Equinox Is Trying to Make Health the Ultimate Status Symbol

When Harvey Spevak took the helm of Equinox Group in 1999, its properties consisted of five well-appointed gyms. Since then, he has overseen its move into spas, hotels and healthcare to meet its affluent customer base’s growing interest in optimising every aspect of its health.

Across 110 clubs, members can now access classic spa treatments and trending services like cold plunges, cryotherapy, infrared saunas and compression. In May 2024, it added the $40,000-a-year Optimize by Equinox programme featuring a concierge, trainer, nutritionist, massage therapist and sleep coach, along with blood tests from health management platform Function Health.

Spevak is positioning Equinox to be at the forefront of luxury wellness today, a space occupied by high-spending clientele looking for exceptional service and the latest cutting-edge treatments as they try to live longer, healthier lives — physically and mentally. While women have historically been the target market for the wellness world, for Equinox that group includes a growing number of men looking for offerings beyond fitness equipment.

The journey hasn’t come without challenges, most notably during the pandemic. The group is still working to entice members back in its aftermath. But the recovery efforts have paid off, according to Spevak, as member numbers have almost fully recovered.

Now Equinox is focused on the future as it charges ahead with its expansion. In September 2024 it had plans to open three more clubs within the year, with 30 more in the pipeline, and means to extend its hospitality push as well. After unveiling its first hotel in New York in 2019, it hopes to open a Saudi Arabia resort by the end of 2025.

BoF: Equinox has expanded into an array of wellness and hospitality services. What consumer mindset shifts have prompted this evolution?

Harvey Spevak: Over the years, we’ve done a great job of leading and anticipating where the consumer is going. The most recent example of that is the hotel. When we first started thinking about doing an Equinox hotel, people were like, ‘Help me understand that. Is this just going to be like a gym with rooms on top? What are you exactly doing?’ And we said, ‘No, consistent with what we do, it’s going to be a holistic and unique experience and offering.’ If you think about how we think about the consumer, just as a brand, we’re always looking for unique ways to engage our members, and we think about it holistically, from a science perspective — what we call high-performance living and catering to those who want to live a high-performance lifestyle.

BoF: Are luxury consumers shifting more spending from physical luxury goods towards health and wellness?

HS: There’s no doubt that the consumer is more focused on experience and not just products. We’ve been at the cross section of that — experience, luxury, wellness and community — for many years, if not the pioneer in a lot of that. Many years ago, the younger population would — if you were single in a major city, like where we operate — go out and party ‘til 3:00, 4:00 in the morning [on weekends], hope you don’t get in trouble, and then you would sleep it off the next day to whatever time you woke up. And you would do it again the next night. Now, people at all ages might have dinner out, but it’s important that they get home at a decent time, because they want to get a good night’s sleep so they can go and experience their favourite class at Equinox.

BoF: Thinking about post-pandemic consumer psychology, do consumers want indulgence now, or do they want self-discipline?

HS: Our hotel brand positioning has been from the day we opened for those who want it all. The consumer today, certainly our consumer, wants to travel, wants to have a good time. I can’t talk about the hedonism part, but psychedelics and mental wellbeing is a huge part of what’s happening.

BoF: Do you have a vision of the future where wellness sits in with the wider luxury space?

HS: The consumer that we target very much wants a lifestyle experience, a unique experience, but an elevated experience. They want something that’s high-touch, service-oriented, thoughtful around design, has the right amenities. That’s what the consumer expects more of, and they expect you to deliver more uniqueness. We have an Equinox in West Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard. We wanted to do something unique, more forward-thinking, so we’ve been working with the sculpturist Daniel Arsham. Daniel helped us reimagine what that club should be. That’s going to be a good representation of what we think the future will be like from an experience perspective.

BoF: Do you think that health and fitness is becoming more of a status symbol compared to luxury goods these days?

HS: The status symbol, in my mind, is not comparing to luxury per se. The status symbol is, ‘I’m living a healthy lifestyle, which gives me a lot of energy, that gives me a lot of permission to explore all aspects of life.’ What’s amazing to me is the convergence of fashion, luxury, music, entertainment, sport, hospitality, wellness — it’s all of that coming together. Celine doing stuff in Pilates or Hermès doing stuff around yoga. That is all converging, and it’s because the consumer wants the high-performance lifestyle.

BoF: Did the pandemic cause any long-term changes to customer behaviour in terms of spending on wellness as a luxury?

HS: Higher spend — in a lot of cases, no limit on what they will spend, as long as you give them a high-quality product and a high-quality experience. What our members have proven to us, time and time again — and Equinox Optimize is a good example — is if we put in front of them a high-quality, differentiated offering with our authority, our authenticity and our expertise, they get excited about it and they’ll pay for it. Equinox Optimize is a $40,000 membership. We have hundreds of people on a waitlist eager to become Equinox Optimize members. The consumer has more discretionary income for health and wellness than ever before.

BoF: What are the strategies for getting members to keep up their Equinox memberships?

HS: Our most engaged members are, frankly, from a business perspective, our most lucrative members. If you’re getting results, you’re going to feel good, you’re going to become an evangelist for the brand, and you’re going to stick around longer. How we do that is by making sure we’ve got that great experience, high level of service, great touchpoints in terms of our amenities and what happens in the locker rooms. We just transferred from Kiehl’s to Grown Alchemist.

BoF: What are the top emerging trends you see shaping the future of luxury wellness?

HS: It’s very much focused on longevity, GLP-1 [glucagon-like peptide-1, the hormone mimicked by weight-loss drugs such as Ozempic], ‘how do I use biomarkers and data to inform what I’m going to do and what results I get?’ There’s a growing focus from men in terms of how they think about wellness. There’s a growing focus from women about how they think about longevity, and all of that ties into unique experiences.

BoF: Equinox recently unveiled its GLP-1 Protocol, a personal-training programme designed for clients taking GLP-1 agonist weight-loss drugs. What kind of reception have you seen for your GLP-1 programme and will Equinox ever offer GLP-1 medications directly?

HS: We do not see a future of offering GLP-1 directly. We think that’s for the healthcare practitioners. There are places that are willing to do that for you, and we think that’s a big mistake. You should be under the care of a medical professional, and that’s not who we are. With that said, there’s been a tremendous amount of interest in the GLP-1 protocol that we developed.

BoF: What are customers’ expectations around longevity these days, and how do they align with what can be accomplished?

HS: We all want to live longer, but we also don’t want to be sedentary when we live longer. People are very focused on ‘how am I going to not just extend my life, but how am I going to do it in a healthy way?’

People are very focused on ‘how am I going to not just extend my life, but how am I going to do it in a healthy way?’

BoF: The concept of wellness is always talked about, most often with businesses targeted towards women and the wellness industry. Have you seen men shift their focus from fitness more to overall wellness?

HS: Yes, and that shows up in a lot of ways. We see that with a higher level of engagement, just like we see with women, but we think that men are more focused on preventative care. Men are at the beginning of a trend of really engaging more and more in terms of their holistic and overall wellbeing, not just the physical and working out.

BoF: There’s been talk about IPO possibilities over the years, so you raised the $1.8 billion to refinance maturing debt. What would the financial picture need to look like in order to pursue an IPO in the future?

HS: We have and continue to be focused on our long-term vision of building a global luxury lifestyle brand. There’s so much desire for us all around the world. We’re not focused on an IPO right now. We get calls, we get bankers, you know, at the right time, we’ll consider it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

This article first appeared in The State of Fashion: Luxury, an in-depth report on the global luxury industry, co-published by BoF and McKinsey & Company.