Fitness is a Commodity

If you look at the fitness industry objectively, it spans a massive range. On one end, you have ten dollar memberships designed for access and scale. On the other end, you have high touch experiences that can cost hundreds of dollars per month. Somewhere in between sits everything else.

That spectrum exists for a reason. Different people want different things at different stages of life (or seasons of life as I always say). There is absolutely a place for every price point and every model, and many of them are well run, profitable businesses. But price alone doesn’t explain why some spaces feel interchangeable while others become part of someone’s life.

Why Fitness Became a Commodity

Fitness, at its core, is not difficult to replicate. Equipment can be sourced from the same manufacturers. Programming follows similar principles. Layouts, class schedules, and even branding trends often converge over time. As a result, most gyms compete on surface level differentiation. New machines. New classes. New promotions. Temporary advantages that eventually become table stakes (or a race to the bottom).

When that happens, fitness turns into a commodity. Choice becomes driven by convenience, price, and proximity. Loyalty becomes fragile, and switching costs remain low. That dynamic isn’t a failure of operators. It’s the natural outcome of competing primarily on features.

What Can’t Be Replicated

Culture works differently. It’s not something you install or roll out. It’s something that emerges from leadership, standards, and daily behavior over time. It can’t be bought.

Two gyms can have identical equipment and radically different experiences. One feels transactional. The other feels intentional. One feels like a place you pass through. The other feels like a place you belong. That difference doesn’t come from programming. It comes from how people are welcomed, how problems are handled, how consistency is enforced, and how expectations are set. Culture shows up in the small moments.

Why Culture Creates Real Differentiation

Culture raises switching costs in a way features never can. When people feel known, supported, and connected, leaving becomes less about finding a better deal and more about walking away from a community. That matters economically. Culture improves retention. Retention improves lifetime value. Lifetime value creates pricing power. Pricing power creates stability. Stability creates long term enterprise value.

This is where many health businesses struggle. Culture is harder to measure, harder to scale, and harder to control. It requires leadership presence, operational discipline, and consistency over time. But it’s also the only advantage that doesn’t erode when competitors copy what you do.

How This Shapes HUMN

HUMN is not being built to win on equipment or square footage. Those things matter, but they are not the strategy. The strategy is building an environment where people show up consistently because the space supports who they are becoming. That means setting standards early. Being intentional about who the space is for and who it is not for. Designing experiences that encourage participation, not anonymity.

It also means accepting tradeoffs. A culture driven business grows differently. It prioritizes depth over volume. Engagement over optics. Long term alignment over short term growth. Those choices are deliberate.

The Long View

There will always be a market for fitness as a commodity. Access matters, and not every experience needs to be high touch. Those models solve an important problem and serve millions of people.

HUMN is simply solving a different problem. It’s built for people who are not just looking for a place to work out, but a place that supports how they train, how they recover, how they work, and how they connect. That kind of environment only works if culture leads and everything else supports it.

Fitness can be bought anywhere where culture has to be built and once it’s built correctly… it becomes very hard to replace.