Club Pilates has passed 1,500 studios worldwide, a milestone the brand reached on the back of recent openings in Bangkok, Thailand and Mexico City, Mexico. The Irvine, California-based operator, part of the Xponential Fitness stable, says it is continuing to move into new countries through master franchising rather than unit-by-unit sales — the structure that matters most to investors weighing a boutique fitness play across Asia Pacific and MENA.
Scale is the whole argument in boutique fitness. Equipment, instructor certification and studio build-outs are expensive per square metre, and the format only works when a brand can spread those fixed costs across a dense network. Club Pilates is now the largest Pilates brand by studio count, and management framed the milestone as evidence the model travels rather than a vanity number.
Few franchise brands make it to 100 locations, let alone 1,500.
That line came from Bob Kaufman, President of International for Xponential Fitness, who argued the brand has shown it can adapt to local communities without losing its programming spine.
For operators in this region the Mexico City opening is interesting; the Bangkok opening is the one that changes the conversation. Thailand is a demanding boutique fitness market — high rents in prime Bangkok retail, a fragmented independent studio scene, and a member base that has already been trained by international gym chains to expect quality instruction. A global Pilates format opening there says the unit economics survive translation into a Southeast Asian cost structure.
It also sits alongside a broader pattern we have tracked in Pilates franchise opportunities in the GCC and in the recent STRONG Pilates master franchise agreement for Central and Eastern Europe: Pilates operators are choosing country-level partners over slow organic rollout.
Master franchising hands a qualified local group the development rights for a whole territory. The brand gets speed, local real estate knowledge and regulatory cover; the master franchisee gets a defined runway and the right to sub-franchise. For a studio format that needs density to work, that trade is usually the difference between three studios and thirty.
The instructor pipeline is the part most investors underrate. A 450-hour certification requirement is a barrier to opening fast, but it is also the reason a studio in Bangkok can deliver something recognisably the same as a studio in California — and it is the single hardest thing for a local imitator to copy.
Read the milestone as a maturity marker, not a headline. A brand crossing 1,500 units has usually finished arguing about its format and moved on to arguing about territory allocation — which is precisely the window in which country rights get awarded and then stop being available. Tianna Strateman, President of Club Pilates, framed continued international growth as a daily activity for the brand rather than a project with an end date.
Two practical implications. First, boutique fitness in Southeast Asia and the Gulf is no longer a speculative category — it is being contested by multiple international operators at once, and the partner-selection process is getting more competitive from the brand side, not the investor side. Second, groups that already run multi-unit F&B or wellness portfolios in these markets are the natural counterparties, because the format rewards operators who can secure several prime sites in one metro rather than one flagship. Investors evaluating comparable American formats entering the region may also want to read our analysis of American franchises entering Japan in 2026.
VF Franchise Consulting advises international brands and investors on cross-border franchise expansion across Asia Pacific and MENA.
Email: info@vffranchiseconsulting.com | Hotline: +84 90 306 54 58
