How to open a Lagree studio: equipment, licensing, and finding your members

If you're working out how to open a Lagree studio, three decisions do most of the heavy lifting: who you're opening for, which machines you buy, and whether you can staff the room. Everything else, including pricing, schedule and marketing, follows from those. Get them out of order and you can end up with a beautiful room full of $10,000 machines in a neighborhood that won't pay $35 a class, or a full schedule you can't cover.

Here's how to work through them, and what to do about the first-timers who walk in expecting something gentler.

What a Lagree reformer studio is

Lagree is a patented method built around slow, continuous resistance work on a spring-loaded carriage. Classes run on Lagree machines rather than classic Pilates reformers, the machines are sold by Lagree, and using the Lagree name in your studio needs a license.

If you want the method explained properly, we've covered what Lagree is and how the method works separately. This article is about the business you build around it.

Reformer Pilates vs Lagree: who actually shows up

From outside, the two can look like the same class on similar equipment. The audiences aren't the same, and that gap is what should drive where you open and what you charge.

Reformer Pilates works for more people

A reformer is a flexible machine. The same piece of equipment can run a slow recovery class, a prenatal session, a mobility class for members in their sixties, and heavy muscular strength work, depending on how the instructor programs it and where the springs are set. That flexibility is a reformer studio's commercial advantage: one room, one machine type, and a schedule that can serve very different people across the week.

So the reformer audience is broad by design. Some members come for stretch and recovery, some are working back from injury, and plenty come for hard strength training. A lot of them book because a physio or a friend told them to.

Who keeps coming back to Lagree

Lagree narrows that range. The method is built to hold muscles under load with almost no rest between moves, and the machine is designed around that, so there's far less room to program the gentle end of the spectrum on it. Sebastien Lagree draws the line himself: "People see a reformer and assume it's Pilates. But how you use the equipment is everything."

That cuts both ways. You give up the members who wanted stretch and recovery, and in exchange you get a much clearer offer for the people who want intensity. The ones who stay tend to already train, read effort as value, and pay a premium for a short, hard class.

That's a narrower audience than a reformer studio's, and it's a more valuable one per head. It also means your marketing has one job: find the people who want to be worked hard, and be honest with everyone else.

Why the overlap is smaller than owners assume

A reformer studio down the road with a waiting list isn't proof of demand for Lagree. That list includes people who are there for recovery, rehab and mobility, and they have no reason to move to a format built around maximum time under tension. Some members will cross over. Build the forecast on the ones who want intensity.

Positioning: client type, cost and staffing together

Once you know who you're opening for, cost decides whether that plan is viable in the location you have in mind.

What your machine choice commits you to

Cost per station is the number that shapes everything downstream. Lagree's own equipment guidance gives the shape of it. Ten Mega Pro machines fit in 1,000 sq ft at roughly $10,000 a unit, so around $100,000 of equipment for 10 spots. In the same 1,000 sq ft you could fit 20 Micro machines at $600 to $2,000 each, so $12,000 to $40,000 for 20 spots.

That gap runs through the whole business. A 10-spot Mega room has to charge more per head to cover the same rent, which means a catchment with the income to support it and a brand that reads premium. A 20-spot Micro room can charge less, fill more spots per class, and work in a wider range of locations.

Reading the catchment

What to look at before you sign a lease:

• What nearby boutique studios charge, which tells you the price tolerance better than any demographic report
• Whether there's already a strength, HIIT or run-club cluster, since that's where your members already are
• Daytime and evening population, because a capped-capacity room needs both lunchtime and after-work classes to fill
• How dominant ClassPass is locally, which changes what your intro pricing has to do
• Walkability and parking, which decide whether a 45-minute class is a realistic weekday habit

Whatever you find, pick a lane and say it out loud. Efficiency for people with 45 minutes at lunch, community for a neighborhood that walks in, or Lagree as one part of a wider offer under the same roof. All of those work. What doesn't work is opening without deciding, then trying to write the marketing afterwards.

Two models that hold up

Premium and low-capacity. Mega Pro or Evo Pro, around 10 spots in 1,000 sq ft, higher price per class, dense and affluent catchment, positioning built partly on the machine itself.

Accessible and higher-capacity. Micro or Mini, 13 to 20 spots in the same 1,000 sq ft, lower price per class, wider catchment, positioning built on results and frequency.

Studios get stuck in the middle: premium equipment costs paired with mid-market pricing. If the machines cost $100,000, the pricing has to say so.

Choosing your Lagree machines: Mega, EVO, Mini and Micro

Lagree sells six machines across three size classes, and the class you pick sets both your capacity and your license fee.

All figures come from Lagree's published equipment guidance and licensing page, in US dollars.

Mixing machine types in one studio

Running Micros alongside Mega Pros is a real option, and a good one if you want a small-group or beginner room, a prenatal format, or a space for teacher training. Since licenses are priced by machine category, a mixed studio means holding more than one license, so confirm the combination and the fee with Lagree before you order.

Compact machines also make satellite sites and pop-ups workable. A Micro room in a co-working building or a hotel gym is a much smaller commitment than a second full studio.

Space and layout

The 100 sq ft per Mega Pro figure covers the machine plus the room to move around it. Add reception, changing, storage and retail, and the unit you need is meaningfully bigger than the class floor. Grip socks are standard in Lagree studios, so plan to stock and sell them rather than turn people away at the door.

Your instructor pool decides your schedule

You can have machines in eight weeks. Building a certified team takes longer, and in most cities it's the thing that sets how many classes you can actually run.

The wider picture

Instructor numbers are growing. New instructors entering Pilates are up 15% since 2015, and 94% say they're satisfied in the job, according to a Balanced Body survey of 800 instructors reported by Athletech News in January 2025. Demand is growing faster: at the time, 77% of studios were expanding, nearly 40% of owners said they needed more instructors, and 30% were actively hiring. Those figures are the most recent industry-wide read available, so treat them as direction rather than today's number.

Why Lagree is tighter than reformer Pilates

A Pilates qualification doesn't transfer. Lagree runs its own certification and doesn't publish how many trainers hold it, so you can't check local supply the way you can for Pilates. If no Lagree studio has opened near you, assume the local pool is zero and plan accordingly.

What certification costs

• Level 1, $2,900 per person. Certifies someone to teach the method. Lagree recommends a minimum of 100 hours, and courses run from two to six days or longer, in person at their headquarters, with a master trainer, at a licensed studio, or virtually.
• Level 2, $290 per course. Advanced modules covering form, teaching efficiency, sequencing and cueing. Requires Level 1.
• Level 3, $4,900. In person at headquarters over two six-hour sessions, and it lets the holder certify others.
• Specialty courses, $99 each. Prenatal and postnatal, 25-minute formats, large-group instruction.

Five instructors at Level 1 is $14,500 before anyone teaches a class. Put it in the launch budget, not the training budget.

Ways to staff a first studio

• Recruit certified trainers from a city that already has Lagree, and budget for relocation or a higher rate
• Certify your own team, and accept that they'll be new to the method on opening day
• Put a Level 3 holder on payroll so you can certify in house as you grow
• Open with a smaller schedule than you want, and add classes as people qualify

Lagree is physical to teach as well as to take, so plan on a lighter daily load per instructor than you would for a mat class. A schedule you can always staff beats a schedule you have to cancel from, especially in your first three months when every cancelled class is someone's first impression.

Licensing and territory

Lagree licenses its name and equipment rather than franchising. You pay a flat annual fee and keep control of your brand.

• No royalties and no revenue share. You decide how to brand, market and position the studio while operating under the Lagree name.
• Three tiers, priced by machine category. Micro at $990 a year, Mini at $1,990, Mega and EVO at $3,990. Each tier covers as many machines of that category as you want.
• One license per studio. A second location needs its own.
• Training isn't included in any tier.
• Territory runs on zip code availability, so the first step is checking whether your area is open.
• Four to six weeks is what Lagree quotes for the process today, and they've said an upcoming portal will cut that down.

These are Lagree's published US figures in dollars. Confirm current pricing and territory rules for your market with Lagree directly before you build them into a plan.

Capacity, pricing and the math per class

Your spot count is fixed by the machines, which gives pricing and cancellation policy more weight than they'd have in a room full of mats.

Take a full-size room with 10 machines. One empty spot is 10% of that class's revenue, gone, with nothing you can do about it once the class starts. Two no-shows is a fifth of the class. In a mat studio you'd absorb that. Here you can't, and it happens every week unless you have rules that stop it.

So the details earn their keep:

• An intro offer designed to convert into a membership rather than churn after one visit
• A waitlist that fills a cancelled spot automatically, not when you next check your phone
• Late-cancel and no-show fees that members accept because you were clear about them from the start
• Class packs priced to encourage a second and third visit rather than a single drop-in

What to do with first-timers

Most cities haven't seen Lagree yet, so a good share of your first-timers will arrive expecting Pilates and get something considerably harder. The method is built around continuous tension, and the soreness that follows a first class usually lands a day or two later. Some people love that. Others feel ambushed, and a few of them write about it.

This is a marketing problem before it's a customer service problem.

Say it's hard before they book

Put the intensity in the class description, on the booking page, and in your ClassPass listing if you use one. Plain wording works: high intensity, low impact, and harder than it looks. If you've done Pilates, expect a different kind of effort. Naming it attracts the people looking for exactly that, and warns off the people who aren't. Both of those outcomes are good for you.

Build an intro offer that filters

A single drop-in is the worst possible introduction to Lagree, because one class is where the method feels hardest and least rewarding. It pays off with repetition. A three-class intro pack with a month or two to use it gives someone room to recover between visits and feel the difference by the second and third class, instead of forcing three hard sessions into a fortnight.

Label beginner-friendly slots on the schedule too, so newcomers can pick a class taught at a pace they can follow instead of landing in your toughest 7am.

Handle the first class properly

Ask about injuries at booking rather than at the door. Set an arrive-early rule and hold to it. Sell grip socks instead of just requiring them. Have the instructor set springs with the member, so they learn the machine instead of being placed on it. And use new members' names out loud in class, which does more for retention than any follow-up email.

Protect your reviews

The soreness lands a day or two later, and that's when someone decides how they feel about your studio. Send a short message the morning after: what they should expect to feel, why it happens, and which class to book next. Then ask for the review after the second visit rather than the first.

Filling the schedule before you open

Start selling before the doors open. Pre-launch signups give you a list to fill your first week with, and a founding-member offer gives early members a reason to commit before they've tried the class.

A few things matter more for Lagree than for a format people already know:

• Show the machine. Most people won't book something they can't picture, so real class footage does more than a styled interior shot
• Get the word Lagree into your Google Business Profile, your site title and your class names, since people searching for it are already sold on it
• Run a soft-launch week for local trainers, physios and boutique regulars, who become the people recommending you

If you're earlier in the process, our opening a studio page covers the wider launch sequence.

Keeping it running once you're open

Day to day, running a Lagree studio is the work of keeping a small number of spots full and a small team covered. Both get harder as the schedule grows.

What that looks like in practice:

• A waitlist that promotes automatically when someone cancels, so a 10-spot class doesn't quietly run at 8
• Late-cancel and no-show rules applied the same way every time, without you chasing anyone
• First-timer follow-ups triggered by attendance, so the soreness message and the rebooking prompt go out whether or not you remember
• Attendance and revenue per class and per instructor, so you can see which slots hold and which ones to move
• Payroll worked out from real class data, which matters when instructors teach variable loads across the week