Ask a studio owner what makes their studio different, and you'll hear the same things: great instructors, a beautiful space, a welcoming community.
Your most committed members will say it's when:
Someone greeted them by name and walked them to their reformer.
Someone remembered it was their 150th class and made a moment of it.
Someone asked where they were off to on holiday and left a note on their profile so whoever saw them at their first-class back could ask how the trip was.
None of that is on anyone's to-do list, and all of it takes time. In most studios that time is scattered across email, texts, WhatsApp, voicemails to return and DMs in other apps, on a phone that doesn't stop.
I opened Kohr to create a space where people, as they age, feel supported as they move through their day, their week, their month and their life, and leave class with more energy instead of feeling exhausted. That's the part I love. As the studio grew, more of my week went somewhere else: can I freeze this, can I move my booking, why was I charged. As that to-do list piled up, it pulled my focus away from my why: the reason I opened the studio, and the joy I got from it.
Freezes were the worst of it. At Kohr they came in through a QR code on a poster by the front desk. Members scanned it, filled in a form, and the form went into a list of someone checked about once a week. Some weeks nobody checked it at all.
A member asked to freeze before two weeks away. Nobody got to it. Their membership renewed while they were on holiday, and by the time they wrote to us, they wanted a refund and were wondering whether to stay. We refunded them and apologized. A few weeks later, it happened again with someone else.
I'd love to tell you I was frustrated with whoever was meant to be checking that list. I couldn't be. I didn't want to do it either. That's why it was on someone else's to-do list.
For a while I filed this under admin, something to tidy up when we had time. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to see it as a hospitality problem. The holiday conversation at the top of this piece takes two minutes. We weren't having it, because the hours were going somewhere none of us had planned.
What members are asking for
Owning Kohr shows me how one studio runs. My 9-to-5 shows me, at scale, how thousands do. I work in product marketing at Momence, the platform a lot of Pilates, yoga and fitness studios run on, and that gave me a way to ask something I never could from running a single studio: was a pile of freeze requests nobody had time for only our problem, or was it happening in studios everywhere? And if it was everywhere, what were members asking studios for?
Momence connects a studio's email, phone, voicemail, text and WhatsApp messages into one inbox, which lets us see conversation themes at scale. We analyzed 500,000 member messages from Pilates, yoga, and group fitness studios. Most weren't questions. They were the same requests, again and again: pause my membership, move my booking, take me out of tomorrow's class, why was I charged. Four categories made up 81 percent of the requests: memberships, scheduling, class information and cancellations.
What the time went to
We changed who handles the requests. At Kohr, Momence's marketing Sequences and AI Inbox Agent now own the repetitive tasks: freezes, bookings, reschedules, and the questions we used to answer with the same paragraph every week. A freeze that used to sit on a list for a week gets handled straight away, at any hour, using the policy we wrote down once. Anything that needs judgment still comes to a person.
The poster was the most visible problem, but it was never only freezes. Once our team stopped spending their days on the same requests over and over, they got back to the part people are good at.
New members get someone's full attention now: a walk around the space, an introduction to the equipment, to their instructor, to the people they'll be moving alongside. A 50th, 150th, or 250th class becomes a moment of celebration. When someone has nothing booked, a person notices and helps them into their next class, because the members who come two or three times a week are the ones who stay. We had time to look for members who had gone quiet on their membership before they decided to cancel it, and most of those conversations were simple: you usually come to this class, have you tried that one?
Sales stopped feeling like sales, too. When you've had time to learn a bit about the person in front of you, an upgrade comes out of a conversation about them.
We never set any of that up as a growth project. Our team does it because the routine requests stopped landing on them, and the retention, rebooking, and upgrades come with it. The growth is built into how the studio runs day to day.
Some of the time went into our team. We put more into our teacher training, and the cohort has grown. Everyone who joins a studio team is with you for a season. They move, start families, and change directions. I've started thinking about the next generation of instructors the same way I think about turning intro clients into members.
If you want somewhere to start, look at one week of your messages before you decide anything. Sort them into what needs doing, what you've answered before, what needs you, and what only needs a thank-you. Most owners have never counted or looked at what that time could mean for the people in their studio if it went somewhere else.
We invite you to join our free webinar on 9 December, about what hospitality looks like for studios in 2027: what members ask for most, which requests you can hand over, and which ones you should never automate.
30 Blogs in 30 Days
Throughout October, we’re sharing one new blog every day, bringing together studio owners, instructors and industry experts to share their experiences, knowledge and perspectives on the Pilates industry.
Day 23 of 30, come back tomorrow for the next blog.
