Boutique fitness has always had an access problem. The studios are sleek, the instructors are credentialed, and the price points—often $30 to $40 per class—have made the industry a reliable space for a narrow slice of consumers. That exclusivity has rarely been framed as a failure. For most of the sector, it has simply been the business model.
Solidcore is trying to change that framing. According to Black Enterprise, CEO Bryan Myers is pushing inclusion not as a values statement or a marketing layer but as a core growth strategy—built on the premise that the customers boutique fitness has historically overlooked represent an untapped market, not a charitable cause.
Myers’ position is notable precisely because of when he’s taking it. Corporate America is in the middle of a significant DEI retreat. Major companies across retail, finance, and tech have quietly rolled back diversity commitments made in the years following the 2020 racial justice uprisings, citing legal pressure following the Supreme Court’s 2023 affirmative action ruling and a broader political climate hostile to the language of equity. The message from much of the C-suite has been that DEI is a liability—reputational, legal, or financial.
Solidcore is making the opposite argument. Myers is framing inclusion as the mechanism through which the brand expands its customer base—reaching Black and Brown consumers, working-class fitness enthusiasts, and communities that have long been priced out or made to feel unwelcome in premium wellness spaces. The business logic is straightforward: if your industry has systematically excluded large portions of the population, growth lives on the other side of that exclusion.
That argument has structural weight. Boutique fitness has plateaued among its traditional demographic—affluent, largely white urban consumers—while interest in fitness and wellness has grown broadly across income levels and racial groups. Brands that figure out how to meet that broader demand without diluting their product stand to gain. Those that don’t will compete for an increasingly narrow slice of an already saturated market.
What makes Solidcore’s approach worth watching isn’t just the rhetoric—it’s whether the operational decisions follow. Inclusion as strategy requires more than messaging. It means pricing structures, community partnerships, instructor pipelines, and location decisions that reflect an actual commitment to accessibility. Myers hasn’t retreated from that language under pressure. Whether the business decisions match it over time is the story that will matter.
For now, Solidcore is one of the few brands in its category willing to say out loud what the market data has been showing for years: that the customer the industry ignored is the customer with the most room to grow.