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Visited by Swift & Bieber, NYC billionaires are competing for this $36K gym membership
Celebrities and Billionaires based in NYC have to fight and wait on their toes for the membership of a gym that not only has no showers but has only 2 unisex lavatories. Read more below.
New York's most Instagrammed gym, frequented by celebrities and billionaires alike, is tucked away in the vogue neighbourhood of Tribeca, Manhattan.
Garnering to its wealthy and famous members the gym- Dogpound, offers unlimited personal training sessions from Olympic weightlifting to weight loss, a sleek boxing ring, state-of-the-art equipment and diagnostic body exams to its less than 100 members.
The gym with another branch in LA is a kingpin in the health and wellness industry with an estimated worth of $450 BILLION annually. Additionally, it accompanies gyms like E by Equinox as one of the top gyms that the mega New Yorkers visit.
Visited by stars like Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber and Cindy Crawford, this exclusive gym that charges $36K for membership, interestingly, has absolutely no showers and only 2 unisex lavatories. It has a spartan changing room with lockers for personal belongings and small black benches for resting on, but much less besides.
According to Jenny Liu, the gym had been trying to install showers since its opening in 2016 but had been obstructed by building regulations.
Kirk Meyers, 44, founder of the gym Dogpound, stated he wanted the “juxtaposition of the concrete jungle with nitty gritty” for the New York branch and explained the brand as “chic but rough”.
“I don’t know if that means not showering,” he said in an interview with The Telegraph.
Hugh Jackman inspired Dogpound
The gym which boasts a following of more than 521,000 followers on Instagram was started by the owner, Kirk, in 2016 when he began training Hugh Jackman who began bringing his dog and friends to the workouts.
The group came to be known as Dogpound and since then has been invested in by model Adriana Lima and actor Tom Holland.
Jenny is of the view that while the gym's membership may seem “like a very high price,” it offers “a lot of value” to the people who train every day of the week.
Maurice Whyte, 36, an expert in animal flow, has been a personal trainer at Dogpound for about 2 years and states that the factor that keeps bringing the mega names of New York there is that they “want to go to a gym where it feels normal to you to be among your peers”.
He shared that being "publicly affiliated" allows people to feel, “OK, I’m Gisele Bündchen, I’m Maria Borges, I want to go to train at these places because my type of calibre of people are there and it’s going to be normal.”
Additionally, he added that members look at fitness “long term” and choose to pay upfront “like your Amazon Prime or so forth, and then you’re done worrying about it for the rest of the year”.
