The workout that thinks it's a nightclub.
It pioneered the group HIIT class in 1998, painted the room red, turned up the music, and accidentally helped launch a global industry. The treadmill never sounded so good.
Above: the Red Room - where the lighting is flattering and the burpees are not. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Oslo, 2021).
It is 6:05 a.m. The lights are low and the color of a stoplight. A wall of treadmills hums. On the floor, a row of benches and dumbbells waits. A coach with a headset mic counts down, the bass drops, and forty strangers start running like they mean it. This is happening this morning in Los Angeles, in London, in Oslo, in Dubai - more or less simultaneously, more or less identically. That sameness is the whole trick.
Barry's is a boutique fitness company built around a single, stubbornly consistent product: a roughly hour-long class split between treadmill sprints and free-weight strength training, performed in a dark, mirrored, red-lit studio it calls the Red Room. Around 90 studios. More than 15 countries. Over seven million visits in 2024. And one idea that has barely changed in twenty-five years.
In the late 1990s, fitness mostly meant one of two things. There was the big-box gym - a fluorescent warehouse of machines where you wandered in alone, did your sets alone, and left without anyone noticing you'd come. Or there was the aerobics class, which had energy but not much edge, and tended to leave the serious lifters cold.
Nobody had really put the two together: the intensity of a hard, structured workout and the social charge of a room moving in time to music. Group fitness existed. So did high-intensity training. They simply hadn't been formally introduced. The market, in other words, had a gap shaped exactly like a loud, dark room.
In 1998, Barry Jay, along with John and Rachel Mumford, opened the first Barry's Bootcamp in West Hollywood. The pitch was almost comically literal: take the rigor of a boot camp and stage it with the atmosphere of a nightclub. Dim the lights. Crank the sound system. Put a charismatic instructor at the front with a microphone. Make the workout hard enough to feel like an accomplishment and theatrical enough to feel like a night out.
It could easily have read as a gimmick - fitness with a smoke machine. Most concept gyms of that vintage are now parking lots. What kept Barry's alive was that the workout underneath the lighting actually held up: treadmill intervals to spike the heart rate, free weights to build strength, a format structured tightly enough to repeat day after day without going stale.
The Barry's class is built on a deceptively simple split. Half the time goes to the treadmill - the "Run" - with a coach calling out walks, jogs, sprints and hill climbs to push your cardiovascular system. The other half goes to the floor - the "Lift" - with dumbbells, benches and bands for strength work. The two halves rotate, and the room never stops moving.
Around that core, Barry's has grown a small ecosystem. The Fuel Bar sells protein shakes you can order before class and grab the second you stumble out, sweat-soaked, into the lobby. Barry's X, launched in 2021, brought live and on-demand classes home for people who can't make it to a studio. RIDE extended the format to indoor cycling. There's branded apparel, an iOS and Android app, and a retail line. But make no mistake about what people are buying: the room.
Boutique fitness is a famously brutal business - high rents, fickle members, and a graveyard of once-hot concepts. So the interesting question about Barry's isn't whether the workout is hard. It's whether the company is durable. The signals it points to: studio revenue up 27% from 2022, all U.S. studios reportedly profitable, and a fresh capital round in 2025 at a moment when competitors were pulling back.
Relative scale across Barry's headline figures - normalized for the chart, not to a single unit.
Figures compiled from public company statements and press reports; bar lengths are illustrative, not to a common scale. Revenue and valuation estimates vary widely by source.
Barry's states its purpose plainly: help people work hard, have fun, find their strength, and be their best. It's not a manifesto about disrupting anything. It's a description of what's supposed to happen in the room - and, by extension, a culture. The company leans on values it lists as diversity, ownership, support, trust, honesty, courage and innovation, and it has a habit of promoting from within. Gonzalez's path from instructor to CEO isn't a one-off; it's close to a brand value.
That matters more than it sounds. In a business where the product is, fundamentally, a person at the front of a dark room making you feel something, the instructors are the company. Treat them as interchangeable and the whole thing goes flat. Barry's bet, again, is on the room - and on the people who run it.
The tension that built Barry's is the same one that will test it. Its strength is consistency: a Red Room in Miami should feel like a Red Room in Manchester. Its risk is dilution: every new studio, every digital class, every licensing deal is a chance for that feeling to thin out. Growth and sameness are, in the long run, in quiet opposition.
So far Barry's has chosen to grow carefully rather than blanket the map. Backed by fresh capital and eyeing further international expansion, the company is wagering that the appetite for in-person, high-intensity, slightly theatrical sweat isn't going anywhere - even in an age of on-demand everything. The screens, it turns out, made the room more valuable, not less.
Which brings us back to 6:05 a.m. The bass drops. Forty strangers start running. Twenty-five years ago that room didn't exist; the gym was a quiet, fluorescent place you went alone. Barry's didn't invent the treadmill or the dumbbell. It invented the reason to want to be there - in the dark, in the red, with everyone else - before the sun is even up.