It’s hard to miss the new Pilates studio that opened near you sometime in the last year or two, even if you haven’t booked a class yet — the reformer machines visible through the window, a waitlist that fills up fast. One franchise behind that boom just made a leadership move that says a lot about how big it’s planning to get.
What RockSalt just announced
The headline move: Pilates franchise RockSalt has named Stephanie Knepp, a franchise veteran with more than 20 years in the industry, as its new chief operating officer, according to the company’s announcement reported by Franchising.com. The announcement comes alongside plans for 84 more studio openings, on top of the eight already running.
Pairing a major leadership hire with an aggressive expansion number isn’t a coincidence. Companies tend to bring in operators with Knepp’s specific background right before they’re about to grow fast enough that their current systems would otherwise strain under the pressure.
RockSalt was founded in 2012 and only began franchising in 2024 — meaning this entire expansion push is happening inside a window of just a couple of years.
Who Stephanie Knepp is, and why this hire matters
Her background: Knepp brings more than 20 years of experience across fitness, wellness, operations, and franchising. She most recently served as CEO of Sit Still Kids Salon, and previously held franchise leadership roles at Zoom Room Franchising and WellBiz Brands.
That’s a resume built specifically around scaling franchise systems, not just running a single successful location. Operations experience across multiple brand categories — kids’ services, pet-adjacent franchising, wellness — suggests RockSalt wanted someone who’s already solved the “how do you keep quality consistent across dozens of locations” problem before, rather than someone learning it for the first time on RockSalt’s own growth curve.
If you’ve ever had a frustrating experience at a chain location that clearly wasn’t run like the original, you already understand exactly why that kind of hire matters before a franchise scales.
From 8 studios to 84 more in the pipeline
The actual numbers: RockSalt currently operates 8 studios, with 6 more expected to open by early 2027. Beyond that near-term group, 84 additional units are already in development — a pipeline roughly ten times the size of what’s currently open.
That ratio is the real story here. A franchise moving from 8 locations to a pipeline of 84 isn’t incremental growth; it’s a company betting that demand for boutique Pilates is nowhere close to saturated yet, even in markets that already have multiple competing studios.
Whether that bet pays off depends on whether the next few years of openings can actually hit that 84-unit target, which is exactly the kind of execution problem a new COO with deep franchise-operations experience is brought in to manage.
Where the growth is actually headed
The footprint: the planned expansion spans Arizona, Northern California, Southern California, and Nevada, along with a first international location in the United Arab Emirates. That’s a notably Western-U.S.-heavy footprint, with one international market added on top.
The UAE location is worth flagging on its own — it’s RockSalt’s first move outside the U.S. entirely, and international expansion usually signals a franchise believes its brand and business model are proven enough to translate to a very different market and regulatory environment.
If you live in one of those West Coast or Southwest markets, there’s a reasonable chance a RockSalt studio lands within driving distance sometime in the next couple of years, well before the full 84-unit pipeline is complete.
Why a boutique Pilates franchise is expanding this fast right now
The broader pattern: RockSalt’s expansion fits into a wider boutique-fitness trend of reformer Pilates studios scaling quickly through franchising rather than opening company-owned locations one at a time. Franchising lets a brand grow using local operators’ capital and local market knowledge, rather than the parent company funding every new studio itself.
That model only works at this pace, though, if the operations behind it are strong enough to keep every new location performing the way the first ones did. That’s the exact gap a COO hire like this one is meant to close before growth outruns quality control.
What this means if there’s no RockSalt near you yet
What to actually expect: if you’re not in one of the markets named in this expansion, this announcement doesn’t mean much for your workout routine today. If you are in Arizona, Northern or Southern California, or Nevada, it’s a reasonable signal to keep an eye out over the next year or two.
For anyone already considering franchise ownership themselves, a hire like this one — and the scale of the pipeline behind it — is the kind of detail that shows up in due diligence long before a brand becomes a household name.
The bottom line
A single executive hire rarely makes headlines on its own. Paired with plans for 84 more locations and a first international market, this one is less about one new job title and more about a boutique fitness brand betting it can go from a handful of studios to a genuine national — and now international — presence in a short window.