Inspiring Indians about the fitness and wellness aspect while aiming to significantly increase its fitness retail presence in the Indian market, BodyPower, a global fitness leader from the UK, is planning to launching around 80-100 gyms through franchising with increasing the count of its ambassadors to around 2000 across the country.
Revealing their strategies, Nick Orton, CEO, BodyPower Ltd, who is on an India tour for Fit Factor India, the biggest fitness modelling competition, spoke to Wellness India. Here are excerpts from the interview.
What is the philosophy of the brand BodyPower in India?
India has similar problems as the rest of the world like obesity, high diabetes, heart diseases and blood pressure among others. Our philosophy is to inspire as many people as possible to get fitter and understand more about how they can control their diet, eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle. India is a brighter spot for BodyPower gyms.
How do you think are people getting conscious about fitness and wellness?
At the moment it is absolutely buzzing. There is a whole fitness and wellness market in India. There has been exponential growth in the fitness quotient in India and there are more and more people participating in Fit Factor. India is different from the rest of the world and people are getting conscious about their health. India is learning from the west and addressing health issues before they go out of hand.
Five years ago, an average physique was the best among Indians and now it is world class in India and its changing the fortune. So fitness in India is at a very good position right now.
From lifestyle to wellness, how are gym habits changing?
In the last two years, Indians have changed massively and consistently YOY. Five years ago, people were not worried of fitness, but now it is the most discussed topic.
While there are players like Talwalkars leading the market, what is unique with BodyPower?
A large number of gyms in India are lifestyle oriented, but BodyPower is result oriented where one can actually go and get trained. A lot of gyms in the market are appealing to different age groups. There are fantastic chains of gyms like Talwalkars aimed at middle market, families and old age groups.
What is your current presence in the Indian market? And what are your future plans?
Recently, we have launched our first gym in Pune and have more opening in Nagpur, Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi soon through franchising. We roughly want to increase the number to 80-100 gyms by 2020. These gyms will be in metros and Tier I and II cities. In two years, we will enter into 18-20 cities and will be opening minimum 50 gyms in the next couple of years. Our franchisees will have both a good bodybuilder and a good trainer and they have to stick to the brand guidelines.
Our first gym is about 1000 sq ft at an affluent area in Pune and we are expecting around 60 per cent females to enter in. We will also introduce our merchandise products soon. Our target consumer is between 17-30 years old. Globally we cater to 40 mn people.
Apart from the standalone presence we have experts and around 650 BodyPower ambassadors across 80 per cent region of the country. Hence, we aim to cover 95 per cent of the country by the end of 2017 with having 2000 ambassadors. This aim is about inspiring people to be frequent with the gyms and encouraging more ambassadors to join us.
What will be the investment?
The franchisees will have to invest Rs 15 lakh. All our gyms will be offering quality and well educated training programmes. The quality of the service as mid premium to premium ones will depend upon the location of the gym.
What is your aim with the Fit Factor initiative?
Fit Factor is the biggest fitness modelling competition in the world. We have got over 1500 applicants who want to take part. On each venue we will run a regional version of Fit Factor. In Mumbai, we are bringing 200-250 athletes. The event is all about education and entertainment, so we are calling top quality international athletes and have got most of the leading national athletes as well. All of them will be talking about different challenges and nutrition tour. So we want to inspire young people to take their health seriously. In India we will be performing well. We operate in 29 countries. We want our message to be more inspirational.
