We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dale Stabler Elizabeth Endres a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Dale Stabler, appreciate you joining us today. Has Covid resulted in any major changes to your business model?
Prior to the pandemic, our main focus was visiting and reviewing fitness studios in New York City. When the pandemic hit and all businesses shut down, we had to pivot in order to suit the needs of our audience. So, we decided to take things virtually. We created an excel spreadsheet that we blasted out and had instructors input their weekly schedule of virtual workouts. Hundreds of instructors and studios listed their live workouts that were happening over IG live and zoom. We released this schedule daily to our audience to help them discover workouts and instructors.
Eventually, we created our own platform, called ORRO, which was modeled after our live schedule. Instead, instructors would teach live classes on our platform and we’d save them on an on-demand library. ORRO consists of hundreds of amazing instructors, workouts and methods that are curated by both of us. We have a weekly schedule that our members can follow, or they can choose from our on demand library of over 500+ workouts. Everything from low impact sculpt, pilates, yoga and HIIT.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Sweats & The City was created out of shared need. We were roommates at the time. and really into exploring the booming boutique fitness scene in NYC. When we got home from work at the end of each day, we’d talk about the classes we had tried. We were both seeking out an unbiased review platform that would give us honest insights into all these classes. We were in search of details such as how sweaty you get, if they had showers / blow dryers, who the best instructors were, and so on. Because at the time this didn’t exist, we decided to start writing reviews of our own and sending them out to our friends. Eventually this led to us putting them on a blog, and Sweats & The City was born!
ORRO is a virtual fitness + self care app that we created as a product of the pandemic. At the time, we were running around NYC, reviewing studios as our business’s bread and butter, and once the pandemic hit (like most of the world) we started exploring our virtual options for work. We noticed a trend in virtual fitness: there were so many incredible instructors who had started their own methods + platforms, many of which had lost their studio jobs and wanted to continue teaching. Since we had spent years already cultivating our community, our thought was to give them a platform to share their amazing workouts and reach a wider audience.We also knew there were so many platforms already in existence, and consumers didn’t want to subscribe to a bunch, they wanted a curated, one stop shop. On top of that, people wanted a curated schedule so they could take out a lot of the decision making around their workouts and self care. With years experience reviewing classes and seeking out the best studios and instructors, we put our heads together and created a platform & app to encompass all of the above.
Does your business have multiple or supplementary revenue streams (like a ATM machine at a barbershop, etc)?
Our revenue streams come from our brand partnerships, our fitness app, hosted events and our Like To Know It page.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
We were randomly set up as roommates in 2016 through a mutual friend. He actually saw Elizabeth’s Facebook post that she was in search of a roommate and heard Dale was as well. We had one Facetime call and we were sold! It has really come full circle, because now we have a Facebook group for those in search of NYC apartments and roommates, that currently has over 50k members!
Contact Info:
- Website: orroapp.com
- Instagram: instagram.com/sweatsandcity
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/537122250305025
- Other: sweatsandcity.com
Image Credits
Lindy Lin Photography