Lift Brands, the global wellness company behind Snap Fitness, Fitness On Demand and a minority partner in 9Round and Fitstop has reacquired the Snap Fitness master franchise for the United Arab Emirates, with plans to open a significant number of new locations across the country in the coming years.

The news comes as the UAE continues to attract activity from the fitness industry, with brands like UBX, GymNation, Anytime Fitness and UFC Gym looking to make their mark.

Lift Brands’ EMEA support office team, headquartered in London and led by CEO Kevin Yates, will oversee the UAE operation. The deal sees Dubai-based Afshad Mistry appointed as general manager for the UAE, having held the position for the previous master franchise holder.

In the short term, Lift Brands says its immediate focus is on strengthening the four existing Snap Fitness clubs in the region, including modernization projects already underway at its Media City and Motor City clubs. The brand, which underwent a massive rebrand in 2021l, offers members 24/7 access, monthly contracts, digital content via its member app and personal training within its clubs. Recovery zones are found in select locations.

“Reacquiring the master franchise for the UAE is a hugely exciting move for us,” Lift Brands EMEA CEO Kevin Yates said. “The health and fitness club market in the UAE is projected to reach over $5 billion by 2030, and by driving the Snap Fitness brand centrally, it will help us to rapidly capitalize on this.”

“2024 was an incredible year for Snap Fitness, with our global teams enjoying more franchise and membership sales than ever before,” Yates continued. Last year, the brand opened 44 new locations. 

“We’re on a roll right now and we can’t wait to unlock Snap Fitness’ potential in the UAE and significantly grow our presence there,” he added.

The group confirms it has already received strong interest in the region and will soon begin the search for franchise partners in the UAE.

“Snap Fitness has been leading the charge in the industry since its inception, delivering standout holistic wellness experiences and a versatile business model,” Lift Brands global CEO Ty Menzies said. “Our success lies in our ability to provide unparalleled support for entrepreneurs and local communities while maintaining a world-class fitness offering. The UAE is a key market for us, and we’re excited to welcome more people to the Snap Fitness family and make fitness more accessible, enjoyable and rewarding.” 

In the UK and Ireland, Snap Fitness reached the 100-club milestone last year and kicked off 2025 with a new opening in Raynes Park, London. Globally, the gym franchise plans to open more than 60 clubs this year.

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Snap Fitness, owned by Lift Brands, has partnered with CoverMe Fitness, an on-demand fitness team management and cover solution app, to enhance operational standards across its franchises in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. The collaboration marks a significant step in ensuring all team members at Snap Fitness locations meet industry compliance requirements, including holding proper qualifications and insurance.

Under this partnership, CoverMe Fitness is now a required component for all 75 Snap Fitness locations in the region. The app streamlines team management processes, ensuring that instructors and personal trainers are certified, insured and able to provide class cover when needed. The integration also supports operational efficiency, particularly for clubs offering group exercise programs.

Paul Stevenson, operations director of Lift Brands, emphasized the importance of this move, stating:
“At Snap Fitness, ensuring compliance and operational efficiency is key. CoverMe’s platform streamlines compliance across our clubs, and many with group exercise timetables are enjoying the full management features. Most significantly, CoverMe helps our teams to be more efficient and frees up their time to do what they do best — creating memorable experiences for our members and their local community.”

The CoverMe app provides additional functionality for managing class schedules and sourcing substitute instructors. According to John Davies, General Manager of Snap Fitness Tooting in London, the app has simplified the previously time-consuming process of finding class cover.

“Finding cover [a sub] used to be stressful, but I can now just direct the team to the app, where they can easily find cover from a preferred list of instructors or beyond if needed. Having all contacts in one place has made things much more organized,” said Davies.

CoverMe Fitness CEO Rosanna Tucker noted that the app’s automated compliance tools save clubs an estimated 10 hours of operational time per week, allowing managers to focus on growth and improving member experiences.

By implementing the CoverMe app across its UK operations, Snap Fitness aims to reinforce safety and compliance standards, while improving efficiency for staff and enhancing service for members.

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Fitness on Demand, the digital fitness platform under Lift Brands, just gave its Flex App a makeover, revamping its fitness content platform with several engaging features and design improvements.

The upgraded app greets users with a new interface along with an enhanced video player featuring subtitles, casting, and automatic workout completion. Fitness on Demand is also making it easier for users to establish a personal library of videos. Users can now “favorite” videos and save them to watch later. The app automatically saves and makes video history accessible as well.   

A personal training feature is also now present, allowing trainers to design and deliver bespoke workout plans directly to users through the platform.

“We believe in empowering operators to deliver exceptional, omnichannel fitness experiences that attract, engage and retain members,” said Andy Peat, CEO of Fitness on Demand. “These latest enhancements will not only elevate facilities’ offerings, but provide the perfect mix of innovation and motivation for members that keeps them coming back.”

Fitness On Demand’s new Flex App also offers users the ability to track progress over time in a central hub, participate in meditation programs, read healthy living tips, listen to podcasts and create personalized nutrition plans either by looking up recipes or crafting their own. Users can also participate in more than 1,200 on-demand workouts at any time.

For operators, the upgrade permits more customization options with signage, screen skins and
a white-labeled mobile app. New comprehensive analytics and reporting tools are also included to provide further intel on member engagement and behavior.

It’s been a year of “out with the old, in with the new” for Fitness On Demand. Last fall, the brand named Peat as its new CEO while undergoing a global rebrand to establish itself as a “tech partner” for its gym clients rather than merely a content provider. These enhancements within Flex App match that ambition. 

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Ty Menzies effectively took over as global CEO of Snap Fitness and parent company Lift Brands right when the pandemic hit in March 2020. Despite running an entire global gym operation from his kitchen in Australia, Menzies helped steer the brand through COVID before piloting a full-scale rebrand designed to bring Snap into the modern, post-pandemic fitness era.

Four years later, the Minnesota-based franchisor of 24/7, no-frills gyms is thriving both domestically and internationally. Snap Fitness currently counts 1,000-plus global locations, including large presences in the U.S., Australia and the U.K., with plans to become even bigger across Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Menzies spoke with Athletech News about how he got his start in fitness franchising, Snap’s massive rebranding effort, and Snap’s plans for continued domestic and international franchise expansion.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Athletech News: Can you tell us a bit about your background in fitness franchising?

Ty Menzies: I come from a family of restaurateurs, so I always wanted to have my own business at some stage. I studied sports management at school and got into personal training. I went from personal training to a sales role and then moved to the U.K. where I became a club manager at a Gold’s Gym in London. That was really my introduction to running a franchise and business management. I loved it; the gentleman who recruited me for that role was John Treharne, who became founder of The Gym Group. 

I was fortunate enough to have a bit of money in my back pocket at this time, and I was able to borrow some more to buy my first franchise with EFM Health Clubs Australia, which is a smaller boutique functional training concept, similar to Fitstop and BFT. I ended up with three EFMs across Melbourne, Australia, and I also bought two independent gyms, which I turned into 24/7 clubs. I ran those for quite some time before selling most of them in 2014. 

ATN: How did you get involved with Snap Fitness and Lift Brands?

TM: I wound up having a conversation with the then-master franchise owners for Snap Fitness in Australia and New Zealand who were based out of Brisbane, and I stepped in to run the Snap Fitness business there. In April of 2018, we sold the master franchise rights for Australia and New Zealand back to Lift Brands, and I became the CEO of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region for Lift Brands. 

In early 2020, our global CEO left and I basically took over in March 2020. My first few months were very interesting because I hadn’t yet been announced as the new global CEO (Menzies was officially named Global CEO of Lift Brands in May 2020) but I was navigating our global response to COVID from my kitchen bench in Australia. We were operating in 20-plus countries and over 40 states in the U.S. I finally made it to the U.S. in June 2020 and really started diving into the global business. Four years later, it’s been a pretty significant ride, including COVID and a range of other things we’ve had to navigate.

ATN: Once the dust settled from the pandemic, what major changes did you implement at Snap Fitness?

TM:  When I stepped into the global role, I knew we had to go through a process of repositioning the Snap Fitness brand. We recruited a new head of marketing who came to the business with significant brand strategy experience in hospitality. We then brought on a consulting firm to really start understanding who our members were. What we found was interesting: consumers in the U.S., Australia and the U.K. are very similar in what they want. 

We also saw a very homogenous health and fitness industry – the way we talk about exercise is very performance and physically led. Everything we were seeing was before-and-after photos, “harder, faster, stronger” and “no pain, no gain.” That’s very performance-driven language which can be quite daunting for a lot of people who are new to the gym space. 

ATN: With those findings in mind, how did Snap Fitness rebrand itself?

TM: We saw an opportunity to reposition Snap Fitness entirely, focusing on exercise from the perspective of how it makes you feel, not just how it makes you look. This included not just a change of logo and color scheme, but a change of our go-to-market strategy, our communication to the end consumer, and a change in our tagline from a very performance-driven, “Fast, Affordable, Convenient,” to our new tagline, “For the Feeling.”

We also changed the look and feel of our clubs to be lighter and more uplifting. When someone walks into a club, for example, our desks are now raised higher so that when any new potential member comes in, they’re seeing someone at eye height rather than sitting down at a desk. We’ve got walls up in our clubs with good-mood messaging that affirms that “For the Feeling” element, among a range of other, more subtle changes.

ATN: How else does Snap Fitness stand out from other gyms, particularly those that are also open 24/7? 

TM: It’s not so much about the amenities. The reality is if you put a brand new Anytime Fitness right next to a brand new Snap Fitness, the physical attributes of the clubs are both going to be very nice, they’re both going to have great equipment and they’re going to be nicely fitted out. Most people would love to work out in either of them. We’ve all been to restaurants where you walk into one restaurant versus another and both have great food and great facilities. Where you have the best experience comes down to who has the best customer service, so that’s been a huge part of what we’ve focused on and how we’re educating our franchisees and club managers. 

ATN: How is Snap Fitness positioned for international success?

TM: Snap Fitness currently operates in 18 countries. In six of those, Canada, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and Ireland, we own and drive directly ourselves, meaning we don’t have any master franchisor. That’s unlike our competitors in the marketplace who have typically sold master franchise licenses in other regions. We also have direct offices in London, Minneapolis and Brisbane where we have Lift Brands employees who are directly supporting our franchisees. 

We do have countries – in Europe, the Middle East and Asia –  where we have master franchisors. But now that we have direct offices in both the U.K. and Brisbane, we can directly support our master franchisors and their franchisees in their dedicated time zones. That’s a lot better than trying to support them directly out of the U.S. office.

ATN: How big can Snap Fitness become, both domestically and internationally?

TM: We’re at just over 1,000 locations today, with around 570 in the U.S., around 350 in APAC, mostly in Australia and New Zealand, and around 130 across the EMEA region, mostly in the U.K. and Ireland. 

We have very big growth goals across the board –  between now and 2028, we expect close to 1,300 locations. Last year, we had our biggest year of franchise sales since 2012, with 77 new licenses sold, the majority of which came out of APAC and EMEA. We’re also starting to get moving across the U.S. again. We’ve got a lofty goal of selling 82 to 83 (licenses) this year.

ATN: Lift Brands, which fully owns Snap Fitness and Fitness On Demand along with minority stakes in other brands, is exploring a sale. Why is Lift looking to find a new owner?

TM: We’re predominantly private equity owned, and private equity always has a horizon in terms of buy-and-sell timing, usually it’s five to six years. Our private equity investor has been with us for around 10 years now, so it’s the right time for them to exit. I’m excited about the opportunity to bring in a new, energetic investor who can really get behind some of these strategies for growth I want to drive. 

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Glofox will replace Fitware, a legacy member management system developed by Lift Brands, in 2,000 locations in North America and internationally. Glofox will enable Snap Fitness and 9Round franchisees to improve their members’ experience with a customized mobile app for members and staff. The platform will enable Lift Brands to take payments in all international markets including the US, UK, Australia, Turkey, and Japan. Glofox will also support each location with modern membership management technology and communications tools. The software will integrate with fitness tracking and other tools within the Lift Brands technology ecosystem.

Glofox technology will form part of a series of initiatives that Snap Fitness locations are taking to reopen their gyms globally in a safe and frictionless way with the ability to manage capacity by scheduling open gym times, checking in using a barcode scanner and no human touch, and running online classes to enable members to work out from home while staying connected to the brand.

Glofox CEO, Conor O’Loughlin, said, “We are delighted to welcome Lift Brands to the Glofox family. We are committed to partnering with them on their international expansion and in delivering a unique and consistent member experience to their customers in North America and overseas.”

Lift Brands CEO, Ty Menzies, said, “We’re excited about modernizing our entire technology stack, delivering the best experience to our members and to our staff worldwide, and maintaining visibility and control as we scale the business. As the industry recovers from COVID-19, we plan to lead the way by staying engaged with our members and empowering our franchisees to be successful.”

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