Female emPOWERED: Winning in Business & Life
Female emPOWERED: Winning in Business & Life
Episode 303: How Strong Branding Builds Stronger Businesses — Insights from Fhitting Room Founder Kari Saitowitz
How do you build a boutique fitness brand that stands out in a crowded market? And how do you balance staying true to your values while also marketing for growth?
In this episode of Female emPOWERED, I’m joined by my dear friend and returning guest Kari Saitowitz — founder of Fhitting Room in NYC and current CMO of New York Sports Club. With a background at American Express, Pepsi, and a Harvard MBA, Kari blends world-class marketing expertise with the real-life lessons of building and scaling a boutique fitness business.
We dive into:
- How Kari transitioned from corporate marketing into boutique fitness entrepreneurship
- The origins of Fhitting Room and how branding + values drove growth
- The difference between brand identity (your fonts, colors, logos) and brand intangibles (culture, values, client experience)
- Why boutique fitness owners should start with branding as the foundation of their marketing
- Creative, free marketing ideas that actually work for small studios (referrals, partnerships, member stories, retention campaigns)
- How AI is changing the way fitness businesses market and operate
✨ Kari will also be joining me live at the CEO Summit this November in Miami, where she’ll sit on our Marketing Panel to answer your questions directly about branding, client acquisition, and retention strategies.
👉 Spots are almost sold out! Learn more and grab your seat here: www.christagurka.com/ceosummit
If you’re a Pilates studio, yoga studio, or boutique fitness owner who feels stuck in the weeds of marketing or unsure how to stand out in a saturated market, this episode is a must-listen. And if you’re ready to step into your CEO role with confidence and clarity, the CEO Summit is where it all comes together.
Hey there everyone. Welcome back to another episode of the Female Empowered Podcast. I'm your host, Christa Gurka, and today we have a guest episode, one of my dear, dear friends, who's also actually returning guest on the podcast. So we have Kari Saitowitz here with me today who is the founder of Fhitting Room, which is a hi concept in. New York and Manhattan, and currently she is the CMO of New York Sports Club. She comes with a tremendous amount of knowledge in marketing, having worked with Pepsi. Her dog's name is Pepsi, which I think is super, super cute too. And she is someone that I credit with. Teaching me a lot about business. We met because we were in a mastermind together. We all joined right at the beginning of COVID. So we were all basically struggling together. She obviously a lot more because she was in Manhattan. So Kari thank you so much for joining me for this call.
Kari Saitowitz-2:My pleasure. I think you me a very elevated ego there.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:You are amazing. I mean, I don't even wanna talk, first of all, she went to Harvard and Penn, so this girl's wicked smart and she's very humble and, would you actually share. A little bit about, so your marketing background started with Pepsi, but can you share your story of how you started in marketing and then your, transition into boutique fitness?
Kari Saitowitz-2:Sure. So if we dial way back to after undergrad, I went to work for American Express. At the time, a lot of brands did not recruit brand managers that didn't have MBAs. I mean, everything has changed. In the many years since then. but American Express, obviously being a huge global brand, always had really awesome marketing campaigns. but I did business development and strategic planning for them. So my first three years out of college was, spent much more like a management consultant. So different project engagements for different business units that would last anywhere from three months to. Up to a year. so while I was situated inside a massive global brand with an amazing global marketing arm, my role specifically wasn't marketing. I knew I really wanted to lean into marketing and spend. All of my time focused more on consumer behavior brand building. So I went back to business school and after that, well actually during my first and second year, I interned for Pepsi in their marketing department and then left that internship with a job offer to return, which was like a total dream for me. Huge brand, big budgets, global campaigns, just an awesome place to build your marketing chops. The. Leadership from most junior levels of management up through the most senior are just really smart and talented in, a plethora of ways. So some people being more like quantitative and strategic and really like insights building others being more creative agency backgrounds. I'd say that's really where I, continue to develop my love of marketing and branding, but also learned that it's so much more than what you think it is on the surface, and it continues to evolve. So. I left Pepsi back in 2007 when I had my older son. and at the time, there was like a proposal from the Facebook on my desk and digital marketing was having a micro site for a promotion. so from an academic standpoint, I'm not a digital native, which is an interesting place to be now as a chief marketing officer because I have to. Hire a team that has skills that, I'm not an, they're more expert in certain things than I am. So from Pepsi, I actually stepped outta the workforce altogether. When I had my older son, I thought I would stay at home until my kids left the house for college. My older one is first applying to colleges this year, and Fhitting room was over 12 years old, so that obviously didn't happen. I found myself just really drawn in general to More business types of conversations than stay at home mom types of conversations. And many of those conversations happened with my personal trainer at the time because the two days a week when I left my house when I was raising kids was essentially when I would go to the gym and work out. I had a personal trainer who was getting an MBA, so he was studying all sorts of business problems at the same time. The boutique fitness first really started to penetrate. so at the time in New York there was one Barry's Bootcamp, one physique 57. I think the second Soul cycle was opening. So this is really, really nascent and I loved my training sessions and my results of my training sessions, but I felt like I was missing out on this. fun that friends were having as they were going to boutique classes. I started to have a lot of conversations with my trainer and with others who also had personal trainers, but were also taking some boutique fitness classes about whether or not it would be possible to take the type of workout you do with a personal trainer. So strength training, Heavy weights compared to the weights that accompanied a lot of more cardio heavy classes at the time. and perform that safely in a group environment. Like is it possible to do real strength training, real conditioning, kind of with that knowledge and heavy direction of a really expert trainer in front of the room, but do it in a group environment so it could be both fun. And very effective. Those conversations kind of snowballed into, I don't know if it was a challenge or relief from my husband that I stopped talking about kids' nap times, but he basically was like, why don't you figure it out? You went to Harvard Business School. Like, just go do it. So what started as, really not a business plan at all. It was more just like, I call it a gym idea.'cause that was the subject line of the first email that I ever sent on the topic. what started as a gym idea ultimately a year later became. Opening the doors of the first Fhitting room, over 12 years ago. And so when I opened Fhitting room, I always had that consumer behavior lens. certainly my love of marketing and just consumer behavior was the lens I really saw everything through. My accountant at the time said to me, you never ran a gym. What makes you think this is going to work? don't, you know nine out of 10 new businesses fails? Which I could tell you this,
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yay.
Kari Saitowitz-2:an accountant who says things like that.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah, so, so, positive. So positive. Yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:encouraging, but, it kind of caught me off guard.'cause I was like, don't think of this as running a gym. I think of this as. Like solving a problem that I see in the marketplace, which is. Personal training workouts are awesome if led by a good trainer, but they're really expensive and they're not very fun. And there's a whole lot of people who would love the benefits of personal trainers who can't afford it or, You aren't turned on by that experience of a one-on-one relationship. And so, I always thought of this as marketing, even though I had to of course, become expert in things technology and systems and finance and accounting and laws and all sorts of stuff. But, but ultimately I always see the business and most businesses through the lens of the consumer.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah, at the height of Fhitting room, you had three locations. With a five, oh my gosh. Five. And, with a goal to continue to grow. I mean, that was the goal and it was successful. You had a very interesting concept because It's Fhitting room spelled F-H-I-T-T-I-N-G. And I think people said to you initially too, You don't need to go so catchy. Right? But it stands for Functional high Intensity training, which I thought was very clever along with like Fhitting room and the changes that happen like in a Fhitting room. You had two trainers, correct me if I'm wrong in the class, that was part of your, ethos, right? how many people to two trainers.
Kari Saitowitz-2:Before we opened, it wasn't intended to have two trainers, but when we opened we needed to train people how to teach these classes. And so we paired sort of more green, trainers with the head trainer to co-teach so that they would learn on the job. however, clients. Played that back as almost the biggest differentiator from
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:it.
Kari Saitowitz-2:at the time that they loved the two instructors. I think it made people feel very safe. There was, could always be leading the room in terms of what are you doing next, counting down the clock. But there was always somebody else who kind of could be all hands on deck with form correction or modifications. So that was, how we. Launched and how we remained up until the pandemic.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah, it definitely is a differentiator'cause there's not often that you see two coaches in. A group, setting. So the other thing that I loved about you and why I love bringing you on to talk about marketing is you're not just a marketing expert, marketing and branding. You were a business owner. So you had to look at it from both sides in terms of budget. ROI, is it working? Is it not working? And I think a lot of owners in boutique fitness, as you could attest, marketing is a huge umbrella. you said, there's digital marketing, there's paid advertising, there's in-person, there's organic, there's earned media. It just becomes, I think, overwhelming for your typical boutique fitness owner who may not actually be so savvy in business. They're technicians often, so when you coming from corporate. Marketing to transitioning into owning a boutique fitness yourself, what were some of the differences that you realized in that kind of that marketing seat, but more as an owner of a boutique brand? Yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:Yeah, so, well, especially for me, coming from places American Express and Pepsi, I think the first and foremost, you have no brand awareness you first open a boutique. And not only did we have no brand awareness at the time. People didn't really even understand the inherent benefits of training with high intensity intervals or women in particular lifting heavy weights. People would come into the studio and our lightest dumbbell was seven and a half pounds, and the lightest kettlebell was, I think six kilograms, might have been eight kilograms, which is, 12 or 16 pounds. and. There was a whole education piece just on the product before we even got into, okay, now why Fhitting room versus some other competitor and you're doing that without a budget? I had no marketing budget. I mean, I don't know, maybe for the first five years I don't think I spent a penny on marketing. And so those were challenges that didn't exist in, in my prior roles. And I think, even for somebody who doesn't come from an American Express or a Pepsi, a lot of times you still have a product. People inherently understand the benefits of. and so we really had to start from,
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:you are huge in branding, which. I love, your Fhitting room. Branding was on point. Very much so. And I, the last time you came to speak at, at the summit, at my summit a couple years ago, one of the things you did talk about was branding, which I do think is really important. So can you talk a little bit about why branding should be. Kind of an integral first step to somebody's marketing campaign and what is actually branding?
Kari Saitowitz-2:Yeah, I was gonna say, let me first take a step back. So the way I think about branding is there's really two big buckets. There's your brand identity, which are all of your tangibles. Colors, fonts, logos, taglines, photography, things you can see, touch, they're tangible. And then there's your intangibles, which are your brand values or your service standards, right? You can't see them or touch them, but. If you were blindfolded and walked into two different spaces and had greetings at two different front desks or something like that, can you tell
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Okay. Yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:And so in terms of your brand identity, all of those tangible things, is really critical because it can help you build awareness. Faster and awareness is the first step in the customer
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Mm-hmm.
Kari Saitowitz-2:Your customer acquisition funnel. So you can't be in somebody's consideration set, should I take this class or that class if nobody knows you exist. So the stronger your identity is, the faster you can build that recognition. it also helps you break through the clutter. So, think about your email inbox and how many emails you get. But, the ones that consistently look unique from everything else they have, you don't even have to read it to know who it's from, right? If you open an email from Fhitting room, you know it's from Fhitting room. It's unmistakable between the colors and the fonts. Certain phrases and things like that. so that just helps you without somebody, let's say you are walking past a storefront, you don't necessarily have to read it. If your brand identity is strong enough, somebody's going to will recognize it. so I think so that's huge also. And then. All of those little seeds, it also helps build your community. So on my wrist right now is a Fhitting room hair tie. We've, had them from the day we open and one of my teammates was on, I always forget if it was a train or a plane at one point, and the woman sitting next to her said, do you go to Fhitting room?
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Mm-hmm.
Kari Saitowitz-2:And she was like, oh, I work there. And they had this whole conversation about it, but they immediately were connected and oh, this person's part of the same
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Mm-hmm.
Kari Saitowitz-2:am. Or maybe the person next to her hadn't been in a year, but now we're on her mind. So now we have top of mind awareness. Maybe we go back into her consideration funnel. So the stronger your brand identity, just the, more effective everything you do can be like speeds up the whole. Process from recognition to getting back in that consideration set to being able to remind people. Like at Pepsi, one of the measures I had to track every week was top of mind awareness was one of the KPIs. So if you said to somebody, name five soda brands or you know, beverage brands or something like that. So one is recall are you top of mind, somebody just says your name, but the other is recognition. somebody may not say, gimme your five favorite workouts. They might not say Fhitting room, but maybe they say like the green one, or they see that hair tie and they're like, oh, that's from Fhitting room. All of that just accelerates your customer journey. So that's on the tangibles, on the intangibles in some ways. I mean, these are equally as important, if not more important from like the total business perspective. they're really the backbone of your business. So if you have a really well-defined brand, it's going to make everything else easier. So when you are, hiring somebody, for example, do they. they a cultural fit? what's that culture like? Those are your brand intangibles. When you are deciding, what new workshop to offer or a different class type, does it fit within, how you define your brand. your messaging, strategic partnerships. Does this partner fit our brand or doesn't it? Is the tagline does it fit our brand? Are we irreverent or is it too irreverent?'cause we're a family friendly brand, but the more well defined your brand is and your brand voice, the easier all your other decisions are.'cause it takes options off the table.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yep.
Kari Saitowitz-2:one that I think of most was, like you mentioned we're in New York and. New York studios were closed for an excessively long time After the pandemic over a year, and a lot of studios started to open before they were technically allowed to open of Fhitting rooms. Brand values is integrity.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Mm-hmm.
Kari Saitowitz-2:And we would sit in these meetings and be like, darn that integrity value, because integrity meant we couldn't have someone in our community be offended that we weren't following the safety protocols of our city. And while it was frustrating in some ways, because you wanna just see revenue coming, and again, you don't wanna lose your customer relationships, also it went against our brand values. So it just, it was off the table, so it was one less. Big decision that, that I had to wrestle with.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah. I do think that's important to talk about when you talk about your mission, vision, and values, which I think a lot of business owners I did for many years. poo-pooed that whole thing. I was like, yeah, they're all in my head. Yeah. I, I, I, everyone knows what we stand for, whatever.
Kari Saitowitz-2:years into Fhitting room.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Too. Yeah, but you, you really. Live your values. I will say that, I mean, I think all of us in the group are like, Kari Saitowitz is the culture queen. It was very important to you, but I do respect that you stuck by it because I also say when I talk about core values, I do think it's something that your business reeks of. I thought that was a great example when you said can, if you go blindfolded, it's a feeling that you get and. It's something that you don't compromise on. So the fact that you said integrity is one of your things and you did not compromise when it got really hard to say and you guys were closed for so long to really sit in it and say, this is part of our value. We have to. Stick to it.'cause some people will cave during those tough times and say, forget it, this is now more important. I will say, can you put your owner hat on just for a second and we'll just segue to marketing.'Cause I think this is an important aspect and I think my listeners will, resonate with this. How difficult sometimes is it? When you're really trying to build a culture and a value and a vision and actually lead from the front as an owner, when there are people on your team that you might have to say no to, or you might have to get off the bus or a client or a business decision. So from a business owner hat, how does that feel?
Kari Saitowitz-2:I mean, I think, you know how hard it can be. I mean, sometimes as an individual I wanna make one decision, but as a business owner who's. Staying true to what we've defined, it's like it doesn't fit. Or, there may be a marketing partner that I think could open up a new. A new pool of clients to us, but it might be a marketing partner that somebody on my team has had a bad experience with and raises their hand and it's like, okay, then it's off the table. so it, it could be really hard and I think it's hardest when you know that you've been. Treating people a certain way consistently or doing things a certain way. And then the perception by some individual, whether it's internal or external, is like the complete opposite what you have been committed to. and. Also part of that integrity is this, taking the high road. So everybody has a microphone these days and there have certainly been situations where people will blast either myself personally or the company about something, some form of treatment in some way. And it's like I might have 25 data points to the complete contrary, and i'm taking
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:You have to eat it.
Kari Saitowitz-2:like, you
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:You have to eat it.
Kari Saitowitz-2:is so, so hard.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:It's really hard and it's very personal. when we, when we do everything in our power as, as owners and colleagues to do what's right by our team, and someone turns around and blasts us and then the, the perception is that we're these awful people. Meanwhile, we've had those people in our home for. Dinner. We've invited them when they didn't have family in town for holiday meals. We've given them loans or raises or allowed them to do certain things and then they turn around and we become the bad person. But you're right, it's really hard as owners sometimes to take the high road. So, all right, we'll segue. I just wanted people,'cause I do think sometimes there's a perception that when you reach a certain echelon that you're oh, five studios in that. We get removed from these problems and one thing I like to tell everyone is the problems are the same. A lot of times they're just on scale, right? So
Kari Saitowitz-2:I was gonna say there's
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:they're just bigger. There's more of them. So they, running five locations has just as many people saying mean things about her, whether it's clients or staff as anybody. So. Okay, so now you have brand first. Um, I love that. I do think it's important when you're looking at someone's brand, when you're looking at their Instagram, when you're looking at their website, that it's is consistent. So color, fonts, um, photos, filters, those kind of things. So now let's take that into marketing. And so when we look at marketing. Again, if I say anything incorrect, please correct me, but marketing basically means telling the market that you exist. So going to find clients that are going to, in our business, hopefully pay us for services. Can you list a couple different ways that business owners can market their business from organic free marketing to paid bigger budgets, marketing.
Kari Saitowitz-2:Sure. marketing, you were saying, it's, it's so large. So I always say if you're in a classroom setting, you learn marketing as the four Ps, right? And the first one is product, right? You have product, pricing, promotions and place. But so it starts with product. and so I always say I think one of the best ways to get your brand out there, if you're at the beginning of your journey, but you could really do this at any point, is first talking to people about. So you could do this through, focus groups, one-on-one interviews. I used to take groups of moms at my kids' schools to lunches. And first just ask them about what's meeting their expectations, what isn't meeting their expectations? If they had a magic wand, what would they change? Like, do they come in the first place? What keeps them coming back? So the first thing is just make sure you're completely honed in on your unique selling proposition, and the only way to do that is to find out from your customers, because it doesn't matter what you think your brand is at all, it matters what they think it is. Once you have that, now you have to, now you know your messaging and you have to be super consistent. But I think ironically, the most effective things, especially for small businesses, are free. I don't think paid works particularly well for small businesses because they don't have brand awareness, so community driven. Content. So start with like your member stories, your transformation spotlight. Like when you showcase somebody, they share that with everybody they know. Others see you showcasing and celebrating somebody's story or journey, and they aspire to be that person. So you have that. You have your instructors, your instructors, and their word of mouth is. So you wanna create a space where you know they want to spend their time and they're doing what it is you do in your spaces. So at Fhitting room, the trainers are in there working out all the time and they're constantly filming themselves'cause it's just what they do. But we make it so that. It, feels like where they wanna do this as opposed to them doing it somewhere else. showcasing whenever your clients are posting, you want them taking selfies, you want them tagging you, you wanna then share that on your feeds so that they have their five minutes of fame. They feel seen, they feel recognized. a lot harder to stop going to the place that, knows you're coming than it is to stop going to this anonymous location. but you're also celebrating that they're there. So we have I. Little phrases on our mirrors that encourage, people wanna take pictures of them inside the lockers. Not everybody wants to take photos of themselves. We have like an easel sign on the sidewalk that has cute things. We have little sayings inside the lockers, and people will often take pictures of those things. and I mean, boutique fitness specifically, but I think all small businesses, it thrives on relationships. So just, I mean. Taking the time to build those one-on-one relationships at the desk. knowing people's names, what's going on in their lives, that's all huge as far as marketing channels. Anything you do, you kind of really wanna be hyper-local. So marketing partnerships, I look around like the neighborhood that my studios are in. What are other businesses that are not competitive but attract the same clients? So maybe it's a retailer, maybe it's a service provider, A hairdresser or whatever it is. So we've done partnerships with like dry bars, we've done partnerships with retailers. if you're getting the word out, if that's your objective, offer like gifts with purchase. hey, if they've got customers who are spending over, I don't know, you name the number,$100,$200, whatever it is, they've got people with disposable income. Give them a class to drop in that shopping bag as like a gift with purchase or something like that. So you're qualifying that person as somebody who has disposable income, and now you're kind of surprising and delighting them. So why would that partner say no? You're literally giving them something where they can surprise and delight their best customers. And now you're hopefully getting your name out there. One of the best partnerships we did early on at our, flagship studio for many years was with this company called Hello Alfred. And they were a concierge company for, York. People who don't have doormen, it's hard to get deliveries and. Get your drycleaning and all this stuff. And so they basically performed that service for a bunch of apartment buildings right around where our gym was. And so we had them, attached to the bags. Just
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Oh.
Kari Saitowitz-2:a little collateral about what we did with our intro offer and we, it just got the word out to people who lived right there. and the reality is you really wanna be within a, in a city within a probably half a mile of radius and suburbs. I would say probably still within a three to five mile radius. You probably know better than me, but who are those companies? affiliate partnerships. So there may be partnerships where you're, you're sharing a discount code for somebody else's brand with your customers. Maybe they're doing the same for you, but it feels like a perk for each. And you each get some sort of a financial kickback. So you're growing revenues, not just your potential. client pool. SEO is an interesting one. Now, there's a million free tools out there where you can run your website through free SEO tools. when we were talking consistency, so before, I feel like it was consistency in all those tangible things. Now, consistency in messaging is just as important because all of these, LLM models and crawlers that are feeding your brand or your product to people. They need consistent messaging. So if your content says something different on your website, then it says on your Yelp page, then it says on your Google listing, then it says in blog posts or something, you're falling to the bottom of everybody's algorithm. So, really clear messaging. if you do spend any money on marketing, I would say hyper. Targeted. sometimes I just do things for New York Sports Club, if we redo a gym, we do sidewalk stickers, just, around the blocks that surround the gym. it's super cheap, but you're just telling a bunch of people who maybe know your gym's been there for 50 years, but it's all new, everything inside, step inside to look. so really hyper-local referral and rewards program. So word of mouth should be your probably number one customer acquisition channel. For small business tool, small, it doesn't have to be fancy and tech enabled. It could be something really simple and manual to
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yep.
Kari Saitowitz-2:know, especially if you're small. but anything that rewards your customers for spreading, the word outs again. I went back to some emails from 2016 on the call this week and there were emails saying we can't afford to give out a free class when somebody hits certain milestones, but we just had the instructors, sort of put a big
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:the room and shout them out. And so it doesn't always have to be something that's going to handcuff you financially. Short form videos. if you've got clients making them great, share them. If you've got instructors making them share them, they can be really, really quick. I think that the fallacy is that you need something to go viral. what good does it do you to have 10 million views on a video if nobody lives in your neighborhood?
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Right. Totally true.
Kari Saitowitz-2:it just doesn't matter. And then I would say, don't forget about retention. So
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:one of the biggest lessons in marketing is it's way more expensive to do customer acquisition than it is to do retention. So, basic automations, that just keep touch points with people. you don't wanna make people feel bad. not coming, if they're kind of lapsed, but just checking in, just maybe telling them about something new that's happening it doesn't have to be those messages that make you feel really guilty or like almost embarrassed to step foot back in the door. I would say I would be really careful with wording of those lapsed customer emails, but, a cadence that works for you at Fhitting room. We do. A newsletter every week at New York Sports Club. We do a member newsletter once a month. It just kind of depends on how engaged the different communities are. You wanna strike that balance between delivering and not getting, having people unsubscribe. targeted offers, to like specific cohorts of people. You don't wanna go on sale every day to everyone. You have customers who are there all the time and they're happy to pay full price. So really targeted like cohorts, when you are running a promotion, different language to different user groups, like emails that go out to somebody who comes to us on a third party. Booking membership are going to be totally different than an email that's going to somebody who, buys directly, but maybe infrequently, versus somebody who comes all the time at full price. So I would just say, really hyper targeted.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Those are really, really great ideas. And I do agree that a lot of people forget about retention and re-engagement'cause everyone's so focused on like leads, leads, leads, leads, leads, especially marketing companies are promoting get more leads in the door. But part of that full marketing funnel is that. They're moving from awareness to consideration, a purchase, and then it's retention and reengagement at the end. And if we don't plug the bottom of that funnel, people just keep falling out. And so. Like our win back series. I think the subject line was like, are your ears ringing? And it was like, oh, we've been talking about you at the studio. We haven't seen you in a while. We'd love for you to come back in with technology. Now there's a lot of ways you can automate these things. you can track the. Re-engagement campaign, like how much revenue are you re-engage with that campaign? And sometimes people are like, it's a nice gesture. I think people just like you said, or they see someone with a hair tie on the train and they're like, I have to make an appointment to go back to Fhitting room. I have been off. So everything that you said is very accurate and I think. What I would, what I think too is that we don't have to do everything at once. maybe one season you're like, okay, this season, this quarter, or this year, I'm gonna really focus on my re-engagement and retention strategies. I'm gonna get my emails done, I'm gonna figure out the tech, I'm gonna get the automations. And then you can, you don't have to do everything all at the same time.
Kari Saitowitz-2:That's right. In fact, I would say you shouldn't because you probably won't do anything.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Right. Or Well, yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:you start with the absolute basics. I would start with your website,
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yes, I.
Kari Saitowitz-2:great about the copy and the imagery on your website? have a place for people to submit their email or a popup on a first timer page or something, right? You want some lead capture and you wanna feel great about the language because then that should be the language that you use
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Everywhere.
Kari Saitowitz-2:everything else. So I feel you start there and you start with Making sure your Google listing is done or your Apple business account, because that's how you show up. in Apple Maps or in Google Maps or in Uber and stuff like that. And it's we don't think about these things as being sexy marketing
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Right,
Kari Saitowitz-2:but getting that stuff right will help drive more traffic to your business than,
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:course.
Kari Saitowitz-2:having one video reach 10 million
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah. Yeah.'cause if you have a shitty website. it, and then you're gonna run ads. You're running ads to a shitty website, that's just throwing money down the toilet, it really is. So, get your website. Well, and it doesn't have to be a 75 page website, it just branding clear font, a really clean user experience. Right. Because if you go to a website, I just, like you said, it's like an extension of who you are and it should match. Your brand, right? So if your website is got a lot of words and there's all sorts of links everywhere, at least for me, the feeling I get as a consumer is I'm oh my God, this is anxiety producing and that's not what I want. So I'm automatically no, thank you. Right? Or one of the things I see on boutique fitness, either their Instagram or their website is I'm where are you? Where are you? where's, where are you? You know, if you're in Manhattan, what part of Manhattan are you in? Right? If I'm looking at your Instagram page, I wanna see on your Instagram bio where are you? What part of the country are you in? Because if you're not in Miami and I can't go visit you locally, I wanna know. So those are very simple things people can do.
Kari Saitowitz-2:That's right.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:So I would say a lot, I think a lot of people feel, I hear this all the time on my calls, oh, it's so crowded. The market is super saturated. And well, one, I'd love to ask you what your opinion of that is. Is it super saturated, especially in the boutique fitness, industry? And if so, yes or no? how can we get above the noise, basically?
Kari Saitowitz-2:So there's no question there's kind of competition. I personally feel like it's been this way since at least 2018,
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Mm-hmm.
Kari Saitowitz-2:in New York. I think it's a little bit different, when you get into some smaller markets. but I think there's good news and bad news. I think there was a time when there was a ton of capital available to To some of these boutiques, investors were just throwing money at startup boutiques and there were some really unsustainable business models. So there was a time where it was almost impossible to hire an instructor at a reasonable cost because well-funded businesses were we'll pay you
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:to teach a class. I think the good news is we're entering, a new phase where there's still a lot of competition, but I think that. It's a much more rational market. I think that people are much more focused on profit and sustainable business models. we are seeing some consolidation of some of the biggest players that expanded really quickly. but I think that doors opening, thinking more about their cost structures, which I think sets a more level playing field, whether you are big or small. So I think that part is good. I think. At one time messaging was more about the, the celebrity trainer or who is teaching the class as opposed to what the workout is and what the benefits of the workout is. And I feel like right now, even some of those brands that were very celebrity driven are also because even they can't afford those big anymore, you know, everything's much more about the benefits. And so I think. From a smaller business, you almost have the advantage of being able to get really personal. And so focusing on, what is it you do making sure that what you do is what people desire. So if you find that. You're suffering and you're not seeing retention. I would have conversations and find out why people aren't coming back. Is pricing off? Is it the modality? Is it the workout? Is it how people are being treated? And so, but you have that ability to really go deep and dig in. but I think, you know, I do think competition is fierce. I really feel like you can be a special place. Like Fhitting Room at this point has one wholly owned studio in New York City and one licensed location in New Jersey. But performance of that studio is actually better than it's ever been. and the engagement is through the roof. We've had a referral and rewards program for years, but we just launched a new one. That's built into the app less than a month ago. we already have 50% of clients who have walked through the door are enrolled and 50% of them are currently in the first challenge that we're running
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Wow.
Kari Saitowitz-2:new program. And that is guy high engagement. because we're small and everybody feels like they have a personal relationship with. With the team, they live close by. It's easy. It falls into their daily routine. They have a workout that gets them benefits. But also we keep evolving. So we ask questions. We'll launch Progressive series. We launched workshops. We'll, we've launched recently an advanced, kettlebells class. But as people progress, we have to evolve and progress too. So you don't wanna just. Set your brand in stone and then never revisit it. It kind of all goes together,
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:What do they say? My menopause brain's gonna forget it. But if you're not growing your dying type situation, you kind of have to, you know, you kind of have to grow the time. So I think that that actually rolls into. AI a little bit and I think, I think we're gonna say I, so Kari Saitowitz is coming to speak at the Women and Wellness Business Summit. Again, I'm so grateful she's coming to join me in November, and I think we actually only have five spots available. I'm gonna link it in the show notes, but we are gonna talk a lot about AI at the summit. But I did wanna just ask you a quick question and just in terms of. How are you seeing AI be a new player in the boutique fitness industry? And even, especially when it comes to marketing,'cause I know people that are using it as their copywriter. I know people that are using it as their brand strategist. So what are you seeing on your side and both just the world of boutique fitness and then in business in general.
Kari Saitowitz-2:I think at this point most people are using AI to help with copywriting, brainstorming campaign ideas, hopefully executing a content strategy helping with brainstorming blog ideas, blog content. Also remember to fact check everything. assisting with scripts. all that stuff. I think sort of the next tier up is there's been Different analyses I've done over the years of diff, our promotions that we run. And I never can get the exact data that I want out of the reports from the POS system. And it usually takes me a day or two to crunch together data from a whole bunch of different reports and pivot tables and and a whole bunch of stuff to get the data I want. So now I throw a lot of. Those reports into AI and tell it what I want and that's a huge time saver. So I would say data analysis, I also at the moment am running, so for Fhitting room. We're not running paid ads for New York Sports Club. I'm running paid ads. I'm running them all on an AI platform right now. So my team is no longer writing taglines are handing off creative. We are not using AI creative in this sense of generative, the whole creative. Ai, but the AI picks from all of the assets that belong to the brand that exist in, out there in the world. and then on the backend, I have the ability to X out if it's picking up anything, I don't want it to showcase. it's just imagine ab testing at the scale of hundreds of thousands of ads and audiences in a month. So You know, traditionally it's you run a campaign, a paid campaign in particular, it has your two week learning. and then if you wanna make a change, you go back to the beginning and you have your maybe eight pieces of creative at a time and a couple ab tests and your different audiences, and sometimes you're gosh, I need to think of new audiences.'cause I feel this audience isn't working. This is just seamlessly doing all of that at a rapid fire. what I actually love about it most, I mean, it is super efficient. It takes a lot of the lift off of my team in terms of resizing creative for different,
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:platform. Yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:it just does all that seamlessly, but I could set the budget at the per location level and set my little radius. I don't have to have this group of all New York City clubs. It's just really nimble. It's really flexible. I can make changes like a dime. I'm not creating all the created, it is getting me lower,
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Cost.
Kari Saitowitz-2:lower cost per lead. More importantly is that it's totally transparent. I have a dashboard. I'm not waiting on an agency report where the agency report might tell me that my cost per lead has gone down by 50%. And I'm it's such a head scratcher'cause I'm spending the same amount of money and I'm not seeing twice as many leads.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Right.
Kari Saitowitz-2:And so are we just putting the same ads in front of the same person or in front of the person who was going to come in anyway, but we're just shoving an ad in their way? Like are the attribution models, right? Like there's all these questions, is a dashboard and I log in, it's totally transparent, and if something's out of whack, I'm what happened here? What happened there? It's not perfect, but it is easy and I'm spending a fraction of what I used to spend on paid advertising without seeing my leads go down.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:I just think it's more honest maybe
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah. It's a, it's a machine, so you take out the human component of them trying to sell you, you know.
Kari Saitowitz-2:Yeah. Yeah. So I will say that, as far as business in general, I mean. There are times sometimes I'll sit down. I had to do an interview guide. I was hiring a new digital marketing manager a couple of months ago and the night before my first interviews, I pulled up my interview guide that I had used to hire my prior digital marketing manager, except it was four and a half years ago it was like in the morning when I was looking at this and I was like, oh my God, I can't believe how long ago I wrote this interview guide. I'm really tired and I just took the job description for the current job and I plugged it into AI and was like, write me an interview guide that would take
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Love it.
Kari Saitowitz-2:to get through. and it was like. Mostly pretty good. But then I was like, oh, I feel like there's some brand specific stuff that I wanna add. Here's my old interview guide, but it's four and a half years ago, so take it with a grain of salt. but just can you integrate some of the brand specific stuff? And I mean, it's like
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:So easy. Yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:so I mean, I think there's a million job descriptions. I tend to, I spend my time getting all of my thoughts down in. Sort of a brain dump into chat GPT so that it can then give me really well-informed output. And it's funny, sometimes I get annoyed now. I was telling my husband the other day, I was like, I had this email. It was like a real doozy and I wanted to be really thoughtful and really respectful and really strategic. But also it was something that, I had some concerns with. And. I was like an email, crafting an email like that would've taken me maybe like a half a day in my like prior life because I'd really wanna get all of it just right. The tone, the content, all of it. And I was like, it's so funny'cause it probably took me maybe five to 10. Maybe 15 minutes to get all of my concerns into chat. GPT, like, I'm concerned, I'm gonna sound like this or, but I really wanna get this point across. I just, it was gobbledigook, what I put in, but it was a brain dump of all my thoughts. And then I was like, can you please? And I was like, here's the email I'm responding to. just. the whole thing in, help craft a response. And I, I mean, I did obviously manipulation of it afterwards, my gosh, it was so helpful just
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Yeah.
Kari Saitowitz-2:that initial, you know, just trying to bring it all together, when you are feeling so all over the place. you know, so I, I use it for, I mean, endless
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:I do too. I use it for everything. And again, helping with email, brain dumping in there, asking it what are my options if I want to do that. I've actually asked it to. I'm getting a, this warning on my Google Ads account Act as a Google Ads expert and tell me where I need to go find, how do I need to troubleshoot this? I I do think if people aren't leveraging the power of ai, they're falling behind the eight ball a little bit. but we're definitely gonna talk about AI in the upcoming summit. So I'm very, very excited about that and I'm very excited for Kari to be down. She's gonna be sitting on our marketing panel, which is gonna be held Friday, November 7th. so you'll be able to ask Kari Saitowitz all sorts of marketing questions. She comes, I said, with a plethora of information, and I'm actually gonna take some of the, the information that you gave me today in this podcast and even maybe ask you when you're down in the summit, like how do you advise. Approaching local retailers or business owners to start that type of partnership.'cause I think implementation for people is the hard part. Like that sounds like a great idea. How do I initiate the conversation? And so I think that might be a really great topic on the panel. So I'm gonna take some of these, some of what you said and make actual questions and people will get to ask you in real life as well. So can you let people know where they can find you? They should follow Fhitting room, which we're gonna link everything in the show notes. And Fhitting room is spelled F-H-I-T-T-I-N-G. New York Sports Club is another place. anything else you wanna share where people can check you out?
Kari Saitowitz-2:I do read my LinkedIn messages. I don't respond to the spam ones.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Okay,
Kari Saitowitz-2:same thing.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:good enough.
Kari Saitowitz-2:also, I'm not quite of the TikTok age.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:I'm not, don't worry, I'm not either, even though I doom scroll on that platform way, way, way too much.
Kari Saitowitz-2:I think I'm logged in as my son on my phone. I definitely mess up his algorithm.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Oh God, for sure. Yeah, no, I'm, I just doom scroll on there. So I, my feet is all puppies and college dorm rooms, situations right now since I just moved my kids back to school. So.
Kari Saitowitz-2:right.
Christa Gurka | Fit Biz Strategies-2:Kari Saitowitz, thank you so much for coming on. And again, for those of you that wanna see and meet Kari Saitowitz in person, you can check out my website at christagurka.com look under the CEO summit, which is happening November 6th and seventh, 2025 in Miami. I am also gonna link the registration, to the show notes below. I think we are really down to our last. Three spots. So we cap it at 30 businesses. So it's small and intimate and really some great learning. So thank you, Kari again, and until next time, my friends, I'm so excited. I can't wait to see you again in November. Bye for now, everyone.