Anne-Worley and Mike Moelter
In 2008, just two months before the financial crises hit the US, Anne-Worley Moelter and her husband Mike Moelter finished the final round of fundraising for their climbing gym in Boulder, Colorado. Their gym, Movement Climbing and Fitness, would become one of the highest profile climbing facilities in the country, partly because of its prime location in the heart of climbing’s own “Hollywood”, and partly because of the laser-like focus of the operation itself.
CBJ talked with Anne-Worley and Mike back in October of 2014 while they were in the midst of building their second facility in Denver, Colorado. Here are their insights, in their own words, on expansion, real estate, luck, the climbing industry and community.
Building a Second Location
“Last time, when we started Boulder, we had all these ideas. How do we make them real and how are they going to work. [Now] we at least have an idea of what we’re doing. We have the experience of Boulder and learning about the gym industry.” AWM
“We’re doing another ground up so we can control a lot of the variables. If we were using an existing building the second time around it would feel a lot like the first time. We wouldn’t know what the final product would look like, what the interactions will be like in the social areas. But since we are doing ground up again, it’s a lot more fun, a lot more enjoyable because we know what the finished product will look like. When you walk in you’re at this stage where it’s a big construction site, you don’t freak out that it’s going to be a construction site forever. That it’s going to be filthy and paint or sawdust. It all gets cleaned up and becomes a finished building.” MM
“We went with a really specific offering in Boulder and we just want to translate that to Denver. But the community is going to be vastly different. I think the median route grade in Boulder is 5.11b and down here [in Denver] it’s going to be 10b.” MM
“We know what the Denver market is. But we don’t know what the Movement Denver market is. Who they are specifically? We’re going to come in with our best efforts to meet them. Then over time it will evolve.” AWM
“We typically have one big focus group. We had a group of people that ranged from…the youngest age was 24 and the oldest age was a mother in her mid forties. It was a wide enough range to give us diversity. From pro climber, to enthusiast, to never climbed before.” AWM
“In Boulder we did a similar thing. There we did an exercise to clue in on what core values resonate with them. Our commitment to community, does that work, are we on track with our branding. And here in Denver for example, we had them circle words that they think describes climbing. Everything from exhilarating to scary, from great work out to social gathering. We also talked about what they thought makes for good customer service.” AWM
“One thing that came out of that process is that we’re considering opening earlier in the morning here in Denver. Because it seems that the work crowd starts earlier than they do in Boulder. We also got really helpful feedback on what good customer service is. Things like, even if whatever the customer is saying is incorrect, showing empathy and that you can at least hear them. This seems kinda basic but it was really helpful to get it down in their own words. We got some feedback about child care that was really good. Just that there be some programming behind it and not just come in and someone watches your kid.” AWM
Movement Denver
Real Estate and Timing
“Boulder was very different. In Boulder we didn’t know if it would work because the property was so valuable. We put together all these different models. At one point we had a 12,000 sf climbing gym with like 8 condos on the property… and a lot of other financial models. Then we just said if we can’t make the financial model of just a climbing gym on the property work then we need to find a different property.” MM
“If you were going to tell me 6 years ago when we were building Boulder, that between then and now no one would have built a [new climbing] gym in Denver I would have been really surprised.” MM
“The Denver metro area is 2.8 million people. Denver itself is around 700,000. I think down here [in Denver], based on what we have seen elsewhere in the country, that there could be a number of gyms here and they would do just fine.” AWM
“In 2012 when we started looking in Denver for the property things were just unfreezing from the financial crises. In 2013 we actually bought the property…there was this window of about a year and now [the price of real estate] has skyrocketed. If we were looking now, we probably wouldn’t be able to do it. We’d have to lease or…I don’t know what we’d do. Timing wise we got really lucky.” MM
“We’ve had significant developers come in here just to check things out. And they’re just like, tear down the walls and build a [marijuana] grow house. You could have 50’ tall plants and you could get $65 a square foot for a lease.” MM
“Financing is always a lot of work so I don’t want to make this sound like a breeze. But it was markedly easier than it was in Boulder. The first time was the classic situation, you have 20 meetings and you get one investor. A lot of the ease [this time around] is because we had a proven track record and we had a relationship with a local bank. And then with the investors we filled our commitments and still had people asking to be involved which was a fabulous experience to go through.” AWM
The Industry
“A lot of gyms are … people use this term … land grab. People say, ‘we gotta be the first to go here and here and we can have seven gyms in four years’. For us, that’s not our model.” AWM
“In 2009 very few [gyms] had gone out of state. It was this move to bigger gyms. Now you see all the little pop-ups. The industry is changing and evolving. I think people are really looking to see what fits their demographic. Is it a big gym, is it a small gym? Is it bouldering, is it ropes?” AWM
“The argument that we’ve been saying is, yes, [the industry has] grown a ton, and it’s going to grow even more. But I don’t know if its necessarily changed. People for the most part offer the typical climbing gym. They don’t necessarily have a ton foresight towards routesetting and they think they’re going to do groups but they’re not sure, they’d prefer not to. But they feel like they have to default to doing birthday parties and autobelays. And so in my opinion there hasn’t been a ton of change but there’s been a ton of growth.” MM
“Right now the real estate that the gyms are on is more valuable than the business. But for us personally Movement is way more about community … for example this one member of ours in Boulder had a bunch of surgeries and I was sitting with her and a friend. She was telling me that her twice a week interval instructor at Movement came to see her and all these members went to visit her in the hospital. And that’s the kind of stuff for us that…that’s why we do this. The climbing is amazing, all the added yoga and fitness components are great. But at the end of the day it’s really about having people feel like they belong somewhere. That’s always been before the financial opportunity.” AWM
“I firmly believe, at the end of the day that a climbing gym run by climbers is going to prevail. That’s my person opinion. I could be wrong but the sport has been around long enough, the communities are strong enough, there’s enough people around that know what a good climbing gym is and they know what they want out of a climbing gym that climbing gyms will start to prevail.” MM
USA Climbing, the national governing body of competitive climbing in America and their international counterpart, the International Federation of Sport Climbing have both released new brand identities this month.
These rebranding efforts come at a time when the profile of climbing is higher than it has ever been before. In their announcements both organizations pointed to the growing awareness of the sport and the need to market to the general public.
The IFSC stated in their press release, “This fast growing recognition along with the unique character of the sport led the IFSC to change its logo to be more representative of its current values, international status and abounding development projects.”
Kynan Waggoner, CEO of USAC, told CBJ in an email interview that they wanted to update their brand, “To make sure that the USA Climbing brand has primary brand recognition by the climbing public and the general public…”
Left: New USAC logo. Right: Old USAC logo
No More Alphabet Soup
While USAC’s flashy new logo is the centerpiece of this rebranding effort, perhaps the biggest change for American climbers will be the retiring of the various brands within USAC: American Bouldering Series (ABS), Sport Climbing Series (SCS), and Collegiate Climbing Series (CCS). Rather than having separate, and competing, brand names for each of these disciplines, the event names will be replaced with “descriptive verbiage to describe our different disciplines,” Waggoner said.
This represents a major change for competitive climbing in the US, particularly for the ABS brand, which was created by Scott Renek in 1999, and has been a successful brand ever since.
“The ABS brand has, over the years, been quite successful for us within the climbing community – but that is a very small portion of the folks that we’re trying to reach,” Waggoner explained. “We’ve repeatedly received feedback from our sponsors and new members that they just do not understand all of the acronyms that we use, and we have identified that the use of these acronyms have come at the expense of the recognition of the USA Climbing brand.”
Each discipline will, at the end of the 2015 season, use a simpler language to describe the activity; ABS will become simply, USAC Bouldering.
New USAC logos
In USAC’s press release announcing the change, Waggoner said, “Over the years, we’ve come to realize that our logo and branding is dated and that it sorely needed some refreshment and direction.” He went on to say, “By designing an updated icon and logo plan, we hope to eliminate some of the confusion that the new participant experiences when participating in our events and also give our organization and its promotional materials a fresh and modern look and feel.”
Timing and the Website
Waggoner told CBJ that it was pure coincidence that USA Climbing’s rebranding was announced at the same time as IFSC’s rebranding. The timing of this effort, he said, has more to do with the development of a future USAC website.
That’s welcome news for many USAC members who have been requesting a website overhaul for many years. Waggoner understands people are eager for a new online presence for USAC, but he is committed to making sure the organization is doing things strategically. “We didn’t want to launch a new website with the old branding (as we knew that a rebranding initiative was imminent), so we decided to start from the ground up and develop the new visual elements of the USA Climbing brand before starting the process of website development,” Waggoner said.
A New International Flag
The IFSC has had the same logo since their inception and break away from the UIAA in 2007. The new logo is meant to invoke all the values the IFSC holds. Anne Fuynel, IFSC Marketing & Communications Director said in their press release: “We wanted to develop an identity that appeals to everyone not only to climbers, one that also shows our values.” She goes on to list the values the new logo will attempt to get across: “sport for all, universality, gender equity, healthy body and mind, dynamic, challenging.”
Left: New IFSC logo. Right: Old IFSC logo
“This new identity represents all these values and is designed to be understood by everyone all over the world,” Fuynel added. “The new logo has been designed to be clear, aerial, universal and promote gender equity.”
Marco Scolaris, President of the IFSC said in the press release, “We are absolutely delighted to see sport climbing booming, with new climbers every day and hundreds of new gyms opening every year all over the world.” As an example he notes that the BMC (British Mountaineering Council) has increased their number of licensees by 115 % from 2010 to 2015 and the CMA (Chinese Mountaineering Association) has reported a growth of 54% in the construction of new climbing walls between 2012 and 2015.
During the last few years, the IFSC has spread its wings outside Europe, with several stages of World Cup competitions being held in the Americas and Asia. The IFSC press release also gave some insight into the demographics of the international competitor by stating the average age of the international athletes is around 20 years old, and 56% are between 16 and 24.
Though unverified they also state that in the last two years the TV coverage of the IFSC events has increased significantly and the live streaming of each IFSC event on YouTube has occured in 210 different countries.
If you would like to know more about competition history and how the organizations fit together, check out CBJ’s Comp Explainer.
Press Release:
BOULDER, Colorado (March 18, 2015) – Head Rush Technologies is pleased to announce Walltopia Ltd. as the newest distributor partner serving climbing wall and adventure recreation customers around the world. Based in Bulgaria, Walltopia is the largest provider of climbing walls in the world.
“Head Rush Technologies continues to expand our long list of international and domestic distributor partnerships with the addition of Walltopia; joining other climbing wall builders Eldorado Climbing Walls and Entre Prises as worldwide suppliers of the TRUBLUE Auto Belay. These partnerships allow owners and operators of current and future climbing gyms to work directly with their builder to include the world’s leading auto belay device in their projects,” says Bill Carlson, Director of Channel Sales at Head Rush Technologies.
All Head Rush distributors are authorized to sell all Head Rush products, including the TRUBLUE Auto Belay, QUICKjump Free Fall Device, zipSTOP Zip Line Brake, and associated product accessories. View a list of our distributors at headrushtech.com/distributors/.