Recording Studio

Happy New Year to you all! I hope your holidays were great and you are ready for an amazing 2007! I want to personally thank you for all of your on-going contributions to one of the most successful years in Equinox history! You continue to drive the heart and soul at Equinox and I thank you for always taking care of our members..

When you work for a high profile company like Equinox, you are held to high profile standards and expectations among the company, the industry and really, the world at this point. Such high visibility brings exciting challenges for us to always be the very best we can be. As your Director, one of my biggest responsibilities is to continuously evaluate our portfolio of programs and compare it to our competitorЎ¦s programs and to the industry as a whole. I constantly ask myself:

Do we have the best programs at Equinox?

Do we continue to be the ones creating the trends that others follow?

Are we still the dominant force in this industry?

Do we have the best instructors at Equinox?

Do we continue to look to you, our instructors, as resources for creating new trends and classes?

Is there consistency in the quality and member experience from class to class and location to location across the country?

ItЎ¦s clear we continue to offer a very strong program overall. And in almost all cases we have the best instructors overall! YouЎ¦ll hear more about our plans for standard of Excellency in our EquinoxEmersion training later this year.

It is important that our programs grow and evolve to continuously challenge and inspire our members daily. A big part of our job to develop new and creative ideas, always exploring new venues (some never even considered for fitness) somewhere, that might just fly at Equinox!

As a management team, we have always looked to you all as Ў§resourcesЎЁЎKyou are the most creative people in the industry and you should view us as the facilitators of your ideas! If you have a great, new idea, a new class that you would like to develop, we want to explore the program development possibilities with you. I invite you to submit your ideas to me, directly.

I am really interested in seeing a new thought process in our GF programmingЎKIn other words, in addition to our amazing roster of offerings, I am not so interested in Ў§re-packagingЎЁ existing formats as I am in seeing a new approach, format, even non-traditional format, completely outside of our industry, if it can make sense. Sometimes these things blossom into amazing programs and sometimes they donЎ¦t, but I CAN tell you, if we commit to it, it WILL be supported.

You already know that our GFM team is the strongest in the country and that they are as committed to you and the industry as anyone! Good examples of what I am looking for are programs like:

the INKA Suspension training group format that we will be rolling out this quarter, created by one of our own in Darien, Ct.,

the new program, CHAOS, designed by Dr. Paul Juris and the GFM team that you will see later this month in NYC,

Cardio Core Motion, designed by Michael Carson in LA (I think that will be the next new Ў§cardioЎЁ)

Full Moon Yoga, ChicagoЎ¦s own Jeff Howard, that actually takes place outside, on the scheduled full moon every month (will begin in 2nd quarter).

This is the kind of thinking and the type of approach to GF that I am talking about and anticipating for 2007.

I also want to mention that overall, as I take classes with you all, across the country, I am so proud to be in your roomЎKthe professionalism, creativity and quality experience that you bring to Equinox is outstanding. That said, in some cases, though, when I look at specific clubs, classes, formats, and