Most new fitness studios open to an empty room. The lease is signed, the reformers are installed, the instructors are hired — and on opening day a handful of curious walk-ins trickle through while the founder quietly does the maths on how many months of runway are left.
It doesn’t have to go that way. PIKE SIX, a new reformer pilates studio in Singapore, came to Jraft Creative before opening with a different plan: fill the studio before the doors open. Here’s exactly what we did — and what just the first 19 days returned, with the studio still to open and the campaign still running.
Opening into a crowded market
A new reformer studio opens in Singapore almost every month. ClassPass makes studio-hopping effortless, so people compare three to five studios before committing to any of them. And a brand-new studio starts with the hardest hand of all — no reviews, no word of mouth, no history a nervous first-timer can lean on.
The hardest class to fill is the one you haven’t taught yet. So PIKE SIX’s goal wasn’t a waitlist of maybes. It was a founding base of paying members, ready for day one.
The plan: one page, two ad channels
We kept it deliberately simple. One high-converting landing page built around a single action — claim a founding offer — and two ad channels driving to it:
- Meta (Facebook and Instagram) to create demand. Nobody searches for a studio that hasn’t opened, so we put PIKE SIX in front of the right people across its catchment.
- Google Search to capture the demand that already existed — people actively looking for reformer pilates in the area.
Every dollar pointed at one outcome: a founding sign-up. Not likes, not reach — sign-ups from people ready to pay.
What happened in the first 19 days
These numbers are from just the first 19 days of the presale — and the campaign is still running, with the studio yet to open. In that opening stretch alone, it produced:
- 269 registrations
- 89 paying founding members (of 100 founding places)
- 33% of registrations converted to paying members
- ~S$17 in ad cost per paying member
- 2.9× return on ad spend, from the founding pack alone
All of that in the first 19 days, before a single class was taught — and the presale is still going as the studio counts down to opening day. That 2.9× return counts only the one-time founding pack, so it’s the floor: every one of those members’ ongoing membership builds on it from there.
Why it’s working
The cost per lead was a fraction of the norm. On Meta, each lead came in at S$3.85 — against a S$13–33 average for boutique fitness in Singapore, three to nine times lower. Google ran higher at S$21.39 per lead, but that’s still well below its S$60–110 norm for this kind of search.
Each channel did the job it’s actually good at. Meta built demand where none existed yet; Google caught the high-intent searchers. Trying to make one channel do both is where most studio launches leak money.
The offer was worth acting on, and the scarcity was real. A hundred founding places, not an open-ended “sign up whenever.” When 89 were gone, the pressure to claim the rest was genuine, not manufactured.
The page was built to convert, not to look pretty. One action, no distractions, everything a wary first-timer needs to feel safe putting money down before the studio had opened.
We optimised toward paying members, not cheap sign-ups. Once real payment data came in, we fed it back to the platforms so they found more people who actually join — not just people who fill in a form.
What this means for your studio
The specifics were PIKE SIX’s — the catchment, the offer, the creative. But the shape applies to any pilates studio, gym, or fitness business opening in Singapore.
The lesson is simple: you don’t open to an empty room by accident, and you don’t fill one by accident either. A studio that markets before opening day starts with members, revenue, and the first handful of reviews that make the next hundred sign-ups far easier to win.
If you’re opening a studio
If you’ve got a launch coming — a new studio, a second outlet, a rebrand — the window to build a founding base is before you open, not after. We can put the same landing page and paid-ads playbook to work for you.
Book a free consultation and we’ll map what a presale could look like for your studio. No obligations.