How a Premium Wellness Studio Turned Quarterly Class Optimization Into a Weekly Habit
Lumen Studio Before Chloe
Lumen Studio is a premium boutique wellness studio in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, two locations, about 620 active members. The schedule looks like most modern boutiques — reformer pilates, hot yoga, Lagree, HIIT, indoor cycling, HYROX, strength and mobility — taught by a roster of 40+ coaches across the week.
The community was strong. The brand was strong. What Eva, the founder, and Jordan, the Head of Operations, didn’t have was a calm way to optimize the class schedule.
Every quarter, they blocked off the better part of two weeks for something they called “Schedule Week.” It never actually fit into a week. It meant pulling attendance out of Mariana Tek, cross-referencing it with waitlists, drop-in vs. member mix, and coach costs. It meant rebuilding pivot tables in Google Sheets. Long conversations with head coaches. Negotiating slots. Rewriting the member announcement. Bracing for the feedback that always followed.
Some calls were easy. A Tuesday 6:15 a.m. reformer class sitting at 38% for six straight months was obviously a candidate to move. But most decisions weren’t that clean.
A Saturday strength class looked quiet on paper, but the regulars were long-tenured members who would leave if it disappeared. A Wednesday HYROX slot looked fine in aggregate, but its fill rate had been quietly sliding for weeks. The information existed — it just didn’t live anywhere useful, in the moment it mattered.
By the time Eva and Jordan finished Schedule Week, the new grid was already three weeks out of date. Next quarter, they’d do it all over again. Usually after hours. Usually on the weekend.
The real issue wasn’t discipline. It was that class optimization — one of the highest-leverage decisions a boutique studio makes — was being run as a quarterly project, not as a living part of the business.
Lumen Studio After Chloe
When Lumen studio brought NexScale Chloe in, the goal wasn’t to automate Schedule Week. It was to stop needing one.
Chloe connected to Mariana Tek directly via API and the rest of Lumen’s stack in under a day. Nothing was migrated. Nothing was replaced. What changed was that, for the first time, something was quietly watching the schedule, the members, the coaches, and the numbers at the same time.
Within the first two weeks, Chloe had built a baseline for every recurring class slot — not just attendance, but fill rate, waitlist pressure, no-shows, member vs. drop-in mix, and the retention impact of the members who consistently attended that slot.
Then it kept watching.
The shift didn’t come from a dashboard. It came from Chloe surfacing the handful of class-level decisions that actually mattered, in the week they mattered, instead of all at once every twelve weeks.
A typical Monday brief at Lumen now looks like this:
“Tuesday 6:15 a.m. Reformer has been at 38% for 8 weeks. Same slot at Front Street is at 84%. Want to consolidate and open a Lagree slot instead? Demand for Lagree is up 22% since January.”
“Wednesday 7 p.m. HYROX has dropped from 92% to 61% over 8 weeks. The drop is concentrated in new members. Recommendation: swap coaches for four weeks and re-measure.”
“Saturday 8 a.m. Strength looks quiet (54%), but most attendees are 12+ month members with above-average LTV. This is a retention anchor — worth protecting.”
“Thursday 5:30 p.m. Hot Yoga has been full with a 12-person waitlist for 6 weeks. Want to add a second Thursday slot at Front Street? I can pre-notify the waitlisted members.”
That was the part that changed how Eva thought about the schedule. Chloe wasn’t just reporting utilization. It was weighing utilization alongside coach performance, member tenure, waitlists, and location dynamics, and coming back with a clear, defensible recommendation for each slot.
Schedule Week didn’t get faster. It stopped existing. In its place is a weekly habit: a handful of clear, explainable decisions made in the flow of the business — not a two-week blackout every quarter.
The Results
Less time spent on class optimization. Schedule Week — 60–80 combined hours across Eva and Jordan every quarter — is gone. In its place is roughly 30 minutes a week of reviewing Chloe’s recommendations.
Higher average class utilization. Within the first two quarters, average utilization across both locations moved from the high-60s to the mid-70s, by consolidating low-performing early slots, adding capacity where waitlists were chronic, and adjusting coaches in formats where the fit wasn’t working.
Faster reaction to demand shifts. Slots that used to quietly decline for 8–12 weeks before being caught at the next Schedule Week are now flagged in 2–3 weeks. Lumen can test a change in the same quarter, not the next one.
Better coach conversations. Instead of quarterly surprises, coaches get earlier, clearer feedback grounded in real data. The conversation is about support and fit, not a moved slot they didn’t see coming.
Retention anchors are protected. Chloe distinguishes between low-performing slots and low-filling-but-high-retention slots. Lumen no longer accidentally cuts classes that look quiet on a spreadsheet but are the reason long-tenured members still show up.
Member-aware schedule changes. Every change now goes out with a personalized announcement to the members actually affected — in the brand's voice, in their preferred channel. Complaint volume on schedule changes is down meaningfully.
“We used to treat the schedule as something we rebuilt every quarter. With Chloe, we run it like a system. The decisions haven’t gotten harder — the work around them has just stopped being ours to do manually.” — Eva, Founder, Lumen Studio
Hire Chloe for Your Studio
(3-month probation period, 65% discounted rate, fully refundable if it is not a fit)
See how Chloe helps you optimize classes continuously — without another dashboard to your week.
👉 https://www.nexscale.ai/product-chloe
