Exploring Life & Business with Dale Stabler and Elizabeth Endres of Sweats & The City

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dale Stabler and Elizabeth Endres.

Hi Dale and Elizabeth, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Sweats & The City was created out of shared need back in 2016. We were roommates at the time in NYC and were very much into exploring the booming boutique fitness scene. When we got home from work at the end of each day, we’d talk about the classes we had tried. We were both seeking out an unbiased review platform that would give us honest insights into all these classes. We were in search of details such as how sweaty you get if they had showers / blowdriers, who the best instructors were, and so on. Because at the time, this didn’t exist, we decided to start writing reviews of our own and sending them out to our friends. Eventually, this led to us putting them on a blog, and Sweats & The City was born!

We began expanding to different cities, especially Los Angeles. Once the pandemic hit (like most of the world), we started exploring our virtual fitness options. We noticed a trend in virtual fitness: there were so many incredible instructors who had started their own methods + platforms, many of which had lost their studio jobs and wanted to continue teaching. Since we had spent years already cultivating our community, our thought was to give them a platform to share their amazing workouts and reach a wider audience. We also knew there were so many platforms already in existence, and consumers didn’t want to subscribe to a bunch, they wanted a curated, all-in-one platform. On top of that, our community wanted a schedule so they could take out a lot of the decision-making around their workouts and self-care. With years of experience reviewing classes and seeking out the best studios and instructors, we put our heads together and created a platform & app to encompass all of the above.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Definitely, the pandemic was a big turn of events for us, like most people. When businesses shut their doors with no indication of when things would reopen, we were quite nervous about the direction of Sweats & The City. Not to mention, a lot of our brand partnerships had to abruptly stop and even some partnerships that owed us money went silent on us. We were extremely fortunate that we could pivot quickly and not have to worry about keeping a storefront afloat like many businesses. Early into lockdown, we started gathering information of virtual workouts so we could start sharing lists of online workout promotional deals, live schedules of instructors who were teaching workouts via IG live and Zoom Live and much more. Our intention was to show up for our community and hope that we could figure it out as we went along. The live schedule gained a ton of traction, which led us to starting our own platform.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Our goal has always been to discover and share recommendations in the fitness, health and wellness space. We’ve since expanded to beauty and fashion. When we initially launched, we were focused solely on studio reviews! At the time, we created it because we personally wanted the studio reviews ourselves. We found there was a gap in the fitness market between trainers/studios and class attendees and wanted our community to be informed going into their boutique fitness classes.

We are very proud of how Sweats & The City has evolved. We built out different aspects of Sweats & The City to make fitness and health more accessible and convenient for our community, and we plan to keep doing so! We launched ORRO: the gold standard of boutique virtual fitness & wellness to provide a destination for wellness rituals, going beyond a typical workout platform. With weekly schedules and an on-demand library made up of hand-picked, live fitness classes, meditation sessions, sound baths + so much more. Our personal experience has allowed us to encapsulate our knowledge and provide a product that will help our users establish a daily routine (centered around both physical + mental health). It’s $19 a month and you can try it 7 days free.

Most recently, we co-founded a new, exciting project: theheard! This app is where all our city recommendations live: everything from our favorite lymphatic drainage, fitness studios, facials, doctors and so much more. It’s the ultimate destination to find and share recommendations! It’s free to use and download.

Pricing:

• $19 a month: ORRO

Contact Info:

• Website: www.orroapp.com
• Instagram: @sweatandthecity
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sweatsandthecity/
• Other: sweatsandcity.com

Image Credits
Lindy Lin Photography