About Plus Fitness

Plus Fitness is an award winning Australian owned company that has been trading since 1996, and operating under a 24/7 franchise gym model since 2011. Plus have over 250 club locations across Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

With quality service, affordability, top class facilities and convenience Plus provides everything a gym consumer could want and requires an online presence to match.

The Problem

The franchise group was growing, the current website was ageing visually, Plus Fitness needed to rebuild their website technology, and security was a major focus.

Through a series of workshops, TechEquipt highlighted the importance of up-to-date security, and the benefits a strong technical foundation that considered scale in terms of increasing memberships, franchisees, and countries serviced by Plus Fitness.

There were other problems identified during the discovery phase, such as:

• Every time they updated the website they had to do it 3 times (once for each country)
• Launching the brand in a new country came with significant overhead
• The current website was feeling outdated , and not representative of their brand
• They wanted to better gain and retain customers
• They wanted to optimise performance
• Integrating with other systems and suppliers was becoming increasingly important

The Process and Challenges

We approached the website rebuild with an agile mindset, by first gaining a deep insight of the project in it’s entirety, then breaking it down into smaller, measurable pieces of work that could be easily understood, implemented, and tested in a series of sprints.

A component library was developed using storybook.js, simultaneously allowing us to test the user interface against edge cases, and provide the client with regular visual updates on progress, with faster feedback loops making sure the project was delivered with common understanding.

Challenges were faced along the way, with a global pandemic immediately reprioritising updates to the existing website, and functionality that allowed the gym franchise network to stay on top of communication, regulation, and revenue at a time of immense difficulty.

With extended deadlines of the project due to COVID, there were also other changes within the business that needed to be reflected in the technical solution with additional 3rd party integrations, and updating of other digital assets, including internal E-Commerce and educational platforms.

The Solution

At the end of this successful project, Plus Fitness had a shiny new website, with a tonne of new features including:

• Flexible block-based content management, allowing Plus Fitness to enter their own website content, and determine where it displayed within the site
• Numerous external integration, including CRM systems, payment providers, and gym/franchise management software
• Improved email sending capabilities, using transactional email to provide reduced SPAM flagging and better email delivery monitoring. This also includes backups of form entries to the website database
• Simpler, faster, and cheaper setup for new franchises and new countries under the Plus Fitness brand