We were lucky to catch up with Carissa Chappell recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Carissa , thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.
5 years ago I took over my gym when it was a fitness boxing franchise that was struggling and about to shut down. During the Covid shut down I started realizing that the way we were being encouraged to sell “health” wasn’t sitting well with me. Then I started taking some courses that really opened my eyes to how toxic gym culture and diet culture really are- and how much of these things we had been doing just out of habit and because we “always had,” and we were calling it health. But truly it was damaging to people and their mental health. I stated reeling that a lot of my mindset around food and exercise was disordered and I made a vow to change it. I also decided during that time to break away from my franchise so that I could run my gym the way I wanted to and make sure that the verbiage, the programming, my staff, everything was in line with the new vision and mission I had in mind. Last September we officially became Rebel Fitness, and the name is indicative of who we are- we rebwl against diet culture and social norms for health. We are diverse, authentic and we are all about empowering our members with the truth about health. We don’t sell gimmicks, fads, lies or toxicity. We don’t offer weight loss at Rebel, but instead offer metabolically responsible fat loss and body recomposition. This helps people hit goals the right way while taking care of their metabolism and building real health at a foundational level. We don’t workout to earn food, we are courageous enough to break family cycles, and step out of diet culture and we workout because we love our body, not because we hate it! We pride ourselves on helping our members redefine health, and for being a safe place for people to experience fitness and health no matter where they are in their journey! I was told by other gym owners when we announced we would not be selling “weight loss” anymore that I was committing business suicide, because that’s the the gym industry is taught to do- make you hate yourself enough to come workout and keep you on the weight loss roller coaster forever… but here we are a year later- still helping people ditch diet culture, uncover the bad ass they are and giving them a space to fall in love with health for all the right reasons 💪🏽💜
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Rebel fitness is a gym that offers: Group classes: boxing, strength training, bootcamp, and mobility.
Private training: one on one session with personal trainer
Semi private training: small group training sessions with trainer
Jiu Jitsu: we partner with Greenville Jiu Jitsu to offer these classes in the gym
Recovery: infrared sauna classes like spin, yoga, mindfulness, core, strength, shadow boxing, etc.
and we also offer infrared sauna pod sessions as well!
The thing I’m most proud of is our ability to commit to going against the grain of typical gym culture, and staying with it without question. We are absolutely the minority, and some days it’s really hard. What we do is based on education, truth and consistency over time- and that’s not always as sexy as lies, fads and fast results..
My background is in mental health. I worked in the field for 15 years and then took the gym over. I was always very interested in the mind/body connection, so a lot of what we do at Rebel is mindset work. True change starts there, and helping people undo and unpack years of disordered health patterns takes work beyond group classes.
I like to think we solve so many problems that people come to us with… the main one is learning how your body actually works and learning to respect your body. Again, with our world being so heavily steeped in diet culture, we are taught at a young age to ignore basic cues our body gives us- like hunger. Cure that keep us not only alive, but keep our bodies functioning at 100%. And we are taught that things like juice cleanses “boost” our metabolism, when that couldn’t be further from the truth! Most people don’t even know what their metabolism is, and definitely don’t realize that most of what they are doing is hurting it.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Covid was absolutely a pivot for us. When Covid hit we had a 53 heavy bag stand in our gym and that was it. It took up the whole space. So when we were shut down for months we couldn’t do anything at all to bring in income, and we were really close to shutting the doors by the fall of 2020. I vowed that if we made it through I would make sure we had more streams of revenue so if anything like that ever happened again we’d have other options. So we cut our bag stand in half, and turned the rest of the gym into private training space. We had one client for PT coming out of Covid, and now we have so many that PT brings in almost half of our income on a monthly basis! We also added supplements, more robust retail offers, events… but training is what we’re becoming known for! It was a scary year, but I learned so much.
What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?
Word of mouth has always been our best source of referrals and new clients. We always want to do such an amazing job that people want to talk about us and encourage their people to come in too. Events are our second most effective growth strategy. We make our events fun and different so we get lots of interest during those for people to come back and try another class or to join!
We also put on major events to raise money for local entities. Our most recent event raised $6100.00 for our local homeless shelter! We take community very seriously at Rebel and we understand that service is payment for our time here on earth!
Contact Info:
- Website: Www.rebelfitnessnc.com
- Instagram: Rebelfitnessnc
- Facebook: Rebelfitness
- Yelp: Rebel Fitness
Image Credits
Breaking Dawn Photography