The Business of Online Pilates
With both on-demand fitness and Pilates being at the top of the trend list, I get a message every week asking how I grew my online Pilates business. In short, my success has been the result of years of training experience, steady social media growth, and a passion to offer the best reformer workouts out there - as well as good timing!
My business, Saran Pilates, offers a subscription service to access reformer and mat on-demand workouts, available to watch online and on the Saran Pilates app. Most of my subscribers live in the US, Australia, Canada and Europe. I first started uploading videos to my current platform in October 2021. In the last year alone, my subscriber rate has gone up 138%.
Here’s the thing - very few ventures are instantaneously successful. Like most businesses, this one took no small amount of setup, testing and readjusting. However, once everything was successfully aligned, my online studio has grown exponentially. My business’s success is partly due to the fact that it’s available globally, and not limited to local sales. That, and the rise in numbers of Pilates enthusiasts, instructors and studio owners, as well as the increase of home-gyms due to Covid!
I started this online journey back in 2015 when I opened my first Pilates studio in Los Angeles, and started posting clips of my Reformer workouts on Instagram. Then, in 2017 I uploaded my very first YouTube video. People seemed to appreciate my workout flows and cues, so I kept going! These two accounts continued to grow organically.
The market for online Pilates and Pilates in social media in 2017 wasn’t as saturated as it is in present-day. Because of that, I never felt the pressures of having to attain x amount of followers/subscribers or x amount of views per video. The whole experience was pretty stress-free. This might not be the case for new accounts today.
As my YouTube channel and Instagram account continued to grow, Covid hit and I had a baby. By then I was living in Atlanta, Georgia, USA teaching private sessions to clients from my home studio. Realizing how much people enjoyed my videos, I started uploading more workouts to YouTube and eventually offered a membership to my channel. For a monthly cost, YouTube subscribers gained access to premium videos and more content. The added income helped me carve out time to make more videos.
As the number of videos increased, I felt the need to organize my content more clearly. YouTube is extremely limited when it comes to customizing the platform, so I quickly sought out other options. The platform I currently use for my subscription service is easier to navigate, and includes search options. Finding the right setup is crucial for a subscription-based service because you want to avoid dragging your subscribers from one platform to another, as that comes with a subscriber-loss risk.
Thanks to the strong number of my Instagram and YouTube followers/subscribers, people found my services without me needing to spend any money on advertising. All those years of posting truly paid off! And now that I have a little more income to spare, I have invested in advertising via Instagram and Facebook, which is honestly worth every penny.
Having the ideal setup for your online services is important, as well as having some social media footprint, but you can’t overlook the special sauce. That thing that sets you apart from everyone else. Maybe it’s your teaching style, what you offer, or what you focus on. For me, I like to think (and have actually been told) that it’s my calming voice and friendly attitude, my teaching cues and class flows that people really gravitate towards. Most of my subscribers are here for my Reformer workouts because that’s what I chose to concentrate on. I also chose to focus on creating amazing workouts that prioritize mindfulness in form and movement over calories burned. I teach a mix of strong, basic Pilates exercises and more creative and contemporary ones. While I do offer some more athletic workout options, that is not my main attraction. So, someone who loves to move really fast and pile on the creative exercises will look somewhere else, and that’s ok. Knowing that you cannot cater to everyone out there will make your business that much more successful, because you’ll focus on what you do best.
As Saran Pilates continues to grow, I will need to distribute some of my workload at some point. I currently create, do, film and edit the workouts. I still take care of all of my social media posts as well as email campaigns. My graphic design background has really been helpful, to say the least! As someone who loves control, being a one-woman show is right up my alley. However, I would also enjoy working with other instructors and specialists to offer more content to my subscribers. I have a few projects up my sleeve, and can’t wait to share them with everyone.
What a journey this has been so far! I am so grateful to be able to do what I love and share my passion with the world. There is no better reward than knowing I’m helping thousands of people feel better in their bodies and minds, and that alone is worth every second of my time.
Gabrielle Saran, founder of Saran Pilates, is a Balanced Body certified Pilates instructor. She has owned and operated studios in both Los Angeles and Asheville, and is now based in Atlanta, Georgia, focusing on private training and Saran Pilates on-demand.