Wellness Experience Pilates: What Happens When a Studio and a Spa Join Forces
A Facebook tag connected a Pilates-loving couple with a spa owner who had an empty room to fill. Five months later, they had a booked studio and a launch that beat every projection.
Most Pilates studios open the hard way. You sign a lease on an empty retail space and build the whole thing from scratch, hoping members show up before the rent comes due. When Lindsay and her husband Kenny opened Wellness Experience Pilates in Belmont, North Carolina, they skipped most of that. Their studio sits inside William Henry, an established spa and salon business just outside Charlotte, and that one decision shaped everything from how fast they opened to what they can offer members.
It started with a Facebook tag
Lindsay has done Pilates for years. She and Kenny used to practice together back in New York, and when they moved to the Charlotte area four years ago, she went looking for a studio. There wasn’t much to choose from nearby, and making the trek into Charlotte for Pilates wasn’t going to cut it.
“That’s when we really started talking about it,” Kenny says. “This is such a need in our community. Can we find a way to do this?”
The push came from an unlikely place. A local business owner posted on Facebook asking whether anyone would want a Pilates studio in Belmont. One of Lindsay’s friends tagged her in the comments. That was enough to connect them with the couple who wrote the post, local entrepreneurs who own William Henry Salons and Spa. They had an empty space and hadn’t decided what to do with it.
When he and Lindsay first walked the room, it was a former church office being used for storage. They sat on broken chairs and shared their vision. That was late April. By September, the studio was real.
The advantage of opening inside a spa
Being inside William Henry gave Wellness Experience Pilates something a standalone studio rarely has: a full spa’s worth of amenities without a full spa’s worth of overhead.
“It’s not common to have locker space and a shower option at a studio,” Kenny says. During the build-out they added three bathrooms with showers, which matters when your first classes start at 6 am.
Members can use the spa’s tranquility room, normally reserved for massage clients, where there’s a fireplace and quiet corners to sit with a laptop. There’s a sauna downstairs they’re welcome to use too. “That makes it stand out, and it’s really different from any studio I’ve been to.”
The business economics benefit as well. Sharing a building with an established business meant a lot of the usual startup costs and headaches were already handled. “We didn’t have to figure it all out on our own and it’s a big part of how we were able to move so fast,” Kenny says.
A launch that beat its projections
Kenny has been in fitness a long time, and he knows how many new studios struggle, so he went in with careful projections. The studio blew past those numbers almost immediately.
He’s quick to stay grounded about it. “Just because we’re having success right now doesn’t mean we will forever,” he says. But he credits a real combination of factors. Demand for Pilates in the area was high. They had a built-in audience through the spa, and an open house in the early days brought in a wave of existing spa clients. From there it spread by word of mouth.
“The response from the community was great,” Kenny says. “We’ve gotten great reviews and people who are just grateful we’re there.”
Ripping off the Band-Aid
The one piece Kenny wishes they’d handled differently from day one was the software. Because the studio launched inside the spa, it started on the spa’s salon booking system. That system was built for salons, not for a Pilates studio selling class packs and subscriptions, and it showed.
“People would buy a package and the credits would just vanish,” Kenny says. The problems piled up through the presale and first month. Good friend and owner of The CS Fit Pilates, Cara Schroter, pointed them to Zipper.
What changed first with the switch to Zipper was simply having a clear picture. Clients stopped showing up with multiple accounts. Payments made sense. The guesswork went away, and over time the platform kept growing into something they could use to run the business, not just keep the lights on.
“We came from a system where things were so messy they couldn’t even be explained. Zipper made it simple. My instinct was that this team would be hands-on and actually listen to our feedback, and that’s been exactly right. It keeps growing into a tool we use to grow the business.”
— Kenny Holvig, Co-owner, Wellness Experience Pilates
Why members stay
Ask Kenny what makes the studio work, and he points to how the room feels. “It’s simple. It’s clean. Anyone who walks in can feel it right away,” he says. For members who are trying something new and feeling nervous about it, that calm is the whole selling point. “I think that’s one of the X factors that’s gotten us some sticky members. They feel comfortable in the space.”
What comes next
Wellness Experience Pilates is coming up on its first anniversary, and it just posted its best month yet in June. Rather than rush into a second location, Kenny and Lindsay are focused on getting more out of the space they have, including expanding their equipment, especially since they’ve reached this point on almost no marketing spend.
A second location is on the table, but they’re thinking about doing something different rather than cloning the studio.
“Our goal right now is to really invest in and grow our current space,” Kenny says. After the summer, they’ll start figuring out what’s next. As he puts it, there’s no time to rest. Strike while the iron is hot.
Wellness Experience Pilates by William Henry is a reformer Pilates studio inside William Henry the Spa in Belmont, North Carolina, offering group classes and private training alongside spa amenities like showers, a sauna, and a tranquility room. It runs its booking and payments on Zipper.
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