Challenge

Glofox is a full business management software platform for the fitness industry. Founded in Dublin in 2013, the business today supports thousands of gyms and fitness studios all over the world, from Malaysia to the US.

Cofounder Anthony Kelly tells us, “Like in SaaS, lifetime value, churn, cost of acquisition, these are the metrics that matter in the fitness business, and payments are crucial to this. Studios don’t want big back-office teams to work on this, they’d rather put the money into hiring staff to deliver a great member experience than have to spend heavily on admin and back office payment support.”

Solution

Glofox has used Stripe Connect to build a white-labelled payments solution called Glofox Payments, to make it easier for gyms and fitness studios across the world to start accepting payments and provide their customers with a consistent, best-in-class experience, no matter if they’re hitting a yoga studio in LA or a CrossFit class in Sydney.

Results

Speedy onboarding for new gym studios

If you’re setting up a new fitness studio, you don’t want to wait six weeks to start accepting payments, so Stripe’s speedy onboarding for Glofox’s new users is a key benefit, “this is especially important with our franchise customers, who can be set up to manage payments in just hours” says Anthony. What’s more, the individual studios get clear visibility of important information like fees and the timing of payouts. Glofox is already using Stripe Sigma to get a deeper understanding of its own business analytics and envisages one day opening this information at a studio-by-studio level to its users.

Scale to support enterprise users

As the business has grown they’ve been increasingly pulled up-market by larger fitness franchise brands wanting to adopt the same high-quality and efficient technology used by the upstarts. As Anthony says, “if you’re a giant fitness franchising empire, each of your individual franchisees is a start-up in its own right, so our heritage of working with new disruptors is really helpful for the big guys too.” Stripe has the scale to support the fitness industry’s largest companies, and now works with Glofox in a partner capacity to bring those companies onto the Glofox and Stripe platforms. With features like smart retries which uses machine learning to identify optimal times to retry failed payment attempts, Stripe is able to generate significant extra revenue for Glofox’s larger enterprise users.

Giving gym goers around the world a consistent, best-in-class experience

“Fitness is a truly global industry and has become very homogenous”, says Anthony, “people taking a spin class in Ecuador are getting the same experience as gym goers in London, Kuala Lumpur, and New York”. This means global franchises want to make the entire fitness experience consistent, including payments. Anthony explains, “it’s not too difficult to have the same fitness content in different countries, but when you get into highly regulated areas like payments, that’s when you can really see the differences between markets”. Glofox Payments, built on Stripe, means Glofox can offer the same best-in-class payment experience, regardless of geography.