We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jonathan Wiens. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jonathan below.
Alright, Jonathan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear from you about what you think Corporate America gets wrong in your industry and why it matters.
Most everything we see and hear about the fitness industry is through the lens of Corporate America. From workout clothes, to equipment, to advertisements on how you can get ‘sculpted and toned’, all the way to the age-old diet/detox regimens. Given this, Corporate America controls a lot of how we perceive fitness and exercise; it tells us what time of year we should start working out, when we should feel good about our bodies, and it even gives labels and morality to different types of food. All this without giving helpful instruction on how to workout or the health benefits of getting stronger. We started Archway Fitness as a strength-based alternative to what we hear from Corporate America. Our mission is to build sustainable strength and care for one’s health. We also focus on creating a safe place for women. We know that gyms can be intimidating, but at Archway Fitness we are building a community where everyone feels welcome.
Jonathan, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I was into sports and did track and cross-country running, in high school. When I went to college, I stopped running, but I never stopped working out. When I graduated from college and was looking for what I wanted to do as a career I found that the most consistent thing in my life, was fitness. I did not expect that it could turn into a career, but I was offered a job by a fitness manager, I knew, and fell in love with training. Ever since I have dreamt of owning my own gym.
At Archway Fitness, we have a unique model called ‘semi-private training’. This is a combination of 1:1 training and group fitness. It gives us the ability to customize and to coach each person, while at the same time capturing much of the energy that you get with group training. The side benefit is that this makes membership much more affordable than classic 1:1 training.
I am most proud of the community that we have created. The cool thing is that our gym has become much more a collaboration of the community than just a reflection of us.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
Our social media presence is not huge, but that fits us. The majority of our clientele live within a mile of our gym, so having thousands of followers across the US wouldn’t really help us. The goal is to foster the community that already exists in the gym, and to have a sort of testimonial of what it is like to work out with us.
The game changer for us, was that we stopped trying to ‘create content’, and started documenting what was already happening in the gym. There were two big problems with creating content from scrap. First, it is very time consuming, and second it feels less authentic. By switching to documenting what is going on we have saved tons of time, our socail media feels more authentic, and the members of our gym feel much more involved in what they gym is doing.
How’d you meet your business partner?
My Cofounder is my wife Anitha. We meet in elementary school in Maryland, we were friends for many years but It took me leaving for Colorado for us to get together romantically. We have been in love ever since. I followed her to California, and then she joined me in my love of fitness, and helped me to found Archway Fitness.
Contact Info:
- Website: archwayfitness.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arch_way_fitness/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100088817186602
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8dSv3AulQKiLalSx0RS9BA
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/archway-fitness-los-angeles
Image Credits
Personal photo by Portlan Polstin all other photos by Jonathan Wines