boutique-fitness
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Rachel Lea Fishman and the education of a check-in desk
She helped build Arketa from the frustrations of running a yoga studio. Six years later, Rachel Lea Fishman is taking the software company back into a room of its own.
Fithouse sold the freedom to change your workout
Yoga on Monday. HIIT on Tuesday. One membership for both. Fithouse bundled boutique fitness into an All Class Club - then COVID tested how much of the club could survive without the room.
305 Fitness built a business on forgetting you’re exercising
Sadie Kurzban put a live DJ inside a cardio class. The harder trick was turning that feeling into a business that could travel beyond the dance floor.
FitGrid knows a full class can hide an empty till
The fitness software company began with a question about strangers in a Pilates class. Today, it connects the people who keep a studio alive with the numbers that explain whether it can afford to stay open.
PushPress and the case of the never-ending class pass
A gym owner discovered that people were training on passes nobody checked. The software he helped build now connects the money, the members, and the moments that keep them coming back.
William Heath Keeps Building for the Moment After the Starting Gun
The Newhouse co-founder has moved from brand strategy to scooters, fitness studios and creator culture. His through-line is less glamorous than the industries suggest: make the next decision, then keep moving.
Jaybird Put Pilates in the Dark - Now It’s Testing Whether a Feeling Can Scale
The Canadian studio stripped away fitness culture’s favourite prop - the mirror - and built a multi-city business around darkness, heat, music and attention. Its next test is whether that intimate escape survives a move into New York.
Arketa
Arketa is an AI-powered operating system for boutique fitness and wellness businesses. Founded in 2020 by Rachel Lea Fishman and Josh Archer, the New York-based platform lets yoga, pilates, gym and recovery studios manage class booking, payments, memberships, on-demand video, courses, branded apps and marketing from a single dashboard. Arketa has processed nearly $500 million in transactions and supports thousands of studios and instructors, and raised a $15M Series A led by Inspired Capital in 2025.
GoSaga, Inc.
GoSaga, Inc. is a Norwalk, Connecticut wellness holding company that builds and scales next-generation lifestyle brands across fitness, beauty, and well-being. Founded in 2020 by Geoff Schneider and partners, it runs an asset-light franchisor platform that pairs a centralized operating engine - unified technology, data, quality assurance, and expert operators - with a portfolio of founder-led brands including LYMBR, Squeeze Massage, VIO Med Spa, and FitLab's boutique fitness concepts. Backed by $5M in Series A funding, GoSaga positions itself to capture consumer engagement at every stage of the wellness journey.
Rachel Lea Fishman
Rachel Lea Fishman is co-founder and CEO of Arketa, a New York-based operating system for boutique fitness and wellness studios. A certified yoga instructor turned software CEO, she started the company in 2020 with UCLA classmate Josh Archer to give small studios the tools she wished she had when she was working the check-in desk. In June 2025 Arketa raised a $15 million Series A led by Inspired Capital, bringing total funding to roughly $23 million and its customer base to more than 3,000 studios and gyms.
Barry's
Barry's is the boutique fitness brand that turned the group workout into a nightclub. Founded in West Hollywood in 1998, it pioneered the high-intensity interval training (HIIT) class with its signature Red Room - low lights, loud music, treadmills and free weights - and helped launch the boutique fitness industry. Today Barry's runs roughly 90 studios across more than a dozen countries, sells a Fuel Bar nutrition line and a digital platform (Barry's X), and draws millions of class visits a year.
StretchLab Franchise
StretchLab is the original and largest one-on-one assisted stretching franchise, built on the simple bet that flexibility deserves its own studio. Trained specialists called Flexologists guide members through customized stretch sessions using techniques like PNF, supported by 3D body-scan technology (MAPS) and recovery tools such as NormaTec compression. Founded in Venice, California in 2015 and now owned by Xponential Fitness, StretchLab became the first assisted stretching brand to surpass 500 studios in North America.
Jessa Reus
Jessa Reus traded twenty years of digital marketing leadership for three boutique stretch studios in San Francisco. She founded Redhead Ventures in 2023 and now runs StretchLab Castro, Union Street, and a third city location, building a portfolio of premium consumer wellness brands from the ground up.
Seth Martin
Seth Martin is a Barry's fitness instructor based in California who runs high-intensity, music-forward classes built around the philosophy that the hard stuff is the worthwhile stuff. Off the floor, he moonlights as a soccer match official and curates an unreasonable shoe collection.