Changes at Love Pilates Willoughby in 2024
Dear clients,
As I started looking at the timetable for 2024, I delved into all our class attendance numbers. Our Pilates reformer and tower classes are close to capacity overall, but our mat business is sitting at around 50% capacity. We have a few very busy classes and lots of quiet classes.
I’m sure there will be some of you that say that our yoga numbers have dropped since the room change. In reality, they haven’t changed much at all. Our yoga business has been struggling since covid. My youngest daughter was born at the beginning of the first lockdown - 3 ½ years ago, yoga has been struggling for a long time. Yoga revenue only covers teacher costs and has not contributed to business overheads for years. Unfortunately the cost of running the business includes much more than just teachers.
When I deep dive, our yoga clients simply aren’t as consistent or as frequent as our Pilates clients. A huge majority of our yogis also stop attending the minute their favourite teacher is away (and we all need holidays). We frequently scramble to find cover teachers - to find that nobody or just one to two clients turn up. This makes yoga really hard to plan and cover teachers even harder to find. I’ve tried a number of strategies to grow our yoga business, none of them have worked.
Maintaining two separate rooms to accommodate our yoga business simply doesn’t make sense anymore as our business has changed.
Over the Christmas period we will move to one multi-purpose space. We will be adding three reformers/towers. This means we will be reducing our mat classes, but will still be offering some mat classes - including Sunday Yin. Our timetable will change as we will no longer be able to run two classes at the same time, but it will allow us to accommodate more people in our busy Pilates classes.
I know many of you will be disappointed that your favourite class is cancelled, but unfortunately the majority of these classes are running at a loss. Like you, I am sorry that we may not be seeing some of our yoga teachers as regularly. Many of our yoga teachers have been at the studio longer than me and are amazing teachers. Wherever possible I have offered teachers alternative classes (and Ange and I had a fabulous discussion about women's circles for next year) - but these times don’t always work for teachers’ schedules.
Whilst I am still finalising the Christmas holiday timetable, our 2024 timetable is now live (we expect to be back to a regular schedule by January 8), so you can see what the new schedule looks like. If you are on a membership and your regular classes have been impacted, I will be in touch to discuss your options. If you are on a mat class pack (that expires after the change) and sometimes attend the classes that are being cut, we will also be in touch about your options.
We still have six weeks until Christmas, so I do hope you will continue to support your favourite teachers until then.
See you in the studio soon,
Libby
