NEW OPENING
BASTILLE BIJOU “B
Kate Cracknell pays a visit to Club Med Gym’s latest new opening – the high-end Pure Club Med Gym, located on Paris’ Place de la Bastille
udget clubs have not killed the market. There’s still plenty of space for mid-market
and luxury operators,” states Franck Gueguen, CEO of health club operator Club Med Gym, which operates 22 sites across Paris, as well as 23 clubs in Switzerland under the Silhouette brand. Twenty-one of the Club Med Gym sites are mid-market, although five – operating under the Waou Club Med Gym brand – are premium mid-market. In spite of this current bias towards the mid-market, Gueguen is very clear in his opinions. “The future of the sector is high-end,” he says. And the success of Pure Club Med Gym – the company’s first venture into high-end facilities, which opened in June 2012 – certainly suggests there’s some truth in this statement.
Creating ‘bien-être’ Gueguen had, he explains, wanted to launch a high-end gym concept for some time, but realised location was the key. “Club Med Gym has been around for
34 years and we already had 21 clubs across Paris, with a 22nd in the pipeline that will open in April 2013. That made it particularly hard to find the right location for a Pure Club Med Gym. “Then an opportunity arose in the Opéra Bastille – our new club is located within the Opéra building, in a basement space formerly occupied by a book/music store. As the Opéra belongs to the State, we had to go through a public bid process. It took two and a half years to secure the site, which we now rent from the Opéra. But we were confident it was the location we needed to launch our new concept.” He continues: “In Paris, there are
very few luxury clubs, and in the 12th arrondissement – Bastille – the demographics are high-end. It’s a very fashionable residential area experiencing a lot of growth. We knew the demand was there for a truly premium club.” Indeed, in the first six months, the club – which has set a cap on member numbers, limiting it to 2,000 to maintain a sense of exclusivity – had already signed up 1,245 members, split roughly 50:50
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men to women, paying i150 a month. Interestingly, 67 per cent of these had never been gym members before. “You have to remember that, in France, total market penetration is only 5.4 per cent,” says Gueguen. “Nevertheless, with Pure Club Med Gym, we’ve created a model that’s very specifically bringing new people into health and fitness. We’ve created a space where people feel good – a club to which they want to belong, where they feel comfortable and want to spend time.” That sense of feeling good – of ‘bien-
être’, as they say in France – lies at the heart of the Pure Club Med Gym concept, as Gueguen explains: “It’s about making our members feel at home, not necessarily in the décor or the feel of the club, which has been designed with a private members’ club in mind, but in the attention to detail. “When members come into the club,
every single one is greeted by a member of staff who comes out to welcome them in. We have a partnership with Babyliss, so we can lend members anything they might need – hairdryer, straighteners and so on. We have iPads in our lounge area, as well
February 2013 © Cybertrek 2013
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