Elevating a product MVP to a full-fledged digital fitness concierge

The St. James is a 450,000-square foot health club in Northern Virginia that offers cutting-edge amenities—including an Olympic-size pool, full gym, basketball courts, ice rinks, and more—to help members turn their health and wellness aspirations into action. The club initially engaged 3Pillar Global to build a digital valet application to connect members with personal training sessions, group fitness classes, wellness evaluations, and equipment availability, but things changed in early 2020.

With the onset of COVID, the client’s desire to build a digital valet app pivoted significantly to hone in on simply helping members get back into their fitness routines as safely as possible. This included focusing the new app on features that helped staff control facility capacity and members fill out health attestation forms, and also supported contact tracing.

With these capabilities, The St. James launched the app as an MVP: sufficient to deliver upon basic user requirements, but insufficient for achieving increased member engagement. They then began actively searching for new opportunities to scale the app’s capabilities, provide more value and increase member usage, and 3Pillar seized the opportunity, leveraging our expertise in strategic planning, product development, UX/UI, and more to develop a roadmap to support the club’s growth and engagement goals.

The St. James leveraged 3Pillar as a major arm of their product development organization, integrating our team members with their own. As quarantine orders were lifted, we expanded the app to include a number of features that helped create a more positive user experience, including enabling customers and staff to:

• Secure reservations for fitness center machines
• Manage pool lane capacity
• Book turf fields and hockey rink access
• Obtain water park passes
• Schedule day-care center reservations

About a year after the launch, The St. James acquired a company with their own application, later rebranded as Strivers. Strivers complemented the club’s existing mobile app by serving as a platform for their personal training staff to post workouts and other content.

To deliver upon The St. James’ vision of providing an “omni-channel training and wellness experience, whether one is at the Washington-area flagship complex or at home,” our team worked to bridge the gap between the two applications by enabling The St. James members to access Strivers content and take their workouts home, and Strivers members to purchase day passes for The St. James facilities when in the area.

Together, 3Pillar Global and The St. James have developed a strong relationship of trust that enables continued innovation. The partnership has opened the door to a plethora of business benefits—including membership growth, reduced churn, and additional revenue streams. On the whole, 3Pillar Global tangibly contributes to The St. James’s broader efforts to continually improve the experiences they offer to members.

“3Pillar Global has been instrumental in our growth and success over the past several years. Not only do they build products that materially benefit our business, their team works seamlessly with our internal talent, providing both data-driven strategic direction and expert tactical execution.”

Craig A. A. Dixon, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, The St. James