Walk into almost any fitness studio in Australia right now and you’ll find a familiar lineup: HIIT, reformer Pilates, yoga, and cycle. All solid. All proven. And all increasingly indistinguishable from the studio down the road.
For studio owners and independent instructors, the challenge isn’t attracting fitness enthusiasts – it’s attracting people who have quietly stopped bothering. The individuals who find traditional gym culture intimidating, uninspiring, or simply joyless. The ones who liked the idea of getting fit, but never quite connected with the execution.
That is exactly the gap a new Australian concept called Fitesque is positioning itself to fill, and it’s doing so with a licensing model specifically designed to work inside your existing operation, without significant upfront investment.
Here’s what fitness professionals need to know.
What Is Fitesque?
Fitesque is a 50-minute, full-body fitness class built around the pillars of burlesque – not as performance, but as a philosophy. Founded by Australian dance and fitness educator Melony Cherrett, a former dancer and showgirl, the concept fuses playful choreography with genuine strength and cardio work, packaged in an experience that feels nothing like a conventional group fitness class.
The class ethos, summed up in founder Melony Cherrett’s own words: “Boas over burpees.”
“Fitesque is about celebrating strength, sensuality and self-belief,” says Cherrett. “Redefining how people experience movement, so they leave feeling confident, connected and alive.”
That’s the consumer pitch. But if you’re a fitness professional or studio owner reading this, the more important question is: what does the business model actually look like?
Why Fitness Professionals Should Be Paying Attention
The fitness industry has a retention problem, and it’s not being solved by another HIIT format.
Research consistently shows that when people exercise for enjoyment rather than aesthetics alone, they stick with it longer. Joy-based, experience-led fitness formats such as the global phenomenon of Zumba in the 2010s, or the more recent rise of dance cardio across social media, attract demographics that traditional fitness formats consistently miss.
Fitesque is targeting one of the most commercially underserved groups in Australian fitness: women who have disengaged from the gym environment due to intimidation, body image concerns, or a simple lack of joy in the experience. For studio owners, these are not lapsed members… they are people who have never truly been converted in the first place.
A class that genuinely addresses that demographic doesn’t cannibalise your existing timetable. It expands your potential audience.
Importantly, Fitesque is already generating strong inbound interest from both independent instructors and multi-site studios while still in pre-launch phase, which signals genuine market appetite, not just novelty.
The Instructor Licensing Program: What's Actually Involved
This is the detail that matters most to fitness professionals considering whether Fitesque fits their business.
No strict prerequisites are required to enter the program. While a background in dance, fitness, or performance is considered beneficial, Cherrett has deliberately designed the licensing program to be accessible and inclusive. What the program prioritises is confidence, energy, and a genuine passion for empowering others through movement.
This is a commercially savvy decision: it dramatically widens the pool of potential instructors and removes a barrier that would otherwise slow expansion.
The Fitesque Instructor Licensing Program delivers training through the FLIRT platform — Fitesque’s dedicated onboarding system — and includes:
- Structured choreography, class structure, and coaching delivered online
- Brand, community, and confidence-building frameworks
- Ongoing support, content updates, and instructor resources post-certification
- Access to a growing national instructor community
For studios, the model allows multiple instructors to complete certification and begin offering classes as part of their timetable. This means redundancy — no single-point-of-failure reliance on one instructor — and the ability to run the class across different time slots to maximise revenue potential.
The investment: Instructor certification is normally priced at $1,000 per individual. As part of Fitesque’s launch campaign at the Dance Expo in Sydney (April 11–12), a limited-time introductory rate of $600 was offered to early movers — a clear signal that the brand is motivated to build instructor volume quickly.
The BeWell Brands Partnership: Why It Changes the Risk Calculation
For fitness professionals evaluating any new licensing concept, the brand behind it matters as much as the concept itself. A compelling class delivered by an under-resourced operator is a risk. A compelling class backed by serious commercial infrastructure is a different proposition.
Fitesque is part of the BeWell Brands ecosystem, and that partnership deserves your attention.
BeWell Brands is led by CEO and Managing Director Elaine Jobson, a well-known figure in the Australian and global fitness industry. Jobson’s track record includes growing the Jetts Fitness brand into a nationally and internationally recognised operation. It’s a franchise and licensing success story that remains one of the more instructive examples of scalable fitness brand building in this market.
Critically, BeWell’s involvement with Fitesque is described as hands-on, not advisory or passive. The partnership provides Fitesque with:
- Deep expertise in franchise and licensing models
- Proven global expansion capability
- Operational systems and commercial infrastructure
- Access to an established international fitness network
This matters for studio owners and instructors for a straightforward reason: the supporting infrastructure behind a licensing concept directly determines whether the concept grows, stagnates, or quietly disappears. BeWell Brands has the systems and the track record to scale this deliberately and responsibly.
How the Fitesque Dance Fitness Model Works in Practice
Fitesque has been built with a deliberately flexible, capital-light approach, which is good news for studios considering adding it to their offering.
In the short to medium term, the focus is on enabling instructors to deliver Fitesque within existing studios and community halls, and helping studio owners integrate it into their current timetable as a new revenue stream. No dedicated space is required. No major fit-out. No significant upfront outlay beyond the certification cost.
For a studio already running group fitness timetables, adding a weekly or twice-weekly Fitesque class is operationally straightforward. The class requires no specialist equipment and can run in a standard studio space.
Longer term, Fitesque’s vision includes dedicated flagship experiences and branded studio environments — but the founders are clear that the current priority is accessibility and scalability. Getting instructors certified and generating revenue quickly is the immediate objective.
This sequencing makes commercial sense. It mirrors the playbook of other successful fitness licensing models: build instructor volume and prove demand first, then develop premium brand environments as the concept matures.
What Kinds of Fitness Studio Owners Should Seriously Consider This?
Fitesque is not the right fit for every studio or every instructor, but for the right operator, it represents a genuine opportunity.
Studio owners who are looking to differentiate their timetable, attract a new demographic, and add an incremental revenue stream without a significant capital commitment should be paying close attention. Particularly those in markets where reformer Pilates and HIIT have become commoditised.
Independent instructors – especially those with a dance, performance, or group fitness background who are looking to add a signature offering to their repertoire will find the licensing model provides not just a class format, but a brand, a community, and ongoing support infrastructure.
Operators targeting the female 25–55 demographic specifically will find Fitesque speaks directly to the joy-and-confidence motivation that research shows drives this cohort’s exercise decisions more than aesthetic outcomes alone.
What Fitesque is probably not is a fit for pure performance studios, functional fitness facilities, or any operator whose existing brand skews heavily masculine or athletic. Fit matters — both ways.
New fitness formats launch in Australia constantly, and most don’t survive contact with the market. What makes Fitesque worth a more serious look than the average new concept is the combination of three factors: a genuinely differentiated class experience, a commercially sophisticated licensing model, and serious operational backing from a team that has scaled fitness brands before.
The concept targets a real gap, being the large and underserved pool of Australian women who haven’t yet found a fitness format that genuinely resonates with them. The licensing structure has been designed to grow fast while remaining capital-light for both instructors and studios. And the BeWell Brands partnership provides the infrastructure that separates a sustainable business from a short-lived trend.
Whether you’re a studio owner looking for your next point of differentiation, or an instructor looking for a signature offering, Fitesque is worth investigating now, before the market in your area is spoken for.
The Fitesque Instructor Licensing Program is currently open for enquiries from both individual instructors and studio operators across Australia.
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