Offering nine boutique studios all housed inside one luxury gym, Altea’s new Ottawa facility could change the face of Canadian fitness
Altea has a bold plan to take over Canada’s luxury fitness market: it involves boutique studios, economies of scale and a massive new club in Ottawa.
Scheduled to open later this year, Altea Ottawa will feature 129,000 square feet of top-shelf equipment and amenities, including boutique fitness studios, pickleball courts, an aquatic center, recovery lounge, women’s only fitness suite, child care services and a sports performance training center.
“This is going to change the way people look at premium fitness and wellness,” Altea CEO Jeff York tells Athletech News. “It’s going to be the best facility in Canada, by a lot.”
Founded by fitness industry vets David Wu and Michael Nolan, Altea currently operates three locations, in Winnipeg, Toronto and Vancouver, which range in size from 43,0000 to 89,000 square feet.
The upcoming Ottawa facility will be Altea’s largest club by far. It may also serve as a model for the brand’s future expansion plans.
Boutique Fitness Like You’ve Never Seen It Before
While Altea Ottawa will offer all the familiar trappings of a large luxury gym, its calling card will be boutique-style group fitness. The Ottawa facility will house nine state-of-the-art boutique fitness studios, including everything from reformer Pilates to hot yoga to LF3, Altea’s take on small-group functional strength training.
The idea, according to York, is to create “multiple boutique experiences in a big-box” gym setting, which should save consumers money over the long run.
York, who previously grew Canadian grocery brand Farm Boy into a household name by offering lower prices than upscale supermarket chains like Whole Foods, sees a similar opportunity to fix what he views as an inefficiency in North America’s boutique fitness market: it’s too expensive.
The average boutique fitness class costs between $35 and $50 USD ($49 to $69 in Canadian dollars), according to data from StudioGrowth. Memberships at Altea Ottawa will start at $150 CAD per month. That means members only need to take one class a week at Altea before they’re saving money compared to attending multiple classes per month at different studios.
“The boutique experience should exist, but it should exist within a big box, so you can have multiple boutiques within the big box and give your customer actual value,” says York, who took over as Altea’s CEO earlier this year after originally investing in the brand.
What’s more, Altea members can also enjoy all the benefits of a traditional luxury gym once they’re done with their yoga, cycling, Pilates or HIIT class.
“People will get value by using a studio four times a month, and then you get everything on top of it,” York notes. “Do a yoga class, do a Pilates class, do some fitness, then go into the steam room or sauna. It’s going to be classes-plus: you get all of your classes, and you get everything else.”
But can a big-box gym compete with highly specialized boutique fitness studios when it comes to quality? York believes so.
“Our cycle studio is going to be the best cycle studio that anyone’s ever seen in Canada,” he says, expressing a similar sentiment about Altea’s hot yoga studio and its other offerings.
“We’re putting money into the facility so that we can wow the customer,” he adds.
Expanding Across Canada
If York’s boutique-fitness-at-scale hypothesis proves out, Altea could change the face of Canada’s luxury fitness landscape.
“In Canada, we could easily do 50 locations,” York says, adding that Altea won’t rule out U.S. expansion down the road.
For now, though, Altea is focused on Canada, a market York believes has been underserved by luxury fitness brands.
Life Time has three locations in Toronto but nowhere else in the Great White North, while Equinox has a pair of clubs in Toronto and one in Vancouver. Neither brand has entered Ottawa, Canada’s unsung capital city which York sees as the gateway to the wider Canadian market.
“Ottawa is the best test market in Canada for any product,” he says. “If it works in Ottawa, it works everywhere because you’ve got a stable, middle-income customer that wants a premium experience but doesn’t want to pay a premium price.”
Provided the Ottawa test works out, Altea sees a massive opportunity to expand its luxury big-box gym concept in cities across Canada by taking advantage of empty swaths of real estate abandoned by shuttered retail and home-improvement stores.
In a nod to this blueprint, Altea has a fifth location, Avant by Altea, a luxury spin-off concept, set to open early next year in an old Nordstrom Rack store in Toronto’s Yorkville neighborhood.
“Let’s win Canada first, and show everybody how to do it,” York says of his expansion philosophy. “Then, fitness will travel. The brand will travel. “
