The 2027 Revenue Stream Almost No Studio Is Touching

The recovery side of wellness (saunas, cold plunge, contrast therapy) is on track to nearly triple over the next decade to almost $27 billion, and almost nobody in the yoga and Pilates industry is moving on it yet. If you have been working harder than ever and growth has still stalled, this episode explains why.

Here is the shift: your members do not want just a workout anymore. They want a result. McKinsey surveyed more than 9,000 consumers and found wellness has become a daily practice, with people buying outcomes like sleep, recovery, and energy. Meanwhile, most people who quit a studio do not leave over price. They leave because they stopped seeing results or got bored, and half are gone within 90 days.

In this solo episode, Jackie Murphy breaks down what your members are really asking for, why studios are too slow to give it to them, and the one recovery move you can make this quarter to get a full year ahead of your market. Become the Studio CEO.

TIMESTAMPED OUTLINE

• [00:00] The $27 billion recovery wave nobody in yoga and Pilates is riding yet
• [01:57] Why this is a "where is this going" conversation, not a quick tip
• [03:56] The belief keeping you stuck: a great class is the whole product
• [06:31] What is opening now: cycling 4%, Pilates 46%, yoga 27%
• [09:26] Recovery: the fastest moving, least crowded category in wellness
• [11:11] Three reasons recovery works for a yoga or Pilates studio
• [13:40] Four ways to start small (no $200K build-out required)
• [16:48] The CEO question that changes how you run your business
• [18:18] What is coming in two weeks and where to connect

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Your members stopped buying activity. They are buying outcomes: sleep, recovery, energy, longevity.
• Price is rarely why people quit. They leave because they stopped seeing results or got bored, and half leave within 90 days.
• Recovery revenue does not require another instructor, so you add income without adding payroll.
• A $59 recovery add-on at 40% member adoption can mean roughly $60K in new recurring revenue per year.
• You do not need a $200K build-out. Start with one layer and prove demand first.
• The studios that move now own the next decade. The ones who wait spend it catching up.

PULL QUOTES
"This is not a hustle problem. The market is moving underneath you, and this is the memo nobody sent."

"A beautiful class used to be the whole product. It is not anymore."

"You never got to vote on that. Your customer just changed their mind."

"You do not have to build an empire to start. Pick the lightest version that fits your space and your brand."

"Stop operating as a teacher who owns a studio and start running a wellness brand."

FAQ
Is recovery a real opportunity for yoga and Pilates studios?
Yes. The fitness recovery market was about $8 billion last year and is projected to hit nearly $27 billion by 2035. Very few yoga and Pilates studios offer it yet, which is exactly why the window is open now.

Do I need to build a sauna or cold plunge to start?
No. Start with a weekly recovery or restorative class, partner with a local sauna or cold plunge spot, or add a simple product like compression boots. Prove demand first, then scale.

How much revenue can a recovery add-on generate?
As an example, 200 members at $129 a month with a $59 add-on adopted by 40% of members is about $5K in new monthly recurring revenue, or roughly $60K a year, without acquiring a single new member.

Why do members really quit a studio?
Price is usually not the top reason. Most people leave because they stopped seeing results or got bored, and about half quit within the first 90 days.

Connect with Jackie on Instagram @studioceoofficial for weekly industry insights.

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Transcript

The Recovery Market Wake Up Call

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Let me start with a number that should honestly stop you in your tracks. The recovery side of the wellness industry, saunas, cold plunge, contrast therapy, all of it. It's on track to nearly triple over the next decade. We're talking close to $27 billion. And here's the part that matters for you and me. Almost nobody in the yoga and Pilates industry is moving on it yet. Your members have already changed. They don't want just a workout anymore. They want a result. They want recovery. They want a whole way of feeling good in their body and in their life. And the studios that see that and move now are going to own the next 10 years. The ones who wait, they're going to spend those 10 years copying and catching up. So today I want to show you three things. What your members actually asking for right now, why studios are too slow giving it to your members, and the one move that you can make this quarter to get a full year ahead of your market. If you've been feeling like you're working harder than ever and growth is still really difficult, this episode could be the reason why and the way out. Let's get into it.

Welcome To Studio CEO Mindset

SPEAKER_00 1:56

I'm your host, Jackie Murphy, an award-winning certified business coach with over 12 years of experience inside the yoga industry. I have seen firsthand what it takes to build a profitable and scalable business. Join me as we dive into strategies, insights, and real-world advice that will help you grow your revenue, build a thriving team, and create a business that serves you as much as you serve your students. It's time to embrace your inner CEO and make more money without working more. This is just the beginning. Hello and welcome back to the Studio CEO podcast. I am Jackie Murphy, and if we haven't met yet, I help yoga and Pilates studio owners stop running their businesses like the hardest working employee in the building and start running it like the CEO. Become the studio CEO. That's the whole game around here. And this is one of my favorite kind of episodes to do because it's not a quick tip that you're gonna forget by lunch. It's a where is this whole thing going conversation? And I think you need it right now. Because here is what I keep seeing. I see owners white knuckling the exact same class schedule they've been running for five years, doing everything right, working so hard, and quietly wondering why growth has stalled. And I need you to hear me say this this is not a hustle problem. You know that you're working hard. The market is moving underneath you, and this is the memo that nobody sent. So let's talk about what's actually changing.

Why Members Now Buy Outcomes

SPEAKER_00 3:56

Here's a belief that a lot of us are quietly running on, whether we know it or not. It sounds something like this I sell yoga and Pilates classes. My service is what I sell. A great class should be enough. People come to me for the workout. That is what we do. And for a long time, this was true. A beautiful class was the whole product, but it's not anymore. And I'm not just saying that as a feeling, the data on this is incredibly loud. McKinse ran a survey last year, more than 9,000 consumers, four different countries, all about the future of wellness. And what they found is that wellness has stopped being something that people do once in a while and has turned into a daily personal practice. People aren't buying activity anymore, they are buying outcomes they can measure, better sleep, recovery, energy, longevity. And here's the big one: in a two trillion dollar wellness market, demand is still outpacing supply. Meaning people want more than what is currently being offered to them. Now, layer on what you already know about why members leave. Sometimes we blame price. But when you actually ask people why they quit a studio, price is usually not the number one reason. The top reasons are they stopped seeing results or they got bored. And half the people who quit leave within the first 90 days. Meanwhile, and I love this number, 73% of people say they'd happily pay more for an experience that feels really personalized to them. So let's take this in.

Who Wins As Studios Shift

SPEAKER_00 6:30

So the market is already rewarding studios who are adapting to this. Let's look at what's actually opening right now. Cycling studios have collapsed to about 4% of new studio openings. 4%. Pilates is around 46%, and yoga's holding steady at around 27%. The formats that read the shift are winning, and the ones that don't are closing their doors. And the closing part is real. Somewhere around 90% of boutique studio owners weren't sustainably profitable after a few years of running. And I want you to come back to the podcast in two weeks because we're gonna dive into why I think 91% of studios are not profitable right now. Today, I'm gonna be straight with you because you always deserve the straight truth, honesty. The data clearly shows two things. People are wanting more than a workout. We talked about that. And the studios that aren't adapting to that are the studios that are struggling. The phrase slow to innovate, that part is my read on the why. It's not a number that someone measured in a lab, but I watch it happen every single week. You can get stuck in the way things have been done, the way things were. And just think of the new thing as a fad that will trend out. And we wait and we wait to see if something's really gonna stick. And by the time we move, we're not on the leading edge anymore. We're just copying the studio that has already done the thing and proved that it worked really well. You can see this with the Pilates studios opening so fast. There have been Pilates studios around for an incredibly long time, decades. And now the Pilates studios that are opening in this wave of the trend being really popular, they're having a much harder time competing. Not that it's not possible. I am all here for you opening the studio that you want to open at the time that works for you. And if you're already operating, innovating, and constantly looking at what do the consumers want, what's shifting, what's trending within the wellness industry, it's almost part of your job as a CEO to be focused on where you think the industry is going. The real risk isn't that your classes aren't good. Like your classes are probably great. I assume that when I work with clients. The risk is that a good class has stopped being the whole game. And you never really got to vote on that or decide that. Your customer just changed their mind. So that's the problem. And there's an opportunity sitting right inside of

Recovery Becomes The Biggest Wave

SPEAKER_00 9:26

it. And the numbers on this part are honestly a little bit wild. So stick with me. The fastest moving, least crowded category in all of wellness right now is recovery. What happens after the workout? Let me give you the receipts. The fitness recovery services market, that means saunas, cold plunge, contrast therapy, compression, all of it. It was at about $8 billion last year. It is projected to hit nearly $27 billion by 2035. Contrast therapy on its own, just the hot and cold combination, was on track to pass $80 billion by the end of last year. Cold plunge equipment is growing 20% year over year. And those Nordic-inspired recovery experiences, the sauna, the cold, the whole ritual, that grew more than 60% in a single year. This is a wave. And right now in yoga and Pilates, no one's riding the wave, or very few people are riding the wave. We are maybe 18 months out from every studio in your town offering some version of this. I want you to be the owner that moves now and innovates now rather than to be the one that waits and does it later. Say move, but 12 months later you get half the credit.

The Revenue Math For Add Ons

SPEAKER_00 11:10

And here's why this is so good specifically for a yoga or Pilates studio. Three reasons. Number one, it doesn't require another instructor. A sauna is just gonna be a purchase. Doesn't need a sub to come in. So you can add revenue without adding a payroll or employees or more work on your plate. And I have seen one of my clients do this extremely well where their sauna experience, their cold plunge and their sauna together is completely key card activated. Number two, it can be a higher ticket than a drop-in. And it's going to help increase your retention rate. I have seen studios who use this as an add-on to membership and increase the lifetime value of what they're getting from one member. I have seen studios that have just sold this contrast therapy as a membership, and that person is paying more than a drop-in, and they're likely to then want to take a class as well. Let's do some numbers just to give you an example of what this could look like for your business. If you had 200 members paying $129 a month for classes, and you decided to add on a $59 Sana Cole Plunge membership, and about 40% of your members added on, and I would say that's conservative, that means you're doing about $5K in new monthly recurring revenue. And over a course of a year, that's roughly around $60,000 of new recurring revenue just from an add-on without having to add a ton of payroll and without acquiring a single new member. And here's really what makes it stick retention in your studio should sit around 90 to 95% so that revenue stays year over year in your business. You're gonna keep the vast majority of those members. So this isn't like a one-time bump. It's going to compound, it's gonna become a part of your monthly recurring revenue or your baseline. So that matters.

Four Low Risk Ways To Start

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Now, number three, and here's the strategy part. You don't have to build an empire to start. Before you spiral and picture a $200,000 renovation or build out, that's not what I'm talking about. That's not what I'm asking you to do. I do want you to start with one layer. One, pick the lightest version that fits into your current space and into your current brand. So, for example, option number one: this could be programming you already can deliver, a weekly restorative class or a recovery class, a reset workshop, zero capital. It tells you immediately whether or not your members are into the recovery product or recovery service in general. Option number two, you could set up a partnership, find a local sauna, find the cold plunge spot, the contrast studio, and co-brand with them, cross refer, bundle it as a member perk. They get four free saunas a month at this place, and the sauna members get four classes a month at your studio. This means that you don't have to pay for equipment, but you're sharing an audience and everyone wins. Option number three, which is what we a little bit talked about, but a product add-on. This could be something as simple as compression boots or an infrared blanket or just a stretch and recovery station that you can have people drop into. Option number four, the recovery membership tier. Take whatever you build and bolt it into your core offer so it raises your average revenue per member, your average lifetime value per member instead of building it completely off the side. Whatever you pick, make it work. Make content about it. Start talking about your recovery routine because you are going to have to market and sell this just like you have to market and sell anything else. Document what you do, film it, share it, post it, and let that bring your current people into this new offer and new people into this new offer. That's already gonna fall into your content beautifully, but that's a whole episode for another day. So here's what I want you to do right now. Just think about which one of those things you would want to start with. You really do not have to rent a new space and build a whole empire, but let's prove the demand with one recovery class and then expand it. That is the move. You test and you scale, and you don't have to just bet on a hunch, but you can have solid proof that your people want this. One of the things that a studio in Raleigh used to do was a dry needling slash yen slash myofascial release class, and it would sell out every single time. That is an example of how we could start to build in recovery without necessarily going and building out sauna and cold plunges.

Think Like A Wellness Brand CEO

SPEAKER_00 16:48

So let's just close this in a really, really strong way because what you actually end up offering, the tactics, that always matters less than how you're thinking about your business, your mindset, and how you're showing up as CEO. Maybe in the past you were asking yourself, okay, how do we deliver really good classes across the board? And thinking that was your service, and that is what you offered. And that question can keep you trapped because there's only so many hours in the day, and your service requires you to hire different people to deliver it. The new question, the CEO question, is how much of my members' wellness experience can I help facilitate? Can I be a part of the recovery, the results, the sleep, the stress, her whole experience of taking care of herself? And the second you start asking that question, you're gonna stop just operating as a teacher who happens to teach classes at a studio they own, but really start to think of yourself as the CEO of a wellness brand and business. And that right there is a difference between a business that plateaus and one that is come going to compound in growth over the next 10 years. I know that you want to be the studio that is a year ahead instead of a year behind. That's why you're listening to this podcast.

Follow Along And Final Send Off

SPEAKER_00 18:18

And so I want you to connect with me on social media. I'm at Studio CEO Official, where I break down any industry insights and where we're headed every single week. And I'm gonna build you up to be able to innovate successfully over the next decade. All right, my friends, I will talk to you in the next episode. Go be the CEO.