Founded in Marrero, this fitness chain has surpassed 750 locations worldwide

It’s the oldest cliche in the fitness industry: “No pain, no gain.”

New Orleanian Stephen P. Smith has learned that lesson in multiple ways.

A former champion bodybuilder and arena football player, Smith has pushed his body to the limit in pursuit of athletic goals.

He's also an entrepreneur who launched a successful global brand before having to completely reinvent his business, which led to the launch of an even bigger enterprise.

The first venture, Planet Beach, is a global chain of tanning salons that reached more than 350 locations worldwide before concerns about health risks stopped the industry's growth.

The follow-up — Hotworx — is an international fitness chain that allows users to do yoga, Pilates or ride a stationary bike in 7-foot-by-9-foot saunas heated to 125 degrees. In the eight years since its debut, the chain has racked up twice as many locations as Planet Beach at its peak, and it achieved the milestone in half the time.

Both businesses, along with several related ventures, are run from a headquarters in Marrero, where Smith leads a 90-person team that's become expert at building brands and turning them into franchises, innovating when necessary.

"You’ve got to refresh and reinvent all the time, and that will allow you to grow,” Smith said. “I had this great core team from Planet Beach, and we were in this tough industry,” he said. “But knowing that franchising really is our core competency, I wanted to get them the right product.” 

Life's a beach

A native of McComb, Mississippi, Smith opened his first gym in nearby Oxford after he graduated from Ole Miss in the mid-1980s. Work brought him to New Orleans a few years later, where, in 1996, he and his business partner, Nancy Price, launched the first Planet Beach tanning salon in a strip mall in Uptown.

The duo franchised the brand and, over the next decade, saw it spread across North America. But there was trouble ahead for the industry.

As the number of tanning salons was growing, so was awareness of the health dangers of tanning beds, which increase the risk of skin cancer, according to the World Health Organization and other experts.

By 2010, when federal legislation added a 10% tax to tanning services to discourage industry growth, Smith knew the venture couldn’t survive without major changes.

To adapt, Planet Beach began offering other services, like massage machines and “red light facial therapy” but, nevertheless, was losing franchisees.

“It was the dark ages of my career,” Smith said.

'Sweat' equity

Then, in 2014, there was a moment of inspiration that changed everything.

While on vacation with several Planet Beach execs in Jamaica, Smith was discussing his love of “hot yoga” with his business partner's husband, Jerome Price, who suggested Smith figure out a way to offer yoga classes in a sauna. Smith said he put down his rum drink and began brainstorming how the idea could work.

“Working out in an infrared sauna cuts down the time you do yoga to 30 minutes, and you get even more results,” he said. "You sweat more, and your sweat has more detox.”

After that vacation inspiration, Smith went on a deep dive into sauna technology, specifically infrared saunas, which use infrared radiation to heat objects — and bodies — directly, rather than heating the air around them.

A techie and tinkerer by nature, Smith sketched up infrared sauna designs, then found a manufacturing partner in China to invest in the idea with him.

“We both rolled the dice on each other,” he said. “We designed it with her engineers, and she built the prototype, then shipped it directly to a trade show in New York City.”

In 2015 in New York, Planet Beach unveiled the first “Hot Box Detox” prototype. Based on the positive reception there, the company began adding infrared saunas to some of its remaining locations, where the results were promising.

“The saunas created more velocity,” Nancy Price said. “They brought members in multiple times a week, versus once a month for a teeth-whitening session or spray tan.”

Soon after, Smith and company decided the infrared sauna concept needed to stand on its own — and could use a better name.

In 2016, they spent a few hundred dollars on a web platform that crowdsources ideas for brand names and logos. The winning suggestion was the name “Heatworx,” which Smith later changed to Hotworx.

The gym's first freestanding location opened in 2017 in Oxford, home to Smith’s alma mater. A location soon followed in Marrero, true to the Hotworx team’s roots in the New Orleans suburbs.

After those early store openings, the franchise really caught fire.

Healthy heat?

At Hotworx locations, gym members enter a sauna that holds up to three people. Some saunas are set up for isometric work like yoga or Pilates; others contain exercise bikes or other equipment.

Wall-mounted screens inside each sauna show instructional videos that lead members through 15- or 30-minute exercise routines.

Smith said the company owns all its own software, along with its custom email marketing platform and customer relationship management system. It holds a patent on the saunas and has a patent pending on a rowing machine.

The gym markets primarily to women, but about 17% of its members are men, said Smith.

Exercising in heat increases the detox effects of sweating and also has a variety of other health benefits, said Smith, who said infrared heat also speeds up the metabolism and dilates capillaries to increase oxygen supply. He said this will increase wound healing and potentially decrease inflammation.

The success of the brand has been healing for Smith, who is relishing the chance to build a brand that doesn’t have the same baggage as the tanning industry.

He likens the feeling of success to his emotional state when enjoying one of his favorite sports.

“It’s like freedom, man,” he said. “It’s like skiing on a wide-open slope.”

Hot franchise

Over the last seven years, Hotworx has grown to roughly 750 locations nationwide — including 12 in greater New Orleans. Nearly 150 new locations opened last year alone. The first overseas Hotworx locations are open in Ireland, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, and the company recently signed agreements with franchisees who want to open locations in Canada and Mexico.

“I feel that this brand is going to be a ratio of 1 for every 100,000 people in the country,” Smith said. “If you’ve got 1.1 million in a metro area, you're going to have 11 locations, and that's how it turned out in Memphis, which was one of the first cities we really fully developed.”

Hotworx claims more than 250,000 members, many paying a $59 or $79 monthly fee for various benefits.

Price said the memberships are the "bread and butter" of the company's business model.

Despite the rapid growth of the fitness brand, many New Orleanians have no idea it started in their hometown.

Smith said that's been partly by design.

“The strategy has been to just do our thing, grow the brand, make sure our franchisees are profitable, and eventually, people will take note,” he said.