A franchise aims for upscale women By John Craig, Editor
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. – Here is the land of the beautiful, Chris Palumbo makes no bones about the image his brand is creating.
“We want our members to have the feeling that they’re walking into a fitness magazine”, he said of elements™, the high-end chain of women’s health clubs that opened its first location 18 months ago outside Atlanta and now has two dozen sites in development around the United States, while making inroads into India, China, Israel, Mexico and South Korea.
elements™ is an unabashedly upscale concept that ties fitness and dieting to the lifestyle of the well heeled (and want to be's).
The boutique style clubs – 3,000 to 6,000 square feet – leave no design detail to chance. They are highly stylized, in a South Beach way, the result of three years of toil by a team of branding experts from “the Madison Avenue boardroom,” Palumbo said.
The clubs feature four “lifestyle zones” – a strength area featuring smartcard technology that allows members to track their progress on each machine, a cardio-theater setup, a diet-coaching area, and rooms for yoga, pilates and just plain relaxation.
Memberships cost about $90 a month, and franchisees will have to invest $400,000 to $600,000 to get an elements™ up and running, Palumbo said. Clubs ideally should derive about 60 percent of their revenue from membership fees, and the rest from premium services such as diet-coaching, small-group exercise classes and sales of health supplements, he said.
The brand concept has been three years and “millions of dollars” in the making, says Palumbo, 32, a New York native and former World Gym franchisee who made a pitch several years ago to purchase the entire World Gym franchise. “You can’t cut corners if you’re launching an international brand,” he said.
Palumbo said results to date are encouraging. elements™ franchises outside the Atlanta area and Charlotte, N.C., have done well, he said, and a club in Exeter, N.H., doubled projections by signing up 400 members in its first several weeks.
Palumbo’s goal is to penetrate the top 300 U.S. markets while simultaneously branching out overseas, he said.
