Interesting article out of Bloomberg Business by Kyle Chayka regarding the business of climbing gyms.
CEO of Brooklyn Boulders. Photo via Bloomberg Business
When Joe Lemay, a 38-year-old developer in Boston, decided to leave his corporate job to launch a startup, he opted against a permanent office. Instead, Lemay spends his days at Brooklyn Boulders (BKB) Somerville, a rock-climbing gym designed to double as a co-working haven for entrepreneurs. “I’ll be sitting there coding and get up from my chair, go over to a squat rack, and do 10 reps on the rack, then come back to my computer,” Lemay says. “You can always be in the mindset of being active and productive at the same time.”
Lemay’s startup, RocketBook, produces a line of digitally enabled notebooks. The venture might not have been possible without Lemay’s time on the wall: It was during an epiphany after a midday climb that Lemay realized his company’s technology would be better suited for smaller notebooks than big whiteboards. “Climbing forces you to be completely present in the moment when you’re hanging onto a wall, trying to make that next move without falling,” he says. “It gives your subconscious its own space to think about things. When you come back, you have different ideas, angles, and perspectives you couldn’t have before.”
Lemay is a model client for BKB, which is incorporating office areas, conference rooms, and even apartments into its national chain of gyms. “A lot of places are having live-work scenarios. They’re trying to do work-play, but they don’t deliver,” says co-founder Lance Pinn. “We deliver on work-play.”
BKB’s latest location, in the airy basement of a high-rise apartment building in Long Island City, N.Y., opens this month. It’s filled with 20,000 square feet of curvaceous blonde wood climbing walls, splashed with a rainbow’s worth of fiberglass holds. Between the walls are modular co-working spaces on raised platforms, pristine glass-walled conference rooms, saunas, a yoga studio, and a ballet barre. A cafe is in the works.
For a monthly fee of $115, BKB offers members a holistic “lifestyle-domicile,” Pinn says during a hardhat tour of the gym during its construction. The premise is to tap indoor rock-climbing’s popularity among those in the tech industry, a trend that puts physical fitness next to disruptive potential and laptops next to free weights. But it’s easy to see the gym more as a kind of millennial day care, at which members can drop themselves off and stay for days. “We want to make a facility that you don’t want to leave,” says Pinn, who looks more startup founder than climber in a plaid short-sleeve shirt, baggy jeans, and bright blue New Balances—a look he calls “outdoor business casual.”
For the full article, please visit the Bloomberg Business website.
