold Coast for me,” he explains. “It was only when Joe Gold suggested we take the franchise that we even considered that option, and in the first five years we only opened three clubs. But it soon sped up as people began to recognise the brand and we got more and more interest from developers, real estate firms and potential franchisees.

“We’re now opening between five and seven clubs a year, have reached 30 clubs in total and will be opening a further eight by April 2020 – and that’s without even really touching on the big markets of Melbourne and Sydney, where we currently have only one and three clubs respectively. Those cities will be our next focus.

“But as we grow, we will stick by our pledge not to over-develop: we don’t want any of our clubs to cannibalise each other. So, for example, in Queensland, which has a population of around 3.4 million people, we now have 14 clubs and I’d say we’re done there. We don’t ever want to have a club that fails. “Neither do we push every growth opportunity: for every franchisee we take on, there are probably 20 or 30 we don’t. We take our time finding great sites and we always offer them to existing franchisees first. More and more of our franchisees are now opening second and third clubs, and that’s very rewarding for us: their willingness to re-invest in World Gym is proof the model works.

“In the end, Mike and I are first and foremost gym owners – I now have three World Gyms of my own, and between all the company directors we own nine – and we always say that we won’t let anyone open a club unless we would open it ourselves. We want every single one of our franchisees to be successful. That, for us, is the measure of our own success.”

From elite trainer to co-founder of Celebrity Fitness to founder of new health club brand Paradigm, JJ Sweeney tells Kate Cracknell about his journey through fitness, and how his experiences have led to the creation of his perfect club

You were one of the co-founders of Celebrity Fitness in Asia. What was your journey up to that point?

I was always interested in fitness. When I was younger, back in Ireland where I grew up, I would take part in amateur cycling races at the weekend, cycling 150 or 200 miles.

After doing a diploma in sports science, I spent five years in New Zealand, training top athletes including Annelise Coberger, who won silver in the slalom in the 1992 Winter Olympics. I left New Zealand in 1994 and spent five years in Japan, managing Hilton Hotels’ health clubs across the country, followed by a stint in Taiwan working with California Fitness.

That’s where I met John Franklin, who along with Mike Anderson and my wife Miho were the three other co-founders of Celebrity Fitness, which we launched in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 2003.

What was the model at Celebrity Fitness?

When we set out, there were no other health club brands in the market. We really were
starting from zero. But we latched on to what people wanted – which in Asia was energy and entertainment – and we came up with a concept people had never seen before. It was Hard Rock Café meets Grand Hyatt Hotels meets Las Vegas. We wanted to take the best of all of those places, those distinct sectors, and put them into a fitness company. We wanted to create a place that felt like going on vacation for all those members who had spent the day in an office. That was the dream.

We had very cool, design-led clubs. We did lots of events and we had incredible group exercise. Our cycling studio, for example, started off as a darkened room, but it also had a fluorescent dome in the ceiling and lights in the floor, and as these lit up – combined with the great instructor and music – there was such an energy in the room. I used to love instructing myself, seeing people’s reactions as the class went on.

What were the key milestones for the brand?

Having launched the first club in 2003, we opened 16 clubs in the space of four years. At the end of 2007, we were acquired by Kuala Lumpur-based Navas Capital, who were very keen to see the brand expand.

We subsequently moved into India and Turkey, but things didn’t go our way there, so ultimately those clubs were sold off. We regrouped and instead focused our growth on the markets we were already in: Indonesia, where we grew to around 37 clubs in 12 cities; and Malaysia, predominantly Kuala Lumpur, where we got up to about 22 clubs. We also opened five clubs in Singapore.

But then things changed again in June 2017, when Celebrity Fitness merged with Fitness First Asia. The Singapore clubs were rebranded as Fitness First and a few clubs were closed in Indonesia. I only stayed with the business for six months following the merger.

What were your key learnings from your time at Celebrity Fitness?

The brand started out being really cool, really design-led, but as it grew to multiple sites in multiple countries that character was toned down. We had new people in the senior management team – that’s inevitable when you expand beyond a certain point – and in the process, the dream we had had as co-founders became somewhat diluted. There seemed to be less creativity. It felt like a number of different concepts and visions were being pushed together and I didn’t feel it worked.

So, while I wouldn’t change a thing about what we did as co-founders, my key learning would definitely be not to expand as fast as we did. It would be to spend more time building really strong foundations, training and developing staff and not pushing them into management roles before they were ready.

As new clubs opnened, they didn’t ‘copy and paste’ as i woud have liked. that impacts the member experience.

I recognise that, if we hadn’t grown fast, another brand would have come in and seized that opportunity, but it did feel a bit out of control at times. As new clubs opened, they didn’t ‘copy and paste’ in the way I would have liked them to, and of course that impacts the member experience.

You’ve now founded a new health club brand: Paradigm. Please tell us more.

Paradigm opened in Jakarta in February 2019 and what we’ve created is a genuinely new and unique concept. I honestly believe, if it were to open in New York, London, Tokyo, it would be THE place to go. I spent a year and a half planning it, unable to sleep for thinking through all the detail. I’ve done everything exactly as I wanted to.

Design-wise, when you walk in, the reception and lounge are like a six-star hotel. The changing rooms are stunning, with wooden floors and marbled bathrooms. The gym is raw and functional – a powerful contrast to the reception area. And then there are the studios, which have a real wow factor: we have a beautiful cycling studio; a 300sq m group exercise studio with space for 120 people in a dance class; and an intimate mind-body studio with space for maximum of 16 people. And then the whole club is surrounded by floor to ceiling windows, so you almost feel as though you’re outdoors – the views are incredible.

We’ve also chosen to be in the first LEED Platinum building in Indonesia, where everything has to be energy-saving and environment-friendly, to the point of them checking any materials we wanted to use in the build.

paradigm is all about mind, body and spirit. a lot of operators talk about this, but few actually do it. we do.

Equally important at Paradigm is our holistic ethos: we’re all about mind, body and spirit. A lot of operators talk about this, but I believe few actually do it. We do.

One great example is our Soundbath class, which we run every day at lunchtime to help people de-stress and recharge. We’re located in Jakarta’s CBD (central business district), surrounded by offices, so there’s huge demand for this service. You don’t even have to change into gym kit. You just go into the mind-body studio, lay down on comfortable blankets, put on an eye pillow and we play special healing music that creates vibrations through your body. You start to see colours: you’ll see yellow if you’re in a creative state, blue if you’re in a dreamlike state… It’s a wonderful class.

We also run other mind-body classes such as yoga, mobility, barefoot, meditation, SMR (self-myofascial release). We’re finding a lot of people are joining us just for these, and even those who are into their weights and high-intensity work are loving the scope we offer for active recovery too. The way I explain it, exercise is important, but ‘inner-cise’ is just as important.

when i left celebrity fitness, people wanted to follow me. i hand-picked those i considered to be true superstars.

We have around 90 group classes a week and we encourage everyone to take part; around 70 per cent of our members do. It helps, of course, that we have exceptional instructors. When I left Celebrity Fitness, a lot of people wanted to follow me, but you can’t take everyone. I hand-picked the best of the best – the people I considered to be true superstars.

Tell us a bit more about the fitness spaces at Paradigm.

The gym floor is split into five zones. The first is Fast Track, which does host some live classes as well as DJ nights two or three times a week, but its primary offering is virtual classes, which you can do on the hour, every hour. We create this virtual content ourselves.

The rest of the gym space is very raw, with no traditional strength equipment – it’s all about standing up, about movement. There’s a Free Weights zone, a Cardio zone, a Kettlebell zone and a Calisthenics zone. This Calisthenics zone features the sort of equipment you’d often find on a beach, with bars and Olympic rings and so on, but we decided to bring it indoors. We have 7m-high ceilings, so we have the space to do aerial stuff, and in fact we’ve combined this with a climbing wall and peg boards that go up 5 metres.

We also worked with Life Fitness to create the first four-pillar cable machine in the world, which is nicknamed The Beast and which sits alongside equipment like power racks, benches, free weights, the Nautilus glute drive… and lots of open space.

Sound is really important to us. Throughout the whole gym floor space, we have 16 sub-woofers. It means you don’t just hear the music – you feel it. It feels like the music is really pumping, but without having to crank up the volume to a point where you can’t hear each other speak.

Then we have our studios. The largest one has a 6m x 3.5m LED screen at the front, on which we project imagery and video to enhance each class and create an immersive environment. Our cycle studio is a really cool space too, with fantastic lighting, a 3m x 3.5m LED screen showing MyRide video footage from around the world, and an exceptional sound system – it has two sub-woofers of its own, just in the studio, so you feel the music but can still hear the instructor very clearly.

The way we describe it: as a 2,000sq m site, Paradigm is a big-box boutique.

Tell us a bit more about your cycling classes.

I’m not a huge fan of all these ‘party on a bike’ classes. Yes, it’s fun and the music might inspire you, but my view is that you get better results if you’re really focused on what you’re doing, if you’re really aware of your body.

I therefore like to teach indoor cycling as if it were road cycling. I like to teach people how to climb and race in the right way, how to engage their whole body: legs, core, upper body. I like to focus on the movement, on technique. Because if you do all this, you’ll burn more calories and get better results.

That’s our approach at Paradigm. We use ICG’s Coach by Colour system for all our classes, where you train in colour-coded zones: we currently offer a 50-minute Colours class and a 30-minute Performance class, and I’m working on two more formats which we’ll launch soon.

Performance is about 25 per cent harder than Colours – you’ll cycle about 12km in the 30 minutes, compared to about 17km in 50 minutes in Colours. In each class, the structure is set – the order of the coloured zones you go through, culminating in a team competition at the end – but the instructor is free to do his or her own choreography. The colour zones are all we dictate.

Interestingly, where at Celebrity Fitness the cycling was all about motivation and
excitement – the instructors really had to be performers – at Paradigm the member
mindset is proving to be different. The members are very focused and are more interested in the data, in their results, in the instructor getting them through a good workout and helping them stay focused. It’s perhaps down to our location in the CBD, which means we have a lot of competitive high-fliers among our members – we have over 30 CEOs, for example – but they’re more interested in getting results than in being entertained.

You refer to Paradigm as a luxury fashion brand. What do you mean by this?

When people get into fitness, over time their body changes shape – but the way they feel also changes. The way they act, their attitude, their self-confidence, the clothes they choose… their whole body language changes. That’s why I see fitness as fashion. We help people fall in love not only with fitness, but also with themselves and with fashion.

By offering all of that within a unique, premium space, we’re also finding others are seeing us as a fashion brand. We’re collaborating not only by the usual sportswear brands, but with the likes of Calvin Klein, Estée Lauder, Guess. For example, Calvin Klein recently organised an event for 300 people at Paradigm, as well as a pop-up store in front of the club. People are seeing us as a fashion brand and we’ve gone viral.

How has Paradigm performed so far, and what are your expansion plans?

It’s going very well so far. We’re currently at 900 members [as at October 2019] and I’d like to get to 1,600, but break-even would be around 1,100. Membership costs around US$80 a month, up to US$350 to include 10 PT sessions. That makes our price point twice as much as Celebrity Fitness, for example, so we don’t need to have thousands of members.

Going forward, I only want to open three or four Paradigms in total, all in Jakarta. I want to keep it exclusive, to create a tight-knit community, to keep standards really high. I want it to be a place where members spend time, and where I can take the time to be on the gym floor engaging with them, teaching them new techniques to help them get results.

I’m therefore not in a hurry to open our second club. The space has to be perfect. We want the high ceilings and the windows. I’ve looked at a few places but they weren’t right – but interestingly, I’m now finding myself being approached by developers who are actively asking me what they want so they can build it for me.

What we will definitely do in 2020 is launch the Indonesian Fitness Academy. I’m concerned by all the influencers on social media who are persuading people to follow them and their advice, but without it being based on any real knowledge or certification – nothing more than their own personal experience. Everyone’s needs are different; to get the best results, you need expert advice and a personalised training approach.

influencers on social media are persuading people to follow them, but without any real knowledge or certification.

We already spend a lot of time educating both members and our staff to address the
misconceptions they’ve picked up from social media, but I now want to do even more to ensure instructors have an in-depth understanding of the human body, and of how to train different types of people.

It is only by doing this – by helping members get results – that we can really get them to fall in love with fitness.