Hyper-growth
The Bay Club Company
Bay Club runs premium health, fitness, and lifestyle resorts on the West Coast, offering top-tier sports facilities, wellness programs, social events, dining, and spa services. In the earlier stages of the company, their locations were primarily located in the Bay Area, California. Previously they were known as Western Athletic Clubs with locations operating under Bay Club, Pacific Athletic Club, and Decathlon Club names. They have since rebranded as The Bay Club Company with all locations folding under the Bay Club name.
Overview
In 2015, Bay Club doubled its portfolio by acquiring Spectrum Athletic Clubs, adding 13 locations, two country clubs, and an urban club in Santana Row (San Jose, CA). I was the lead designer and was tasked with ownership and delivery of all design needs across the duration of the acquisition, providing creative direction to a remote creative team. To ensure a smooth transition, key goals included onboarding Spectrum employees, rebranding all newly-acquired locations, and streamlining marketing operations across the portfolio.
By Q4 of 2015, Bay Club also updated its annual membership communication for 40,000 members, incorporating the new membership structure and a unified operations guide for all 26 properties.
Stakeholders
York Capital Management
CEO
COO
CFO
SVP Marketing
SVP Operations
SVP Sales
Legal Counsel
Area Management
NorCal/SoCal Sales Directors
Key partners
NorCal/SoCal Marketing Directors
Social Media Manager
General Contractors
Swirl Integrated Marketing
Image Vendors
O N EConverging teams
Onboarding Spectrum Athletic Clubs
The key to merging the two businesses was uniting their employee bases. Bay Club tasked me in leading the brand development of their annual leadership conference and art direct event presentations. Previously, the Shine Management Retreat used simple type-based styling without a branded element. With the new acquisition, the executive leadership team felt it needed a more strategic and polished approach. It’s with this in mind that I developed the Shine conference brand, a symbol of the union of companies moving forward “hand-in-hand.”
Creating the Shine brand system
When developing the Shine brand, I anticipated the transition to occur over multiple years. Given the Shine leadership retreats were a recurring event, I created a brand system inclusive of the logo, keynote templates, and motion graphics—all outlined in a style guide.
Designing executive keynotes
In preparation for the leadership conference, I assumed the role of creative director for the conference and all the required assets. I lead a small team of 3 graphic designers for all printed materials. Due to the critical nature of the presentation delivery, I designed at 5 keynote presentations for the conference, inclusive of motion graphic assets and video production of prior-evening events to be presented next day.
T W OBoots on the ground
Rebranding Southern California
The company was familia with my hospitality operations background prior to becoming a graphic designer. Given my skill set, I was tasked with leading a small creative team to lead design of the initial rebrand of Spectrum Athletic Clubs. This started with a full audit of each location’s marketing materials, sales tools, aesthetics, and communication systems, and deciding what to keep, replace, or remove. Afterwards, I oversaw all fabrication and installation work across the LA market.
As part of the rebrand, we also designed custom gallery walls for each club—key sales tools for membership directors to share the Bay Club story. I also established a partnership with Woodsnap to produce these walls.
The entire physical rebrand took 300 hours over three weeks.
Igniting a new fitness presence
During my time in the region, I observed an opportunity to better integrate the Bay Club brand into the region. To help us gain more immediate traction with fitness programming, I partnered with the Regional Programming director to produce a short but effective video to launch Bay Club branded fitness programing in the LA market.
Rebranding Bay Club Santana Row
Right after rebranding Bay Club LA, the company acquired a new property in Santana Row, a luxury shopping center in San Jose, CA. With a 48-hour weekend before an investor tour, I was tasked to rebrand the facility using only available resources. Since a forthcoming $1M+ renovation was being planned, we opted for cost-effective, quickly produced branded posters to create a cohesive look in time for the tour, across all current placements.
T H R E EMembership communication
Programming awareness
After successfully rebranding Southern California and assessing its marketing operations, I set the foundation for a new Marketing Director to take over and launch Bay Club LA. Together, we developed The Latest—an integrated print and digital campaign. Collaborating with the Social Media Manager and development team, we used the company membership blog One Lombard as the central hub for Bay Club LA updates, covering events, sales, and operations. This allowed the team to manage a centralized system of event updates while also onboarding the new membership base to the current communication methods.
Integrating Country Clubs
In the midst of the transition, Bay Club also acquired a set of country clubs to integrate into the portfolio. In order to seamlessly converge all membership bases and scale the company’s offerings, I partnered closely with the SVP of Administration and Legal Counsel to develop all necessary documentation for Bay Club’s ownership transition. Each facility received a custom set of rigorously reviewed documents, tailored to its unique operations. Additionally, I created informational videos that became key sales tools for the Country Club locations.
F O U RIntroducing the new portfolio
A whole new membership experience
With the LA region fully onboarded and the country club acquisitions complete, we began developing the 2016 Membership Communication Package. I designed a coffee table-style piece set the design direction for the forthcoming year and also doubled as the company’s primary branded sales tool.
Given the sensitive and evolving nature of the information, the books underwent multiple revisions over the course of three months. The main 2016 Membership Book highlighted Bay Club’s offerings, while the 2016 Membership Information + Guidelines book standardized operations across all 26 properties.
Introducing: Lifestyle points
In conjunction with the 2016 Membership Book, we launched a new Member Rewards/Retention Program across the entire portfolio of properties. I designed and partnered with our lean engineering team to implement a responsive landing page that could easily be edited as the program was finalized.