What are the top 3 classes among students
For the past 5 years, I have been a frequent student to a Yoga centre in Singapore. The point of this article is to share some interesting discovery about yoga classes in the centre by looking at their class schedule over 1.5 months (1 Dec 2020–15 Jan 2021). Note that this Yoga centre has many studios. The class schedule together with public booking data is able to tell us:
Disclaimer: The insights are specific to this yoga centre and should be taken as relative “truth” because behind the scene, it’s constrained by studio capacity and teacher capacity which I don’t have access to. With that, let’s dive in.
For the period of 1.5 months, there were 2.8k classes, which is equivalent to 62 classes per day. Of course, this number doesn’t tell us whether it’s high or low as there’s no comparison basis.
My bet is more on the second point where 62 classes/day is lower than usual because I believe the studio is default maximised.
More than 50% of classes are Power Flow, Basics and Hot Basics. It’s coincident (or not) because these are the top 3 classes I usually go to. It shows the centre’s target audience: beginner - immediate students (like me). Next in the line is Core, Hot Core and Power that take up 29.6% of total classes. These top classes are all studio classes. Again, do take into constraints like online classes are “unlimited” mats so they do not need so many online classes.
With specific to online classes, they take up about 10% of total classes. But within online realm, Power Flow, Basics, Core and Flow&Zen (in that order) are top class types (80% of total online classes).
Looking at the class type number (which is not shared here), class distribution in online classes are more even than studio ones (Studio has a lot of long tail / funky classes). The strategy seems to be: running experiment classes in studio and online classes only run confirmed popular classes.
As a frequent student, I usually thought weekend is the most crowded time but I couldn’t be more wrong. Popular class time is defined by the number of mats (not classes) offered during that time (regardless of online or studio). Timing wise, top 3 timings are 12:30–13:30, 17:30–18:30 and 10:00–11:00. I’m not surprised about the 12:30–13:30 as I presume it’s lunch time. I guess the 17:30–18:30 caters to crowd who starts work at 8:30 or before that. For 10:00–11:00, I’m not sure who would be the target audience and surprisingly, for this slot, the mats filled are 95.27% (compared to other 2 whose mats filled is around 77%). Who could they be?
Then how about date of the week? Monday till Thursday seems to be the most popular timing while the number of classes decrease from Friday and over the weekend. Again, take it with a pinch of salt given the studio location, it is to cater to work crowds rather than resident crowds. For myself, I usually go weekend and maybe I feel it’s packed because it has fewer classes to choose from.
This is a fun one. Aside from the significant volume of studio classes compared to online cousin, there are 2 insights worth highlighting:
During the analysis period, there was 1 teacher that taught 116 classes in the 1.5 month period, meaning 2 classes/day. Kudos to the teacher!
Among teachers who taught 80 classes and above, the highest % mats filled for 1 teacher is 90%, but other teachers’ % mats filled are actually not much lower. The lowest % mats filled is 80%. I guess regardless of teacher, studio classes are doing pretty well.
Online classes tell a different story. The difference in attendance across teachers is much more obvious. A popular teacher can have 80% mats filled while a “not-so-popular” one hits 29% mats filled with a comparable amount of classes.
Though weekday has more classes/day than weekend, studio turns out to have more empty hours in weekday more than weekend. Empty hour refers to the opportunity of having at least 1 studio class during the “empty slots”. Interesting findings:
Studio has average of 4 hours empty on weekday and 2 hours in weekend.
Now I know the no. of classes/day (62), the no. of mats filled/class (12), the cost per mat ($18), the centre’s annual revenue could be around:
62 classes x 12 mats x $18 x 365 = $4.8m
So what does it mean? If I’m a studio owner, this could help me look into optimise my studio calendar better. The more I dissect this data in different manners, the more I realise creating a yoga calendar for multiple studios is an art of balancing between student demand, studio constraint and teacher supply.