Global fitness chain nails lessons in monetising its community
Product Initiative Newsletter Blog | 20 February 2024
Hi there.
As you may know, my workout of choice is Barry’s (formerly Barry’s Bootcamp). And while you probably don’t care about my workout habits, I want to share what I think is a master class in partnerships, commerce, and social fandom.
The best thing is that you don’t have to go anywhere near a studio because I summarise everything right here. If you want to dig deeper into commerce, creators, social and video — and possibly join me for a Barry’s class — come to our study tour in Los Angeles this October.
I’m also recapping a number of conversations around best practices in road maps and bringing together stakeholders, which I hope is helpful.
As always, please drop me a note if there is anything you’d like to see in this newsletter or if you have a question you need answering from the INMA product community. I’m at Jodie.hopperton@INMA.org.
Barry’s gives us lessons in commerce, social, and the value of partnerships
I am a Barry’s bootcamp fan. Three to four times per week, I go into a dark room to be yelled at until I drop dead. Not quite. It’s a HIIT (high-intensity interval training) exercise studio where you work hard to loud pumping music. They have been around for 25 years, have 84 studios around the world, and say they have a community of 3 million people.
I have written about their loyalty before. Today I want to talk about adjacent business lines and what we can learn.
The reason I think this is relevant for news is that Barry’s has developed a community based on common interests. They have developed that community through a number of loyalty schemes and now they are giving a master class at monetising that audience.
First off, commerce.
It’s fairly obvious here: When you work out, you wear specific clothes. There are small storefronts in every studio. Great if you forget anything. Or see something you like. Or buy for a friend. Barry’s is not a clothing manufacturer, nor do they seem to want to be. But they want to own their space within it so they run limited edition partnerships such as Barry’s X Lululemon and Barry’s X Vuori. They “co create” designs and sell them. At an extortionate price because:
- They are limited editions.
- They are good quality.
- They know they have an affluent audience (classes are US$20-US$34 each, depending on your subscription).
Secondly, and the reason for this post, is music.
It’s like a nightclub in there. At Barry’s, you spend 50 minutes working out to pumping music in a dark-ish studio. Some customers go to specific classes because they like the music. I’ve seen themed classes before such country or Taylor Swift heavy when the Eras tour was in LA. Now they are starting to monetise it. Check out the e-mail I received:
What an innovative way to market music.
A third learning can be found in the latter part of the offer: Food.
“Enjoy a custom Training Season shake.” Nutrition is important to people who work out. At each Barry’s, there is a “fuel bar,” which makes protein smoothies, mostly ordered before class and ready as soon as people come out (again brilliant — no lines!).
They are cutting across Barry’s lines, which allows more upsell and more promotion. Again, this is a limited edition item so there is some urgency to try it.
A fourth tip: incentives.
Barry’s often runs “challenges” where you get a reward for completing a certain number of classes within the designated time frame. They don’t over push but have a good cadence.
These are four e-mails I received over the course of three weeks:
The incentive to customers is clear: a gift for doing a set number of classes.
I imagine a percentage of customers do more than they would otherwise. And in-studio, there is a physical manifestation of this, as you can see below, which brings in the community. Almost everyone takes part and your achievements are on display. Instructors are encouraged to take part (for classes they take part in, not teach), which they post on Instagram.
And that’s the very last piece: They have mastered the art of Instagram and social.
In-studio, every spot is Instagramable: the sign, the placard with milestones/birthdays that are changed multiple times per day to recognise customers, the props. At their huge party to celebrate 25 years, the first thing someone told me is, “There are so many great photo spots.”
By way of example, here are some recent stories from my Instagram:

So what can we learn?
They know their audience and figure out where relevant adjacencies lie.
They don’t create new products themselves; they partner.
They incentivise both brands and customers — everyone gets something out of it.
They are adept at using “limited edition” to create a sense of urgency.
And if you want a few more examples of great marketing/partnerships/commerce, here are a few more I found while scrolling through my inbox:
Date for the diary: How to build a chat product on February 28
There are very few organisations that have gone through the process of building a chatbot, so I’m delighted to have Bernd Volf, GM media tech at Ringier, take us through where they are up to in terms of customer research and build vs. buy decisions, as well as Steve Henn and Alex Goldmark, who built NPRs PlanetMoney bot. You can sign up here.
I’ll be running this Webinar from New York where I’ll be for the INMA Media Subscriptions Summit. There is an incredible line-up, and I am very much looking forward to getting time to speak to members face to face. If you’ll be in town, please get in touch at jodie.hopperton@inma.org.
Side note on road maps
The very first Webinar we did for the INMA Product Initiative was titled: Who gets to prioritise the product road map?
I don’t know any product and tech teams that move as quickly as they want in a structurally sound way, no matter how big the team is. There are always more things we want to do (I have a long list of things I’d love to have budget/resource for, too). So if we take it as a given that you can never get everything done, which stakeholders are the ones to decide what gets done?
A recent conversation brought me back to this question for two reasons. One was a discussion about a gap between OKRs and the actual road map.
The second was that this product group left 30%-40% of the road map open at each sprint for business stakeholders to weigh in. I love this concept but haven’t heard much more than 20% being left open. That’s more than other organisations I have spoken to, but enables more agility and control by the business based on needs. The team that decides is made up of key stakeholders who have to decide together.
And now we circle back to that original question: Who gets to prioritise the product road map? Which can also be read as: How can we best manage stakeholders?
As this question doesn’t go away, I pulled up a few resources where we have discussed this below. The TL;DR is that product needs to do so with clear input from stakeholders. This is probably best laid out by Jason Jedlinski, former managing director of The Hill, with this presentation on Designing Roadmaps to delight customers and respect stakeholders.
Kara Chiles, senior vice president of consumer products at Gannett, enhances this with Communicating Product Value (and some great comments recently on our Slack channel here).
And a few blog posts that may be helpful:
- 5 questions help media companies prioritise the product road map.
- Shepherding meetings to a close: Is boldness over consensus a better way to work with stakeholders?
- 4 ways product teams can show value without a revenue line.
- How MediaNews group creates strategies and buy in for product teams.
About this newsletter
Today’s newsletter is written by Jodie Hopperton, based in Los Angeles and lead for the INMA Product and Tech Initiative. Jodie will share research, case studies, and thought leadership on the topic of global news media product.
This newsletter is a public face of the Product and Tech Initiative by INMA, outlined here. E-mail Jodie at jodie.hopperton@inma.org with thoughts, suggestions, and questions. Sign up to our Slack channel.