Cult.fit Built India's Largest Gym Network. Now It Wants to Be

From the outside, Cult.fit's push into fitness products can look like a sudden pivot. It is not.

The company entered the apparel segment in 2020. Footwear followed. Then home fitness equipment. Over five years, the portfolio has expanded steadily into categories including spin bikes, treadmills, recovery devices, massagers, and fitness accessories.

"As these categories matured and found product-market fit, they started contributing meaningfully to our revenue growth," says CEO Naresh Krishnaswamy.

The business has remained asset-light throughout. Product design and material selection happen in-house. Manufacturing is outsourced. The company has not had to build factories or manage complex production infrastructure to grow this revenue stream.

What Cult.fit does have, however, is a distribution advantage that most fitness product brands would struggle to replicate: direct daily access to thousands of fitness-conscious consumers through its gym network.

"If you think of a gym user, they need workout wear, shoes, accessories, gym bags, yoga mats, and several other products. We want to continue adding categories and increasing our presence across all relevant categories for a fitness user," Krishnaswamy explains.

The gym network, in this framing, is not just a revenue source. It is a product research engine and a captive customer base simultaneously.

For most of its history, Cult.fit sold products online. That is still where most of the volume sits: around 70% of product sales happen digitally.

But over the last two years, the company has built a network of 29 exclusive brand outlets from scratch, giving customers a physical touchpoint for its growing product range. The plan is to add another 30 to 35 stores this fiscal year, taking the total count beyond 50.

Krishnaswamy is not limiting the expansion to the metros. Beyond Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Delhi, the company is moving into cities like Lucknow and Pune. Most stores are expected to break even within nine to twelve months.

The ambition is clear: to build a fitness retail presence that works across price points, geographies, and channels, competing directly with global specialist retailers in a category that remains underpenetrated in India.

While the product business is emerging as a meaningful growth driver, fitness services remain Cult.fit's largest business. And within that, the company is betting heavily on an affordable gym format called Cult Neo.

"Attacking that sweet price point between Rs 10,000 and Rs 12,000 for an annual gym membership is a big driver of growth in the market," Krishnaswamy says.

The company currently operates around 40 Cult Neo centres and plans to expand the format across 100 Indian cities. The affordable segment is growing at roughly twice the pace of the premium category, which tells its own story about where India's fitness market is heading.

At the premium end, Cult.fit is also experimenting with Pilates Circle, a specialised format launched a year ago with subscription pricing of around Rs 30,000 for a few months. The CEO does not expect Pilates Circle to scale at the same pace as Cult Neo, but it serves a different purpose: signalling that the brand can compete for the most discerning fitness consumers as well as the most price-sensitive ones.

Cult.fit's walk toward profitability has been a long one. The company is attempting to solve a challenge that has followed it for years: how to build a business where revenue grows faster than costs without resorting to aggressive cost-cutting.

Rent remains the largest expense, followed by employee costs, marketing, and management overheads. All of these increase every year.

"Expenses do increase every year. Employee costs go up. Rents increase contractually. We are not cutting expenses to drive profitability. Our revenue has been growing more than costs. More than that, we are able to achieve increasing revenue per gym while keeping costs relatively flat," Krishnaswamy says.

The same operating leverage logic applies to products. As volumes increase and distribution expands, unit economics improve. Pricing power grows. Scale efficiencies kick in. Margins strengthen.

Products, offline retail, and Cult Neo have become the three pillars of Cult.fit's next phase of growth, each reinforcing the others while reducing the company's dependence on any single revenue stream.