How the right foundation helped Corevibe grow 4x in seven months

Michelle Liu built her life around movement. She swam competitively at Stanford, then moved into a corporate career while teaching fitness on the side. Reformer Pilates came later, and it stuck: years of competitive swimming had worn her body down, and its low-impact intensity was exactly what she needed. For years she turned down chances to open a studio of her own, never quite feeling the timing was right. About a year ago, she stopped waiting and opened Corevibe.

Opening her first studio raised an early question: what to build it on. Michelle wanted a platform that would partner with her rather than box her in, flexible enough to shape the studio exactly as she imagined and free of the frustrations she had hit as an instructor on other software. After a lot of research, she found it in Arketa.

Curious what led Michelle to choose Arketa over others? Book a demo to find out.

The problem

Choosing a foundation, not just a place to take bookings

Building a studio from nothing meant choosing the system everything would run on before a single class was booked. Michelle wanted a clean slate. Years of teaching across other booking platforms had shown her exactly which frustrations she did not want to inherit.

Some of those frustrations were basic and costly. On MindBody, she had watched checkout fail mid-class when the payment connection went down, and seen clients turn up holding booking confirmations for classes that were already full. For a founder whose entire brand rests on how supported a client feels from the first tap to the front desk, those were not small misses. They were the gap between the experience she wanted to deliver and the one the software allowed.

She also knew Corevibe would never be a single-format studio. Reformer classes and recovery sessions needed to live together, memberships needed to flex, and the whole thing needed room to grow into digital programming and loyalty later on. She was choosing a foundation, not just a place to take bookings.

The solution

Found it as a client. Chose it as a founder.

Michelle actually found Arketa as a client. On a trip to New York she took a class at The Ness, a low-impact trampoline cardio and sculpt studio, and was struck by how clean and easy the booking felt as a brand-new client. The experience stayed with her. When it came time to build Corevibe, she researched intensely with a spreadsheet full of platforms and reviews, and Arketa kept standing out for the reasons that matter to a founder thinking years ahead.

Arketa provided the option of customizable bundles, which lets her pair reformer classes with recovery sessions (called Reset at Corevibe) and insert a recovery session into membership perks. The branded app gave her a path toward the digital programming she wants to launch in the coming months. The gamification of Challenges and Achievements told her the platform was growing and innovating in the same direction she was. And the support reassured her more than any single feature.

"I call Arketa my team, my back-end team who can help fix things. I never have more than a 24-hour delay getting an answer."

Michelle Liu
Founder of Corevibe Studio

The results

Revenue quadrupled. Run exactly the way she wants.

Seven months in, the growth is clear: monthly revenue has more than quadrupled since the studio's first full month of operation.

At Corevibe, recovery is its own service, not an add-on. Alongside the reformer classes, clients book Reset sessions in a dedicated room with compression boots and red light therapy, and Arketa runs both sides of the business as one. Two distinct services, one membership, one platform.

Michelle runs her own marketing automations through Arketa, triggered by where each client is in their journey. A first-class buy-one-get-one offer rolls automatically into a four-class pack the moment a client finishes it, an unlock that arrives at exactly the right point in the relationship, and the timing shows in the numbers: roughly two in three clients who reach that four-class pack go on to buy again.

"I found the automations to be a wildly powerful tool. When someone finishes our buy-one-get-one offer, they automatically get a message that they've unlocked a four-class pack. It's highly segmented and nuanced, and the conversion rates have been really high."

Michelle Liu
Founder of Corevibe Studio

Another automation she relies on: Arketa can automatically comp the monthly no-show and late-cancel fees for clients that it pertains to. This not only saves Michelle time by removing a manual follow-up, but it also mitigates the risk of not collecting the fee by removing a potentially uncomfortable conversation and opportunity for client pushback.

Day to day, Michelle runs the studio from Arketa's dashboards. She reviews customized reports every morning, tracks who is no-showing or late-canceling, and works out where the client experience can be tightened. Client check-ins and checkout run through the same system, with a point-of-sale option for anyone without a card on file.

The branded app gives Corevibe a storefront of its own. Through the app builder, Michelle noted that she’s able to seamlessly keep promo cards current with upcoming events and promotions and structure the layout of her app with ease.

Corevibe’s message to other studio owners

Arketa is deep, and for a first-time owner that depth can feel like a lot. What carried Michelle was the Arketa team and how they helped her with each question with patience and empathy. Seven months in, she still counts herself in onboarding, learning each new tool as it ships, and her advice to other founders is to build the same way: little by little, without expecting to know it all on day one.

"I feel really grateful since, as a studio owner, you're trying to do everything at once, and having a team that's giving you grace and a little empathy has been really great. I feel like I have another team with the Arketa Team."

Michelle Liu
Founder of Corevibe Studio

Looking ahead, Michelle plans to launch digital programming in the coming months and is eager to lean into Arketa's loyalty tools, Challenges and Achievements, as Corevibe continues to grow.

Opening a studio from the ground up or want more automations built in? See what Arketa can do. Book a demo.‍