Mariana Tek City Tour Sydney: Connecting with the People Behind the Studios

Running a boutique fitness or wellness business means spending a lot of time thinking about other people’s experience.

How does someone feel when they walk through the door? What keeps them coming back? What are the details that make a studio feel different from anywhere else?

For our first Australian Mariana Tek City Tour, we wanted to turn some of that attention back towards the people creating those experiences every day.

So, last week, the Mariana Tek team headed to Sydney for a few days spent visiting studios, meeting operators and bringing a group of boutique fitness and wellness leaders together for an evening designed around connection and restoration.

Taking the Mariana Tek City Tour to Sydney

The Mariana Tek City Tour is our opportunity to get out from behind our screens and spend time with the people building boutique fitness and wellness businesses.

For us, that means seeing studios in action, meeting the people behind them and having the kinds of conversations that are much easier to have face-to-face.

Sydney was our first Australian stop, and rather than filling the visit with presentations or formal sessions, we wanted to spend our time experiencing the local studio community and creating an opportunity for operators to spend time together.

At the centre of the tour was Connect & Restore with Mariana Tek, an intimate evening in Alexandria that brought together a select group of studio owners and operators.

An evening to Connect & Restore

The evening began at Soak Bathhouse on Bourke Road, where guests joined us for a private wellness experience.

We started with a guided sound bath, giving everyone the chance to properly switch off before moving into Soak’s bathhouse circuit, with mineral pools, sauna, steam and cold therapy to enjoy at their own pace.

For people who spend so much of their working lives thinking about the experiences they create for others, there was something particularly fitting about putting them on the other side of that experience for an evening.

There was no presentation waiting afterwards and no business agenda to work through. The intention was simply to give everyone some space away from the day-to-day and an opportunity to meet other people who understand what goes into running a boutique fitness or wellness business.

And once everyone had swapped laptops and phones for robes, the conversations started pretty naturally.

From the bathhouse to the dinner table

After a couple of hours at Soak, we made the short walk around the corner to The Potter’s Corner at The Grounds of Alexandria, where a private three-course dinner was waiting.

By then, introductions had been made and conversations were already flowing, so dinner became a chance to keep them going.

Around the table were people behind different businesses and brands, each with their own approach to fitness and wellness, but with plenty of shared experiences when it came to building a business, looking after a team and creating an experience people want to return to.

There was no formal discussion topic and no Mariana Tek presentation. Instead, people talked about what they were working on, shared experiences and got to know other operators they might not otherwise have had the opportunity to meet.

That was exactly what we wanted the evening to be.

Out and about in Sydney’s studios

The City Tour wasn’t only about bringing everyone together for one night. While we were in Sydney, we also made time to get out into the city and visit some of the studios that make up its boutique fitness community.

Across the tour, we stopped by Studio Mouvoir, Peaches Pilates in Surry Hills, Mode Pilates in Mosman, PilatesBarre and KAAIAA, giving us the chance to see the spaces behind the brands and connect with people along the way.

At Flux Pilates, we took things a little further and joined the studio for a class.

It gave us the chance to experience Flux as its clients do, with Pickles and Lilac joining us for the class and making the most of Flux’s dog-friendly studio.

Getting into studios is an important part of the City Tour for us. There’s only so much you can understand about a business from a screen. Being in the space and seeing what the team has created gives us a much better feel for the brand and the experience they’re building for their clients.

Why getting out into the community matters

Mariana Tek was built specifically for boutique fitness, and we believe staying close to the people running these businesses matters.

Our team spends a lot of time talking with studio owners about software, operations and growth, but understanding their businesses also means getting out into studios, taking classes and listening to what’s happening on the ground.

It’s part of how we think about partnership. We want to understand what operators are building, what matters to their clients and where the industry is heading from the people experiencing it every day.

The City Tour creates more opportunities for those conversations, while also bringing operators together to make connections of their own.

Thank you, Sydney

To everyone who joined us for Connect & Restore, spent time with us while we were in Sydney or welcomed us into their studio, thank you.

Our first Australian Mariana Tek City Tour gave us exactly what we came for: the opportunity to spend time with the people behind some brilliant boutique fitness and wellness businesses and get to know the Sydney community a little better.

Want to join us next time?

If you’d like to attend a future Mariana Tek City Tour or have our team stop by your studio when we’re in your city, get in touch with the Mariana Tek Australia team. We’d love to meet you.