All three open in the same unit, with the same fit out and the same customer walking in. And yet they do not hold up the same way. The difference is not which format is fashionable. It is what each place costs you, how many people fit in a class, and who teaches it.
A reformer machine does not have a price. It has a range, and it is enormous. In the public catalogues of Spanish distributors, the Quirumed aluminium reformer sells at €1,144.80. The Balanced Body Studio Reformer, which is the standard kit in a Club Pilates style boutique, sells at €6,820.77 at GymCompany.
That is a six fold difference, and neither one is a bad purchase: it depends on who you want to charge €30 a class. The problem shows up when the business plan is built on the €3,500 per machine figure that circulates online and the owner then buys the industry standard. In a ten place studio that is a €33,000 gap in the numbers of someone who has just signed an eight year lease.
Barre and yoga do not have this problem. Their equipment fits into a few thousand euros for the whole room. The entire investment gap between the three formats sits in the machines, not in the fit out and not in the lease.
Here is a figure you will not find anywhere, because there is no census of barre studios in Spain. We counted it ourselves, website by website.
The largest barre operator we identified in the country has five studios and does not franchise. It is Casa Barré, with four in Madrid and one in Barcelona. Behind it come SHE Barre with three, and Arde Barre and Club Barre with two each. Club Barre is the only one that has opened a franchise, and it did so in December 2025. Below them sits a long tail of single site studios.
On the reformer side, Club Pilates runs 34 studios across eight cities as of June 2026, having closed 2025 with 26 and €10M in actual revenue, and guiding for more than 40 by the end of this year.
The consequence is direct, and almost nobody says it out loud: open barre and you compete against neighbours; open reformer and you compete against a chain with capital and national marketing. Those are not the same thing, and you do not defend against them the same way.
Xponential Fitness is the parent of Club Pilates and of Pure Barre. It sets the expansion pace for this format worldwide, and it is the company bringing the reformer to Spain. Its 2025 year end figures are public because it is listed, so nobody has to take anyone’s word for it: North American comparable sales went from +7% to +0.5%.
And the 2026 guidance is worse than the year that just closed: 20% fewer net openings and 16% lower revenue at the midpoint. Existing studios no longer growing means one thing. The company itself guiding 20% fewer openings means they see less room too.
Spain runs behind the United States. This is what the end of the cycle looks like, not the beginning.
It is not which of the three formats is trending. It is whether you are going to teach the classes yourself.
The investment is paid once. Payroll is paid every month, and in a studio running around 130 classes a month the cost of the instructors matches or exceeds every fixed cost combined: rent, utilities, insurance, accountancy and booking software. Going from teaching them yourself to hiring someone moves the break even point far more than choosing one format over another.
The report works out both scenarios for all three formats, with the assumptions stated on the table: how many members you need if you teach, how many if you hire, and how much fuller you have to be in each case. It is the single most important figure in the study, and it is inside.
The full report, with both scenarios worked out, real pricing for the three formats and the comparison table, lands in your inbox as a PDF, instantly after purchase.