Aligned Fitness Holdings, one of the largest Club Pilates franchisees in North America and an Eagle Merchant Partners portfolio company, has acquired CAM Pilates, a Columbus, Ohio-based franchisee operating six studios. Announced via PR Newswire on April 28, 2026, the deal lifts Aligned Fitness’s network to 55 Club Pilates studios and marks the platform’s first expansion outside its established Southeastern footprint of North Carolina, Georgia and South Carolina.
The acquired CAM Pilates business was founded and operated by Caitlin McTigue and Jason Tomany, two franchisees widely respected inside the Club Pilates system for the operating quality of their Columbus studios and the strength of their local member communities. Aligned Fitness has indicated it intends to keep the existing operations team in place and use the Columbus base as a launchpad for additional in-market development.
“This acquisition represents a natural extension of our strategy.”
That comment from Jon Smith, chief executive officer of Aligned Fitness Holdings, frames the move as opportunistic rather than transformative — the platform identified an operator that already met its quality bar in a desirable metro and bolted it on, rather than entering a new market with greenfield builds.
Columbus is one of the fastest-growing US metros and is squarely in the demographic sweet spot Club Pilates targets: a deep base of women aged 25–54, household incomes that support $200+ monthly memberships, and a track record of strong boutique-fitness penetration. By acquiring six already-operating studios, Aligned Fitness avoids the 12 to 18 months of pre-opening risk associated with greenfield development and immediately captures the cash flow and member rolls that the McTigue–Tomany team had built.
The CAM Pilates deal is part of an accelerating trend of multi-unit franchisee consolidation inside the Club Pilates system. Just one week earlier, the brand confirmed its largest-ever development deal with Riser Fitness — a 127-studio commitment across six US states that pushed Riser past 340 licenses. Aligned Fitness’s move into Ohio sits in the same playbook: institutional capital backing operator-led platforms that aggregate territory inside a single brand.
That dynamic now defines what franchisor parent Xponential Fitness looks for in a developer: balance-sheet depth, professional management, and the ability to integrate post-acquisition. The era in which Club Pilates territory was being carved up among individual operators with one or two studios is essentially over in mature US markets.
For master franchise investors evaluating Club Pilates or any other Xponential brand for an Asia or MENA territory, the Aligned Fitness move is a useful proof point in two ways.
First, it confirms that the boutique-Pilates model travels well through institutional, multi-unit hands — a pattern that maps cleanly onto how Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia typically structure master franchise agreements, where a single regional sponsor signs for 30 to 100+ units over a development schedule. Second, it raises the operator bar: franchisor support, training and brand investment increasingly assume professional, multi-unit operators on the receiving end. New international master franchisees should expect their development plans to be benchmarked against US institutional platforms like Aligned Fitness or Riser Fitness, and should structure capital, real estate pipelines and management bench depth accordingly.
The Club Pilates story over the past 24 months has not been about adding a few studios — it has been about reshaping who owns those studios at scale. The CAM Pilates acquisition continues that trajectory and signals that Q2 and Q3 2026 will likely produce more cross-state platform deals at the franchisee level, both inside the US and increasingly across mature international markets.
