London luxurious gyms in disaster as Equinox plunges to £18 million loss
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listed below are rising indicators London’s luxurious health market is in disaster after high-end gymnasium membership Equinox posted an £18 million loss and warned on its future within the UK.
The agency, which has three websites in Kensington, Bishopsgate and St James’s and is common with celebrities reminiscent of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Khloe Kardashian, warned that there was ‘material uncertainty’ as to its standing as a going concern and it was reliant on funds from its bigger US mother or father to proceed buying and selling.
Equinox, which costs as a lot as £350 monthly for a membership, turned over revenues of lower than £15 million in 2022 as losses widened and it shed tons of of members in comparison with pre-pandemic ranges.
The firm’s plans to open a fourth site in Shoreditch, which it first announced in 2016, have by no means materialised, whereas a biking studio group it owns, SoulCycle, was taken to court by Cadogan Estates earlier this yr for failing to pay hire on a website in Chelsea which it by no means managed to open after three years. A Cadogan spokesperson yesterday informed the Standard the agency reached a settlement with SoulCycle shortly earlier than the court docket case was set to start.
The Standard additionally discovered that:
- Luxury gymnasium membership 1 Rebel, which has 11 websites together with in Angel and St John’s Wood and costs as much as £240 monthly for a membership, warned in accounts filed in March it had tens of millions of kilos of debt maturing this yr that might carry down the corporate if it weren’t refinanced.
- Another luxurious gymnasium, KX Life in Chelsea, warned in accounts filed in March its future was unsure because it wanted to seek out an additional £400,000 in funding earlier than the top of 2023 or danger defaulting on loans owed to Metro Bank, after it posted a £2.7 million loss.
- GymBox, which has websites in Bank and Farringdon and costs as much as £153 for a month-to-month membership, in January mentioned it had taken out a £2.5 million mortgage to finance operations after it made a lack of £8.8 million.
- Body Machine, a high-end health studio arrange in 2019 to serve the residents of Kensington, entered insolvency in September final yr.
It comes as premium cycle machine agency Peloton noticed its shares tank 22% yesterday after it posted a lack of $242 million as gross sales slipped.
The difficulties dealing with the luxurious health market stand in stark distinction to extra inexpensive gyms, which have seen their membership numbers creep up over the identical interval.
PureGym yesterday posted a 17% jump in sales and cheered membership development in new gyms performing forward of plan.
An evaluation shared by PureGym urged that as many as 40,000 members of premium UK gyms traded right down to low-cost alternate options between 2022 and 2023. That would equate to a £100 million drop in commerce for the luxurious gymnasium market, assuming a mean membership payment of round £200.
One market analyst informed the Standard: “People trade down from premium to low-cost memberships because the majority of activity that takes place in gyms is actually using the gym equipment.
“People in premium gyms who only use that equipment, who are subsidising say a swimming pool they don’t use, find that the low-cost gyms actually have more gym equipment, while the money saved from the high membership fee could be better spent on a personal trainer.”