The most obvious version of Sweat Equity is a menu: pick the classes you want, we find you a better price. We started with the opposite — three fixed stacks, each a full month for one kind of person.
The short version
Set stacks keep the business simple enough to run by hand, and they force us to decide who we’re for. Both matter more than flexibility when you have no members yet.
Why set stacks
One stack means one set of packs to buy, one price, one number to explain. A build-your-own basket multiplies every one of those by every member.
We buy whole packs and share them across a group. That only works if the group wants the same packs. A set stack makes the group’s basket identical by design.
Each stack is a person we can picture: who she is now, who she’s becoming. Three clear people tell us faster who actually signs up than one vague menu.
Every stack is its own world — its own photography, colour and voice. You can only do that if each one is a fixed thing you can art-direct.
“$441 a year in rewards” only means something if we know exactly what’s in the month. A set stack lets us state the number before you’ve chosen anything.
Three fixed options are an experiment. Whichever stack fills first, and which one nobody picks, is the cleanest signal we can get in two weeks.
The complexity we avoided
A menu sounds simpler to the member. It’s much harder for us. Every member’s basket is different, so packs stop splitting cleanly, prices stop being one number, and the optimizer has to solve a new problem for every person instead of one problem per group.
With set stacks, all of that collapses. One group, one basket, one set of packs, one price. The optimizer only has to answer one question per stack: what’s the best month for these people?
Who we’re for
Three stacks is also a bet on three people. Sculpt is for the woman who lives at Lagree and cares about hormones and labs. The Metropolitan is for the guy whose week is Barry’s and hot yoga with friends. High Performance is for the athlete who wants recovery and data. Naming them made every other decision easier — what goes in each month, how each one looks, what we say.
What we heard
We put the stacks in front of people. The answer was clear: a fixed bundle felt too rigid. Almost everyone already has one or two favourite studios they go to every week — and they don’t want to trade them for ours.
That doesn’t undo the reasoning. It tells us where it breaks. The persona still holds; the basket has to bend around the routine people already have.
What we’re testing next
Three build-your-own models, each keeping as much of the simplicity as we can:
The three stacks stay, as starting points you can edit.
Your own one or two studios at the centre, with extras you choose around them.
Keep your routine as it is. It runs through us at today’s price, and the spread comes back as a rewards balance to spend.
We’ll put all three in front of people and report back here.