mornin’ merrymakers 🧘‍♀️🎀🪞🩰🦢🕯️

before we dive in, i want to disclose that i love pilates. i’ve been doing it since i was 13 as a part of my ballet training, i got certified in it, & have taken 100s of classes across sf, nyc, and atx.

i think the workout is great for flexibility, strength, longevity, and mental health.

BUT

i’m deeply worried about the business of pilates right now.

the pink pilates princess aesthetic has taken over my feed. i learn of a new pilates franchise every week. i’m seeing so many first time business owners (and influencers) opening pilates studios.

most alarming is the the number of pilates studios that have opened within walking distance of my apartment in downtown austin.

we’re approaching 20!

for comparison, i can walk to 3 gyms, 2 grocery stores, & 1 pharmacy.

so today i’m putting together my case that pilates is peaking & the bubble is bound to pop soon. we've seen this movie before. several times. & it doesn't end well for most of the business owners in it.

before we get to pilates specifically, let's establish the historical pattern.

boutique fitness is one of the most reliably cyclical categories in all of retail.

a format catches cultural fire. entrepreneurs flood in. franchise machines oversell territories. unit economics deteriorate quietly while the cultural aesthetic stays immaculate and ever invasive.

then something (a scandal, a pandemic, a research paper) trips the wire & the whole thing collapses faster than it rose. some examples to prove my point.

🌀 curves

in 2005, curves international was the fastest-growing franchise in american history, with 7,848 US locations. opening one new club every three hours at its peak!!!

the women-only circuit training concept was genuinely revolutionary for its moment.

then it wasn't.

by 2009, more than 1K locations closed in a single year. failure to innovate, over-franchised territories, and a flood of low-cost gym competition did it in.

now roughly 150 us locations.

💀 crossfit

crossfit peaked at ~15,000 affiliated boxes worldwide in 2018.

then founder greg glassman tweeted "it's FLOYD-19" during the george floyd protests in june 2020. reebok terminated their partnership. glassman was forced out. covid closed ~20% of boxes.

then in 2024, the crossfit games drowning of athlete lazar đukić triggered another 1,461 de-affiliations in a single year.

currently ~10k affiliates, down 33% from peak.

the brand is now for sale again.

🚴 soulcycle + cycling studios

soulcycle filed for an IPO at a ~$900 million valuation in 2015 with just 38 studios. it peaked near 99 locations.

the IPO was quietly cancelled in 2018. flywheel sports, soulcycle's chief competitor with 42 studios, filed chapter 7 bankruptcy in september 2020 with less than $50,000 in assets against $50–100 million in liabilities.

then came peloton, which delivered the true death blow, not to soulcycle's business, but to the fundamental premise that you need to leave your house to ride a bike hard. peloton got people to cycle at home during the pandemic. but as we know that business too has already boomed and now mostly busted on the stock market.

classpass reports pilates as the #1 most-booked workout globally for three consecutive years, with bookings up 84% since 2023. google searches for "pilates" have tripled. 11.86 million americans practiced pilates in 2023, a record, up 15% year-over-year.

the demand is real. i'm not disputing that.

what i'm disputing is whether the supply being built to meet that demand…

let’s just look at one extreme example.

club pilates.

this is the dominant franchise chain right now, owned by publicly traded xponential fitness. & has grown from ~30 US locations in 2015 to over 1,071 today.

that's a 35x expansion in nine years.

xponential fitness (ticker: XPOF) is the holding company behind club pilates, pure barre, row house, stretch lab, and several other boutique fitness brands. it's the most important data point in this entire conversation because it shows us exactly what's happening underneath the aspirational branding.

the stock peaked at $33.08 in april 2023. it crashed 47% in a single day in february 2026 after reporting Q4 2025 results. it now trades around $5.75, an 83% decline from peak.

here's what those earnings actually said:

but the most damning number is in the franchise pipeline.

xponential had roughly 3,000 sold-but-not-open studio licenses in 2022–2023. by 2025, that pipeline had shrunk to ~1,590.

that means approximately 1,400 licenses were terminated or cancelled… far exceeding the number that actually opened. & ~30% of remaining contractually obligated licenses are more than 12 months behind schedule, classified internally as "inactive."

translation:

they sold territories faster than anyone could (or should) build them.

meanwhile, xponential fitness has paid $39.75 million settling an FTC investigation and a separate suit from 509 current and former franchisees alleging financial misrepresentation. many of this concept owners claim “xponential left them bankrupt."

i see a juicy docu-series on the horizon.

my fear of franchises keeps growing.

for the last several years, the boutique fitness business has been run on a logic of growth-at-all-costs. open fast. sell territories. collect royalties. worry about profitability later. and for a window of time that logic sort of worked. classic bubble mentality.

that window is closed.

that means:

the well-capitalized multi-unit club pilates franchisees with genuine operational discipline will consolidate market share as weaker operators fold. and the independent studios with loyal local clientele and lean cost structures will outlast the chains that overextended.

i’m not saying all pilates studios are doomed, just most of them.

all of this has me thinking about tulips, specifically tulipmania

i first learned about it in high school history & it’s a concept that’s forever stuck.

in february 1637, dutch tulip bulb prices collapsed overnight after years of speculative mania. at peak, a single tulip bulb traded for the price of a skilled craftsman's annual salary. people mortgaged their homes for flowers.

then the market seized, buyers disappeared, & prices fell 99%.

the people left holding tulip bulbs (or in this case 10-year leases on pilates studios in oversaturated markets) had no good options.

i am not saying pilates is going away overnight.

it's a 100-year-old practice with genuine clinical backing. the format will survive. but a lot of the studios currently being built will not…

there are an estimated 9,000–13,000 pilates studios in the us serving ~12M practitioners, which is roughly 1k participants per studio, in a country where 80% of gym memberships go unused.

the ibisworld 2025 analysis of the pilates & yoga studio sector already notes that profit margins average just 6–7% in the category. this is alarming because we’re currently in the good times where profit margins should in theory be there highest.

the correction is not a question of if.
it's a question of when.

p.s. i think supplements are over franchised too, worth checking this for yourself 👇