Today we’d like to introduce you to Angela Tomassetti.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Angela. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Longing for a yard for our rescue pups, my husband and I moved from our Logan Square home to Berwyn in 2013. I discovered my newly acquired two-car garage made a great spot for my own training and personal yoga practice in the warmer months. One quiet afternoon, I threw out the invitation on a local Facebook group for any curious neighbors to join me. To my surprise, quite a few took me up on it.
Next thing I knew, I was training a small group of folks out of my garage three mornings a week and offering a weekly evening yoga class to a sweet group of absolute beginners. I was still commuting to Chicago daily to maintain the very full schedule of fitness and yoga classes and private training clients. My husband kept asking when he could have “his” garage back. It hit me like a blinding flash of obvious.
I took a quick walk through the neighboring business district to our house and found a sweet little storefront about the same size as our garage. I signed a one-year lease and the rest, as they say, is history.
Has it been a smooth road?
The storefront I occupied was never built to suit a fitness studio. It was poorly ventilated, had a pretty weak HVAC system, and a landlord that wasn’t terribly interested or motivated to make any repairs or updates to the crumbling infrastructure. I feel so lucky to have found such patient students who were willing to overlook the discomfort. As many would remind me, at least it wasn’t a dusty garage littered with grass clippings and the lingering scent of barbecue!
After a year, we grew in membership from 10 to over 150 students. While great, we were stuck. We couldn’t accommodate any newcomers because space was simply too small, but the area wasn’t stocked with many spaces well suited to a slightly expanded version of what I was doing or trying to achieve. When a teacher of mine mentioned she was looking at storefronts for her own concept of a cafe with classes for kids and families, I insisted we sit down to discuss.
Since then, Fit Club has partnered with Blissful Owl to create a new space that houses it all — Lunges ‘n Lattes.
We found a much, much larger space which came with significantly greater investment. With a lot of creative financing and even more personal sweat equity, we made it happen and opened our doors officially March 1st. At such a nascent stage in the new venture, we are still grappling with a lot of uncertainty and learning an awful lot about the food service industry as we go. It’s a pretty bumpy road yet, but getting smoother each day.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Fit Club story. Tell us more about the business.
Fit Club offers students access to highly qualified trainers and fitness and yoga instructors at a fraction of the cost of personal training or private yoga lessons. Having left a chain of big box gyms to start the Club, I saw firsthand what happens when a gym becomes hyper-focused on filling a space to the rafters with bodies.
People get injured, they lose motivation and simply do not feel connected or empowered in their fitness or yoga journey. Our classes are capped at small numbers so our coaches can get to know their students, workouts and yoga classes can be tailored to the needs of the smaller group, and no one ever feels as though they are being left behind. Scientifically speaking, people are far more successful in making fitness and yoga a part of their lifestyle when they are participating in a group.
But that group can only get so big before people start to get lost. Does that mean our growth is limited? Sure! But we would rather the small group of dedicated students who see their time here as filling more than just a need to break a sweat. We don’t exaggerate when we say the connections folks make here vastly improve their quality of life.
Socializing with other health-minded neighbors or learning to stay active through injuries or medical conditions that would otherwise disqualify one from participating in classes elsewhere. These are total game changers.
When people ask us what we do, our simple answer — inspire and empower everybody.
How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I sure see a lot of my neighbors aging into a host of perfectly preventable conditions from lower back pain to heart disease and diabetes. Kids aren’t spending as much time engaged in physical activity. More and more of my friends are working 10+ hours a day and experiencing lower back, hip, and knee issues most likely attributed to all the glute smashing they are enduring in those office chairs.
It isn’t enough to simply tell people what they ought and ought not to do and point them to a gym. Engaging with people in meaningful ways is important to every industry, even more, so the fitness and yoga industry. Getting these aging neighbors, kiddos, and desk jockeys to take control of their health by arming them with the firsthand experience provided under the guidance of a seasoned expert is where I think success lies.
The class participants who are motivated by bargain-priced classes at the local recreation center are growing fewer and further in between. Add to that the fact those bargain prices are coming on the backs of low paid fitness instructors who aren’t cobbling enough income to sufficiently fund their ongoing education beyond a similarly bargain-priced online course, the cycle continues and no one wins. There are so many boutique studios, including highly specialized spaces that are focused on delivering just a small smattering of formats that they have become the masters of.
More and more, I think my colleagues are becoming as disillusioned with the industry and seeking to build their own communities, too. A friend recently asked how I felt about all the neighboring fitness studios that seem to be springing up overnight. I say, great! The addition of these spaces gets more people off their hamster wheels and out of overcrowded classes at big box gyms. Neither of which are proving particularly helpful to the sort of reluctant exerciser that sees the movement as a penance for poor diet choices. The more small studios, the merrier.
As a business that is not built to serve massive crowds, I am relying on more of my colleagues to step up. I expect to see more studios like ours investing in their education. I am excited to see them cultivating the same culture of empowerment and betterment of health.
Pricing:
- 5 class punch card valid for 60 days: $75
- 5 class monthly subscription: $70/mo
- 10 class punch card valid for 90 days: $145
- 10 class monthly subscription: $135/mo
- Individual unlimited monthly membership: $180/mo
Contact Info:
- Address: 6805 Stanley Ave, Berwyn, IL 60402
- Website: fitclubdepot.com
- Phone: 708-762-3445
- Email: help@fitclubdepot.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/fitclubdepot
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/fitclubdepot
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