INSIGHTS / News

SETsquared Bath alumni MoveGB has generated more than £1m for fitness, yoga and dance instructors across the country since launching its lockdown-inspired Move At Home service.

MoveGB pivoted its business to help reduce the economic impact the coronavirus would have on its partners. By quickly adapting its subscription-based fitness platform to run completely online with the launch of its Move At Home Service they have generated more than £1m for fitness, yoga and dance instructors across the UK.

In less than one month more than 40,000 classes have been streamed via the service and this continues to grow daily.  Since the nation went into lockdown there has been an explosion of live-streamed fitness classes, however, very few offer any financial support to your local aerobics, yoga or dance tutor. Whereas Move At Home enables fitness businesses to stream their classes to MoveGB’s vast membership base of 250,000 users helping them to maintain their income.

Lucy Stone, founder of award-winning yoga studio The Hive in Bath, said: “Since the lockdown and converting to streaming our classes online through MoveGB, we have seen an increase of people attending classes by almost 300%. We have had to double the number of classes available on the timetable from 23 to 45 to meet the growing demand and now are streaming classes to people from all over the world.”

MoveGB CEO and founder Alister Rollins added: “In the face of an unprecedented crisis, we knew we have to change things up quickly to help support our members and partners. For our members, this meant keeping them moving while at home. For our fitness partners, this meant ensuring they could maintain their livelihoods.”

Alister continues by saying: “MoveGB was created to be a community-led business that would connect providers with users to encourage people to stay active for life. With Move At Home we have been able to uphold that principle and prevent this pandemic from having a significant impact on our partners’ businesses.”

More than 73% of users are attending classes by instructors in their own city, choosing to support the local, independent businesses on their doorstep. To further protect the many independent small fitness businesses in the UK, MoveGB has also launched an Activity Provider Support Fund which will provide income to providers, even when classes are not running.

Free to existing members, Move At Home offers live-streamed classes from MoveGB independent instructors and on-demand workouts from the world’s top trainers. Existing MoveGB members will have access to these features as part of their membership at no extra cost. Move At Home is also available to new members from £1 per week, offering on-demand workouts as well as pay-as-you-go live-streamed classes (many instructors are offering free taster sessions). And they will be  supporting NHS staff by offering them Move At Home for free.