Wellness. Longevity. Community. Equinox executive chairman and managing partner Harvey Spevak isn’t a fan of 2025’s biggest beauty buzzwords. But he’s willing to concede that they are pillars of the luxury fitness club’s next phase of growth.
“These are words that are being bounced around, but the exciting part is that you’re going to have almost a $10 trillion category — broadly defined — in the coming years. So it’s very high growth,” Spevak says. “The consumer has a more robust appetite than ever before for health, wellness and longevity. Even though I don’t love the word wellness, because most people don’t understand what that word means anymore, what it does mean is that the consumer is more interested in what Equinox has to offer and what Equinox will offer in the future.”
As predicted at the beginning of the year, people are now thinking longer term when it comes to their physical health, adjusting their fitness and health routines — and investments — accordingly. Gen Z and millennial consumers surveyed in a recent Future of Wellness report by McKinsey are prioritizing wellness more in 2025 than one year ago; up to 60% of consumers report that healthy aging is a “top” or “very important” priority for them.
In recent years, Equinox, which was founded in 1991 with one Manhattan location, has been laying the foundations for growth in a world where fitness no longer means simply lifting weights and pounding a treadmill. Within its clubs, the company has upped its design features and added more communal spaces to encourage members to spend even longer in the vicinity. It’s introduced “biohacking elements”, as Spevak calls them, including contrast therapy, more saunas (including infrared), IV drips and hyperbolic chambers.
Equinox has had a tough few years, following the closure of its doors during Covid. In March 2024, Equinox raised $1.8 billion from a group of private capital investors, including private lender Sixth Street and private equity group Silver Lake, in order to refinance $1.2 million in debt. Spevak is confident that, by leaning into longevity and wellness tech — and investing further in projects like hotels — the fitness club can return to a place of strength.
Spevak says demand is rebounding, with all four of Equinox’s most recent openings. In West Palm Beach, pre-opening membership sales exceeded expectations by 250%. (Equinox declined to share numbers, but confirmed that expectations were calculated based on budgets from the history of other new market openings.) There are 40 additional locations in the pipeline, with the view of opening about 10 locations per year (Chicago’s West Loop, San Diego, Nashville and a second Santa Monica outpost are all on deck for the coming months), as well as a Saudi Arabia Equinox Hotel on the way for spring 2026.
The Equinox Hotel, which opened in New York’s Hudson Yards in 2019, is a microcosm of where the luxury fitness club is headed — high design, advanced tech, white-glove service. “It’s a great inflection of not just how we can extend the brand, but also how we understand our consumer and anticipate their needs,” Spevak says. The hotel is the embodiment of the “high-performance lifestyle” Equinox centers its messaging around. “Yes, we do the traditional stuff very well, the massages, the facials — but we’ve also got the contrast therapy. We have a very big IV drip business there. We’ve got some unique offerings that don’t exist anywhere else.” The rooms are optimized for the best possible sleep (another luxury) — lights off, full blackout, 66°F. Prices start at about $910 a night.
Equinox’s supercharge is squarely in response to consumer demand, Spevak says. It’s driven by young people who, he says, are planning further out than ever. They’re also spending more on wellness than generations prior. “Younger people, particularly young women, are more focused now on what’s going to happen in 20, 30, 40 years,” the CEO says. “That used to not be the case.” This is reflected in their habits: Spevak believes that dinner, wine and bed by midnight beats out 4am Friday and Saturday nights, so that young people can make their morning gym classes. “It’s a very different mindset,” he says. “The social’s still there, but in a very different way.”
Size matters
Equinox is operating in an increasingly crowded environment. It may be the largest retailer by square footage in Manhattan, but on every block there’s a new boutique fitness class, specialized longevity clinic, or new-fangled ‘social wellness club’. How does Equinox compete with — and stay ahead of — these challengers?
Spevak says it’s good for business: “That just validates the demand and speaks to the opportunity Equinox has going forward.” These new players can’t match Equinox’s credibility and authority, he contends. “The challenge is that the fitness industry has historically been very mom and pop and very fragmented,” he says. “It still is. With the longevity stuff, it’s a Wild West right now. Every day there’s a new pill; every day there’s a new program. The consumer has to be careful of where they engage, because some of those concepts will be successful and scale over time, but some of them will be in and out in a fad way.” Spevak believes that, for consumers having a tough time sussing out what they should and should not buy into, Equinox can offer an easy in.
The CEO believes there’s something to be said for size. “We’re a much bigger community. We’re a more international community,” he says, expecting that this will entice gym-goers whose networks are already tapped into the Equinox ecosystem. As the gym continues to expand internationally (there’s a Caribbean location on the way, though Spevak declines to share specifics), this community element will strengthen, he expects.
For those who want ultra-specific treatments, Equinox may not be the fit. But the fitness center can, on one hand, offer a gateway into a lot of the longevity programing, and on the other, offer a tailored exercise regime to those experimenting with deeper and more complex advancements. Equinox won’t offer nano-implants for hormonal health, but it does offer personalized programs based on wearables data. The fitness center won’t administer GLP-1s (this is left to the medical professionals), but it has devised a GLP-1 training protocol for those taking the medication.
Tech boost
Equinox has upped — and will continue to up — its investment in technology to future-proof.
AI is a focus in three key areas, Spevak says: cost reduction, productivity and enhancing the in-club experience. The CEO offers real estate development as an example. What would have taken 18 months from finding a site to opening can now take 14 months — and will eventually go down to 12. “What that does is open up the ability for the team to spend more time on creativity and innovating in terms of design, layout and program, as compared to some of the construction details,” he says. AI for personalization will also become increasingly key to Equinox’s offering.
The latest such launch is Equninox’s women’s initiative, Equinox Arc, announced last month. The program includes personalized guidance around health, fitness and longevity, under coaches who have completed a Women’s Health Certificate. They’ll leverage wearable and biometrics data to offer training that considers the influences of hormone health, fertility, post-partum and perimenopause.
The gym’s buzziest bid to merge innovation and health programing, though, was in May 2024 when it announced the launch of Equinox Optimize, the $40,000 yearly program tailored to members looking to optimize their health via biometrics analysis, training and over 100 biomarkers, including hormone balance and organ status. “It was really dipping our toe in the water,” Spevak says. The program launched at select clubs in Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco in spring 2024, as well as in select New York clubs this year. The waitlist remains over 1,000-people long.
Spevak’s takeaway? “People — certainly the right people — are willing to pay anything for longevity.” He defines longevity as energy and vitality, which, he says, ties into health’s status as the new luxury. “The idea behind Optimize is we are going to use biomarkers and take blood to provide data, and that data will inform training protocols around working with a coach, a personal trainer, a sleep coach, or a nutrition coach, all supervised by a concierge.” There’ll be more to come on Optimize, Spevak promises, adding that Equinox plans to introduce similarly personalized programs in 2026.
Consumers are willing to pay more for products that deliver lasting impact, with 72% open to spending more on longevity-driven solutions and 69% favoring products that work at a genetic level, per Vogue Business’s 2025 Future of Appearance survey.
“That’s a big part of the future, tapping into data from different sources to inform, test and see how you’re doing — and tweak,” Spevak says. “It’s something that I’ve been doing for 20 years and it really makes a difference.”
Shifting spend
Spevak is confident that consumer’s luxury spend will shift further away from products to experience — especially in the realm of health and wellness. It’s already happening, he says. “What you’re seeing is people are thinking about how to live a high-performance lifestyle,” he says.
Plus, investment in one’s health often begets further investment. Though the efficacy and ethics of GLP-1 drugs for users who aren’t diabetic or overweight can be debated, the fact is that over 2% of Americans are on the medication — up 600% over six years, according to Fair Health. Notably, this data is based on healthcare claim records, but many GLP-1 medications are now available without a prescription, so the actual number is likely far higher. Research organization Rand puts the estimate at 12%, based on a recent survey. For Equinox, this is a big opportunity, which has driven the launch of its GLP-1 training protocol, creating a certification through its education arm to certify coaches on how to train someone who is on GLP-1s.
“A lot of people thought that what we do was going to be under a lot of pressure, because now you can now just take a pill,” Spevek says of last year, when GLP-1s began their ascent. “What quickly became obvious was that GLP-1s are a good kickstart — depending on your own situation — but you need to complement them with lifestyle changes. That’s working out; that’s eating. So it’s been good for business.”
Spevak anticipates more such shifts in the coming years. Equinox has a health advisory board with experts from science, medicine and various academic fields who help the team to assess which trends are likely to come and go, which will sustain over time, and which are safe and legitimate. Essentially, which are worth investing in. “While we will always be innovative and ideating new concepts, at the same time, we’re doing it through the lens of what’s safe and effective, which is critically important,” Spevak says.
The CEO is confident that consumers will only increase their investment in companies that can service their wellness and longevity ambitions. “There’s still great demand for luxury products, of course, but it’s under pressure,” Spevak says. “It’s because the consumer has shifted to unique experiences, [meaning] health and wellness. That’s why I feel like we’re just warming up. We have a big opportunity.”
Correction: Updated to reflect that Harvey Spevak’s title is executive chairman and managing partner.
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