“All our cult.fit trainers are influencers in their own right.."

While most of us are well-versed with ways to skip our workout every single morning, health-tech startup, CureFit has got hacks to help you kick the morning blues out of your life!

Well, at least the brand claims so! Introducing FitCash is clearly one such step in that direction.

Launched in 2016 in Bengaluru as a gym and fitness offering called cult.fit, CureFit's service offerings also include food-delivery platform — eat.fit, healthcare clinics called care.fit and an online mental wellness platform called mind.fit.

In a candid chat with afaqs!, Naresh Krishnaswamy, growth and business at cure.fit admits that the brand's TG is not just millennials.

“Our target users are between the age group of 20-40 years; for eat.fit, it is between 20-45 years. For mind.fit and care.fit, we have slightly older TG, above 40 years as well,” he says.

A recent commercial introducing FitCash, a health currency you earn every time you engage on the cure.fit app is just another engagement model (1 fit cash=1 INR and can be utilised to purchase anything on the app).

“By introducing FitCash, we want to motivate people to take up more healthy activities. Most health players have a challenge of maintaining consistency with its members. With FitCash, we hope to encourage members to be consistent and motivate them to get healthier,” he points out.

Krishnaswamy continues, “We aim to be a one-stop destination for all health requirements. The idea is to make health ‘easy for all’ with end-to-end solutions such as fitness, food, and meditation.”

The brand aspires to be omni-channel. Citing an example of Dominos, Krishnaswamy informs that one can place an eat.fit order through their own website apart from Zomato and PhonePe. “On the eat.fit app, subscribers can register and have food delivered every day. However, that option is unavailable on Zomato. Rest of the features: quality, price, variety is the same across all platforms,” he explains.

The brand has a robust model of cooking, sourcing ingredients and maintaining hygiene. “We tightly monitor every aspect and use technology to ensure seamless functioning of the kitchen,” he says.

The cult wing, currently, has 200 centres across 11 cities (100 centres in Bangalore alone).

“Overall, cult drives 60 per cent of our total revenue with 40-45 per cent growth quarter-on-quarter. We plan to have 500 centres by the end of next year (opening of 30-40 centres per quarter). We have started selling membership in Kolkata and will open the centre early October,” he reveals.

Currently, eat.fit, has a presence in 7 cities and will be present in 15 cities by end of the year. The sub-brand draws 35 per cent share of the brand's total revenue and is growing at 55-60 per cent QoQ .

Cultsport, an off- shoot of the startup, which has recently been listed on Myntra and Flipkart, is growing at 200 per cent and is expanding rapidly. Carefit is 5 per cent of the share and is only present in Bangalore and growing at 100 per cent quarter-on-quarter.

Also Read: Cure.fit aims to make Indians holistically healthy

He informs further, “We are a digital-first company and channels of advertising we use are Facebook, YouTube and Google Ads. We have over 200 centres and these play an important role in advertising. We use TV once or twice a year with digital running throughout the year and radio is also utilised from time-to-time.”

The brand also ties up with influencers to increase direct engagement with consumers.

“Influencer’s engagement is an important strategy in brand positioning. We have plenty of influencers in-house and we leverage their presence across social media platforms. All our trainers, 2000 of them in total, are influencers in their own right and are active on social media. We also partner with external influencers, food influencers, etc.,” he states.

Krishnaswamy feels that although there's no direct competition for the brand as a whole, the individual businesses have competition in their respective segments. Given the increasing number of stand-alone salad shops and health cafes mushrooming across metro cities, are they feeling the heat already?

He elaborates, “For cult, any nearby gym is a competition. For us, 60 per cent of our users are first-time gym goers; for eat.fit, it's other food options. We are not only targeting health freaks, we want to engage with regular eaters.”

The brand takes consumer feedback quite seriously and offers feedback screens to the consumers every time they walk into a centre, “Feedback on format, trainer, centre locations, ambience are key to help us evolve. We introduced dance fitness routines recently solely on the basis of consumer feedback,” he signs off.