This video is an interview with Harvey Spevak, Executive Chairman of the fitness brand Equinox (originally from the "No Free Lunch" podcast).
00:00Opening — "You should never ask people what they want"
- Opens with Harvey's core philosophy: you should never ask consumers what they want. Most people don't know what they want.
- The analogy: ask "what color should I paint that wall?" and they can't answer — and what you do get back is only safe and boring.
- Equinox has always been about anticipating the needs of the consumer and the community ahead of time (the hotel being the flagship example). A brand should speak to belonging and community meaning, and provide inspiration and motivation.
00:54From the Bronx to the sneaker business — background
- Born in the Bronx, raised in Rockland County, undergrad + MBA at Michigan. He always planned to come back to New York.
- Worked in a neighborhood sneaker store in high school (Sports Shed, a Foot Locker type) and became a sneakerhead (collected Superstars, Puma Clydes, all of it).
- Two years on Wall Street after graduating was a bad fit. He restarted the sneaker business with his childhood best friend — the first 'Manhattan Sports' store near Columbia (next to Tom's Diner of Seinfeld fame) worked, and they expanded into sporting goods.
- His father was unhappy — "you got an MBA to sell socks and sweats?" — but it worked out.
02:48Favorite sneakers & the Nike story
- Favorite is the Air Max 95. He also likes Dunks and the new Adizero — a "Nike guy." His closet is split in two: luxury on one side, Nike and Adidas on the other.
- An early story: on the day the first small Jordan allocation arrived (18 pairs) it sold out immediately, but they had no cash and would pay Nike late and get in trouble for it. Still a die-hard Nike guy.
03:58Career philosophy — "I followed excitement, not a roadmap"
- He has never built a career roadmap of the "in X years I'll have Y title" kind. The only test is "am I excited about what I'm doing right now."
- He credits his father with a strong work ethic and grit — when you're excited you work hard, and good outcomes follow.
04:48Leaving retail for Chelsea Piers — an introduction made by dog-walking
- He got out because "retail is a hard business." He came to know his neighbor Roland Betts because both of them had aggressive dogs (Harvey's bull terrier Brownie only got along with the neighbor's bulldog).
- Roland co-owned the Texas Rangers with George W. Bush and was building a sports complex on Manhattan's west side — what became Chelsea Piers.
- He pitched an idea while walking the dogs → "what do I have to lose," and they took a meeting. Roland asked "when can you start?" and his partner Tom said "we have no money" — the two argued right in front of him. That's how he joined the Chelsea Piers development (about five years).
06:34Joining Equinox — when it was four clubs (1998)
- He knew the founders from his shoe and equipment store days and as a Rollerblade dealer, and joined in late 1998.
- The gap they filled: at founding (1991, Upper West Side) they combined Jane Fonda–style aerobics (classes) with a cross-training facility (the Nike / Bo Jackson era) — delivered in an attractive, well-designed, service-oriented, clean environment.
- Harvey extended that into today's global luxury lifestyle brand.
08:06Three pillars — real estate, brand, experience (not M&A)
- Real estate and brand matter more than M&A, and everything starts with the consumer. He repeats the philosophy: anticipate the need.
- Equinox defines itself as a "category of one" — outside the industry.
- They opened location 116 yesterday (Chicago West Loop / Fulton Market), with Toronto King West coming in summer. They took the first two floors of a new low-rise building and designed it for the neighborhood (not cookie-cutter), opening with twice the members they projected.
- Real estate is mostly greenfield (they build it themselves) — so they don't inherit someone else's problems.
10:59The science and the art of real estate — data vs. instinct
- They have a real-estate team (Jeff Weinhaus and others) and a vertically integrated construction and design team. The business, in his framing: "maximize human potential and support health. For profit, but a good thing."
- The science: demographic and psychographic data mapped nationally determines where they go next. A pipeline of 50 new sites, 8–10 openings a year, targeting more than doubling the portfolio.
- The art: going in first when there is no data — Hudson Yards, where at the time there were only trains, no people, no offices, no residential. It was the largest dollar commitment in the company's history, a pure gut bet. His partners Stephen Ross and Jeff Blau (Related) actually had to talk him into it.
- Getting in early buys favorable lease terms (especially in New York). Which side of the street you're on and who you're next to is decisive in urban markets. "We've made mistakes, but very few."
15:12'The club of the future' — evolving the space with consumer trends
- The new Chicago club: a bigger lounge (five-star), a bigger weight zone (centered on racks, free weights and open space, with fewer machines), less cardio, and elevated locker rooms.
- West Fulton was done with Robert Stern Land, an AD Top 100 designer — "nobody in our industry does collaborations like this," another example of category of one. Designers don't want to do gyms, but they'll work with Equinox because it's luxury.
- On opening day they hold a pep rally — trainers and group fitness stars on stage firing up the staff. The staff is the heart of the brand, and the "magic" happens when they're doing well.
17:47Investment and cost discipline — "every decision runs through a return analysis"
- No specific numbers, just the principle: they are highly disciplined about spend per location, and everything must clear a return analysis hurdle.
- Brand power means landlords want Equinox as an amenity anchor → favorable terms.
- Harvey himself is still personally involved in every club's layout and design (design meetings more than once a week). A standing 'club of the future' project runs alongside, designing for the future rather than for yesterday.
20:01Where the future club is headed (only a hint)
- More elevated finishes and touchpoints, and expanded programming centered on wellness and longevity rather than just fitness.
- A push-and-pull between Harvey (pushing for elevation) and the team (budget constraints). The Nashville case (opening in fall) — they took more space because it was short (it cost more, but the long-term experience won), though that doesn't happen every time.
21:24The ideal member — "the high performance lifestyle" (MNRC)
- Brand positioning: "living a high performance lifestyle." All of it is science-based.
- Their own acronym, MNRC: Movement, Nutrition — Harvey prefers "Nourishment" (Gary Brecka: "it doesn't matter what diet you're on, just don't eat processed food") — Recovery (sleep above all), Community (increasingly important).
- Longevity experts like Huberman and Brecka align with this same frame, he says.
23:07The wearable-data debate — "it's only a barometer"
- Sleep data from Apple Watch, Whoop, Oura (a partner) has produced backlash — data saying "you slept badly" ruins the whole day.
- The host: these devices are a barometer, not an absolute standard. A DEXA scan should be read the same way — as a measurement marker where the trend (20 → 19 → 18, and something's wrong if it climbs back) matters more than the absolute number (20%).
- Harvey agrees, but flags the psychological backfire of this new data: "when you see data telling you that you slept badly, you fall into self-loathing and actually ruin the day."
- Their target member: people who want a high performance lifestyle and push their limits toward a goal — someone getting fit, someone recovering from injury, women pre- and post-partum — a like-minded community of people with goals.
25:42The relationship with pro sports — hard during the season
- Teams want control over the training of athletes they've invested enormous money in (football is the most extreme, and now it's every sport). So they're not a fit for active players in-season, but welcome in the off-season and after retirement (Lindsey Vonn before her injury).
- No plan to get deeply entangled with pro sports — not because they don't want it, but because of how the teams operate. On the host's Time Warner–era recollection, he says expanding into longevity is obviously something they want. The only person who ever pulled this off in-season was Tom Brady — "the GOAT earns privileges."
28:43Pop culture × fitness — "you need a point of view"
- Being at the center of the culture matters. Most of it fans create on their own, but sometimes they provoke it directly (including taking positions that draw controversy).
- The core brand thesis: a strong brand has to have a point of view. He respects brands that stay neutral ("Switzerland") the way Walmart does, but emotional connection comes from the side with a sharp point of view.
- Equinox showed up in a Kanye single (Steve Stoute tipped him off), in the Kennedy drama, with Chris Rock, in an Arnold film — mostly organic. A provoked example: his friend J Balvin ran a "put your phone away for a day" campaign on Mental Health Day → it went viral. "An ordinary brand can't get J Balvin."
31:51Digital expansion & COVID — "we are a physical experience"
- COVID shut down hundreds of locations and 15,000–16,000 employees overnight (no pivot available), and Peloton rose in that window. CNBC and others kept asking "will they come back?" and all he could say was "of course."
- They launched their own digital product, but the essence is the physical experience (IRL and community are the point) → they bounced back hard, and it will stay 98% physical.
- How they use AI: ① efficiency — cutting months off the lead time from finding a site to opening (design, documentation, lease negotiation — "the lawyers are in trouble"). ② experience — AI agents answering inquiries at 3am, applied to the hotel as well. ③ personalization — serving each member's app-based digital journey to them individually (on the roadmap, about to accelerate).
36:04The biggest win
- "I'm proud of my 116 children (= locations)." Getting through COVID is what he's proudest of — most companies cut variable staff immediately, but Equinox kept paying employees for a long time. Everyone thought they were dead; last year was a record and this year will be bigger.
- Viral campaigns: this year's "AI slop" campaign got attention, and Equinox Optimize ($40,000/year) memberships exploded two years running.
37:55Where the hotel came from — "they'd stay in a run-down hotel and still come find Equinox"
- At first it was ego and fun. The decisive observation: members treat Equinox as an essential routine, so on business trips they'd stay at a bad hotel just to get their 'Equinox fix.'
- Several hotel brands asked them to "redesign the rooms" → they said no ("that isn't Equinox"). That obsession with the brand is why the equity exists today. A member survey found about 98% would stay at an Equinox hotel → they went ahead.
39:45"What is an Equinox hotel" — science and instinct
- To the skeptics ("so you're putting rooms on top of a gym?"), the answer was "more refined than that." The ethos: "for people who want it all" — activity, a great meal, the best sleep, and community in one place. (The community is already there organically.)
- Advice from Ian Schrager, the OG of lifestyle hotels: "Stop asking everybody else and go with your gut." — exactly how the brand was built. Even so, they hired Chris Norton out of Four Seasons as hotel CEO for balance.
- The result: a third-party top 50 hotels in the world listing — in the US, only Equinox and Aman New York.
41:44Hotel product details — the 'sleep chamber' room
- A Stephen Starr restaurant (Electric Lemon). The rooms are 'sleep chambers' — dark, quiet, cold, with full blackout at the touch of a button. Oversized showers, by New York standards.
- The guest mix: Fortune 100 executives, Lenny Kravitz, Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Hart ("they only stay with us") — not for a deal, but for the experience, privacy and convenience.
43:34The next hotel & the challenge of long lead times
- He respects Aman but says it's a different experience, so not really a competitor. Everything is ground-up development, so lead times are long — he keeps challenging the team to "think ten years out."
- Next hotel: the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia — late spring to early summer, designed by Norman Foster, on the marina (next to Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, Nammos). It's a resort format, different from the urban ones, and they'll push further on things like the spa.
45:03What breaking through cost ① 9/11
- The Wall Street club (across from the NYSE) was near the epicenter. The general manager Denise Jonsic (still with the company) opened the club as a refuge amid the debris. With communications down, she kept a landline open so people could connect.
- They reopened every New York location immediately — after a debate over whether it was appropriate, they recognized the clubs were a sanctuary for the community and opened. Even for someone you've never said hello to, seeing that person still on the treadmill next to you was a comfort.
46:58The cost ② the Great Recession — KES locker-room amenities
- They had big contracts with Bear Stearns and Lehman → both went under. The leadership lesson: being a calming force gives the team clarity.
- 2008 was destructive, 2009 was flat (heroically so), and then they grew fast. In the fall of 2009, in the middle of the downturn, they put luxury KES amenities in the locker rooms → members loved it and the business took off. Last week they announced a switch from Grown Alchemist to Lavo, to the same enthusiasm.
49:26The cost ③ COVID, the hardest of all
- Mostly hourly employees, and no pivot available. In that first Sunday board meeting, "we modeled four months" drew "four days, four weeks maybe?" from everyone — in reality it was nearly two years in LA, six months in New York.
- They burned hundreds of millions in cash "like flushing it down the toilet every day" — not investment, pure survival. "We paid a really big price." The host closes by inviting him to dinner at the Equinox Hotel.
📌 Bottom line
- Equinox is not a "gym" but a luxury lifestyle brand that anticipates consumer needs and holds a distinct point of view — what Harvey Spevak calls a "category of one."
- The growth engine is ① getting into real estate first (data as science + instinct as art, with Hudson Yards as the emblem) ② obsession with design and experience (locally tailored, top-designer collaborations, the club of the future) ③ community and staff (the heart of the brand, the pep rally) ④ the science-based MNRC frame (movement, nourishment, recovery, community).
- The brand's power comes from organic intersections with pop culture (Kanye, J Balvin, film) and from the conviction that a brand must have a point of view — which they extended into the hotel (sleep chambers, top 50 in the world).
- Decisively, the interview's central message is that betting harder on members and staff during every crisis — 9/11, the Great Recession, COVID — by keeping payroll going and upgrading amenities in a downturn is what built the brand equity they have today.