The Thirty-Euro Revolution
In the late 1990s, the average German gym membership cost somewhere between 60 and 100 Deutsche Marks per month — roughly €30 to €50 — and the experience that came with it was predictable: beige carpeting, a juice bar nobody used, a personal trainer hovering near the entrance with a clipboard, and an atmosphere calibrated to make you feel that fitness was a lifestyle choice reserved for the aspirational middle class. The German fitness market was sleepy, fragmented, and thoroughly convinced of its own logic: that gyms were service businesses, that members would pay for ambiance, that the economics of the industry required high monthly fees and long-term contracts. Then a man who had never attended university, who had built a fortune selling pagers and mobile phones from the trunk of his car, looked at that industry and saw something different. He saw a business model that was ninety percent empty real estate and ten percent iron. He saw an industry charging premium prices for a commodity product. He saw, in a single intuition that would reshape European fitness, that the gym was not a service business at all. It was a volume business.
Rainer Schaller opened the first McFit studio in Würzburg, Bavaria, on October 1, 1997. The name was not subtle — the "Mc" was borrowed directly from McDonald's, a deliberate provocation that announced the thesis before anyone walked through the door. This would be the fast food of fitness: cheap, standardized, no frills, available to everyone. The membership fee was 29.90 Deutsche Marks per month, roughly €15 — less than half the prevailing market rate. There were no showers initially. No sauna. No swimming pool. No personal trainers offering complimentary assessments. What there was: equipment. Lots of it. Open 24 hours. And a price point so aggressive it redefined who could afford to go to the gym.
Twenty-seven years later, the RSG Group — the holding company Schaller built around that original McFit concept — operates over 300 fitness studios across five countries, claims more than two million members, and sits at the center of a fitness empire that spans from discount gyms to luxury wellness concepts, from outdoor fitness festivals to the world's most famous bodybuilding competition. The company has never gone public. It has never taken institutional capital. It remains entirely owned by one man, a man who lost his brother, four friends, and the mother of one of his children in the Loveparade disaster of 2010, who nearly lost his company in the pandemic, and who has responded to every crisis by expanding.
By the Numbers
McFit & the RSG Group
€850M+Estimated annual group revenue (2023)
2M+Active members across all brands
300+McFit studios in Europe
€19.90/moMcFit standard monthly membership (2024)
12Brands under the RSG Group umbrella
6,000+Employees across all operations
0External investors
The McFit story is, at its core, a story about the democratization of access — and the ruthless economics required to make democratization profitable. It is also, inescapably, a story about Germany: about a market where consumers are legendarily price-sensitive, where discount retail is a cultural institution (Aldi, Lidl, Ryanair's spiritual cousins), and where an entrepreneur without a university degree could build a fitness empire by understanding, better than anyone, what the German consumer actually wanted versus what the industry assumed they needed.
Rainer Schaller grew up in Schlangenbad, a small spa town in Hesse with a population barely north of 6,000. He did not attend university. He did not come from money. What he had was the hustler's instinct for arbitrage — the ability to spot the gap between what something cost to provide and what people were paying for it.
In the early 1990s, Schaller was selling pagers and mobile phones, riding the first wave of German telecommunications deregulation. The margins were extraordinary. The product was a commodity. The distribution was personal — Schaller working trade shows, setting up kiosks, building a network of resellers. He accumulated capital quickly and, more importantly, he internalized a lesson that would define everything that followed: when technology or structural shifts commoditize a product, the winner is whoever figures out distribution at the lowest cost. Not the best product. The cheapest access.
By the mid-1990s, Schaller was looking for his next arbitrage. He was also, by his own account, a regular gym-goer — and a frustrated one. The German fitness landscape was dominated by mid-market chains and independent operators charging what he considered absurd prices for access to equipment that depreciated slowly, in spaces that were often underutilized. The industry's cost structure was overwhelmingly fixed — rent, equipment, insurance — and the variable cost of adding one more member was close to zero. This is the fundamental economics of the gym business, and it leads to a counterintuitive conclusion: the rational strategy is not to maximize revenue per member but to maximize members per square meter.
Schaller saw this. Almost nobody else in Germany did.
The Economics of Less
The first McFit in Würzburg was a deliberate experiment in subtraction. Strip everything out that isn't the core product — the weights, the machines, the space to use them — and see how low you can push the price before the model breaks.
The answer turned out to be astonishingly low. At 29.90 DM per month (later standardized to €16.90, and eventually €19.90 as the euro-era pricing settled), McFit was priced at roughly one-third to one-half of its competitors. The economics worked because Schaller understood something that seems obvious in retrospect but was heretical at the time: most gym members don't use most gym services. They don't swim. They don't take group classes. They don't book personal training sessions. They come in, they lift weights or run on a treadmill, and they leave. The entire apparatus of the traditional gym — the juice bar, the sauna, the towel service, the personal training floor — existed to justify a price premium for services that the majority of members never touched.
By eliminating those services, McFit achieved a cost structure that was structurally different from the incumbent model:
- No wet areas (pools, saunas) eliminated the single most expensive line item in gym construction and maintenance
- No group fitness classes removed the need for specialized studios and instructor payroll
- No personal training cut the most expensive labor category
- 24-hour unmanned operation (initially with minimal overnight staffing, later with keycard access systems) maximized asset utilization
- Standardized layouts across locations enabled bulk equipment purchasing and rapid buildouts
The result was a studio that could be profitable at dramatically lower membership levels than a traditional gym — and that, at full capacity, generated margins that its competitors couldn't approach even at twice the price.
We didn't invent anything. We just stopped doing everything that wasn't necessary.
The model was not without its critics. German fitness industry incumbents dismissed McFit as a fad, a race to the bottom that would cannibalize the market and then collapse under its own low margins. The trade press was skeptical. The established chains — Fitness First, Kieser Training, the premium independents — looked at the McFit price point and saw an unsustainable stunt.
They were wrong. Within three years of the Würzburg opening, Schaller had ten studios. Within five, he had thirty. By 2005, McFit had passed 100 locations and was the largest fitness chain in Germany by membership count. The incumbents had made the classic blunder of the disrupted: they confused their own cost structure with the laws of physics.
The German Discount DNA
McFit's explosive growth cannot be understood outside the context of German consumer culture — a culture that has produced, per capita, more world-class discount retailers than any other developed economy. Aldi and Lidl didn't merely succeed in Germany; they were expressions of Germany, of a national psyche that views unnecessary spending as morally suspect, that considers the hunt for the best price a form of civic virtue.
The German fitness market in the late 1990s was, in this light, an anomaly. It was a service category that had somehow escaped the discount revolution. Germans who bought their groceries at Aldi, flew Ryanair for holidays, and furnished their apartments from IKEA were still paying €50 or more per month for gym memberships loaded with services they didn't use. McFit didn't create demand for discount fitness. It released latent demand that the market had been suppressing through overpricing.
The numbers tell the story. In 1998, Germany had approximately 5.3 million gym members — a penetration rate of roughly 6.5% of the total population. By 2010, largely driven by the discount fitness wave that McFit had triggered, that number had climbed past 7.5 million. By 2019, it was over 11 million — a penetration rate exceeding 13%. McFit didn't just steal members from incumbents; it created an entirely new category of gym-goer who had never considered membership before.
This is the signature of a genuine market-expanding disruption, as opposed to mere price competition. The pie grew. And McFit got the largest slice.
The Schaller Operating System
Rainer Schaller's management style is frequently described — by employees, competitors, and journalists alike — with a single word: kontrolliert. Controlled. Every aspect of the McFit operation runs through centralized systems designed to minimize variance and maximize predictability.
The studio buildout process is a machine. A new McFit location follows a standardized template: approximately 2,000 to 3,000 square meters of floor space, typically in secondary commercial locations (industrial parks, retail peripheries, former warehouse spaces) where rents are lowest. Equipment is sourced through group-wide contracts with manufacturers — McFit's scale gives it purchasing power that no independent operator can match. The layout is identical across locations: cardio zone, free weights, machine circuit, stretching area. A member walking into a McFit in Berlin should find the same equipment in the same configuration as a McFit in Cologne or Vienna.
This standardization serves multiple purposes. It simplifies training for new staff. It enables rapid rollout — at peak expansion, McFit was opening a new studio roughly every two weeks. It reduces maintenance complexity, since every location uses the same equipment models. And it creates a brand experience that is, if not inspiring, then at least reliable. You know exactly what you're getting. That reliability, at €19.90 per month, turns out to be an enormously powerful value proposition.
The centralization extends to marketing. McFit was among the first German fitness brands to invest heavily in television advertising — a channel that its smaller competitors couldn't afford and its premium competitors considered beneath them. The campaigns were brash, populist, and relentlessly focused on price. "Ab 19,90 Euro" became one of the most recognized advertising slogans in German consumer services. Schaller reportedly spent up to 15% of revenue on marketing in the growth years — a figure that horrified industry observers accustomed to gyms that relied on walk-in traffic and word of mouth.
Schaller doesn't think like a fitness operator. He thinks like a retail chain. That's why we couldn't compete with him.
The comparison to retail is precise. McFit operates like a discount retailer that happens to sell gym access: centralized procurement, standardized formats, location strategy driven by real estate costs rather than prestige, marketing spend aimed at volume, and a relentless focus on the cost base. The gym industry's traditional playbook — invest in ambiance, charge for services, build relationships through personal training — was the equivalent of a department store strategy. Schaller brought the Aldi model.
The Loveparade Shadow
On July 24, 2010, twenty-one people died and over 500 were injured in a crowd crush at the Loveparade music festival in Duisburg. Rainer Schaller was the organizer.
The disaster — Germany's worst crowd-related tragedy in decades — cast a shadow over everything Schaller had built. Criminal investigations were launched. Lawsuits followed. Public opinion turned viciously against the organizers. Schaller was not ultimately charged with criminal responsibility (the trial, which began in 2017, was eventually discontinued in 2020 due to the statute of limitations and the complexity of assigning individual blame), but the personal toll was devastating. His brother and four close friends were among the dead. The mother of one of his children was killed.
For years afterward, Schaller retreated from public life. He gave almost no interviews. McFit continued to operate and expand, but its founder was absent from the trade conferences, the magazine profiles, the industry gatherings that had previously been his stage. The Loveparade became a dividing line in Schaller's biography: before it, he was the brash discount disruptor who liked to pose shirtless in trade magazines; after it, he was something darker and more private, a man carrying a grief that no amount of business success could resolve.
The impact on the business was indirect but real. McFit's brand, which had always been polarizing — loved by members for its price, dismissed by industry insiders as cheap and cheerless — acquired an additional layer of controversy. Schaller's name was, for a period, as associated with the Duisburg disaster as with the gym chain. Whether this slowed expansion or dampened partnership opportunities is impossible to quantify precisely, but the reputational overhang was significant enough that the company's eventual rebranding under the RSG Group umbrella — which gathered McFit and a growing portfolio of other fitness brands under a corporate parent — served, in part, to diversify the identity beyond one man's name.
The Portfolio Play
By the early 2010s, McFit had saturated its core niche in the German discount fitness market. The chain had over 200 studios, more than 1.5 million members, and a market position so dominant that new McFit openings were increasingly cannibalizing existing locations rather than expanding the total addressable market. Schaller faced the classic problem of the category creator: he had won his category, and now he needed to figure out what came next.
His answer was vertical and horizontal diversification, assembled into what became the RSG Group — a holding company structure that would allow Schaller to pursue multiple fitness and lifestyle segments without diluting the McFit brand or confusing its ultra-clear value proposition.
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The RSG Group Brand Portfolio
Fitness brands under Rainer Schaller's holding company
| Brand | Segment | Positioning | Status |
|---|
| McFit | Discount fitness | €19.90/mo, equipment-only | Core |
| John Reed Fitness | Premium / lifestyle | Design-led gyms with DJs, art, bars | Growth |
| Gold's Gym | Heritage bodybuilding | Acquired out of bankruptcy in 2020 | |
The most strategically significant move in this portfolio expansion was the acquisition of Gold's Gym in 2020. Gold's — the Venice Beach institution where
Arnold Schwarzenegger sculpted the physique that launched a thousand careers, the gym featured in the 1977 documentary
Pumping Iron — had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2020, crushed by the pandemic closure of its 700+ global locations (most operated as franchises). Schaller's RSG Group acquired the brand and company-owned assets for a reported $100 million, a fraction of what the brand had been valued at in healthier times.
The acquisition was quintessential Schaller: opportunistic, contrarian, and strategically coherent. Gold's Gym gave RSG something McFit could never provide — heritage, cultural cachet, and a global brand name recognized far beyond the German-speaking world. It also gave RSG a foothold in the United States, the world's largest fitness market by revenue, and a franchise model that McFit had never developed. Where McFit had always been company-operated, Gold's came with a global franchise network that, even in its diminished state, represented a capital-light expansion vehicle.
John Reed Fitness, meanwhile, represented Schaller's attempt to move upmarket — a chain of design-forward gyms featuring curated art installations, in-house DJs, cocktail bars, and membership fees of €40 to €50 per month. The concept was the anti-McFit: everything that McFit had stripped away, John Reed put back, wrapped in a Berlin-nightclub aesthetic. Opening in cities like Berlin, Hamburg, and Los Angeles, John Reed targeted the urban creative class that wouldn't be caught dead in a McFit but might pay for a gym that felt like a members' club.
The portfolio strategy was, in effect, a barbell. McFit owned the discount end. John Reed and Gold's competed for the premium and heritage segments. And by housing them all under RSG Group, Schaller could share back-office infrastructure, equipment procurement leverage, and management talent across brands that would never share a member.
The Pandemic Crucible
The COVID-19 pandemic was, for the European fitness industry, an extinction-level event. German gyms were ordered closed in March 2020 and, with brief intermissions, remained substantially restricted through much of 2021. For a business model built on physical presence — you cannot lift weights over Zoom — the closures were devastating. Industry estimates suggest that the German fitness market lost between 25% and 30% of its total membership during the pandemic, with many operators, particularly independents and small chains, closing permanently.
McFit, with its enormous fixed-cost base — over 250 German studios, each carrying rent, equipment depreciation, and minimum staffing costs — hemorrhaged cash. The company reportedly lost hundreds of millions of euros during the closure periods. Schaller's response was characteristically aggressive: he froze membership fees (rather than continuing to charge members for inaccessible facilities, as some competitors did, inviting legal action and PR catastrophe), negotiated rent deferrals and abatements with landlords, and used the downtime to accelerate the CYBEROBICS digital platform, which offered streaming workout content as a stopgap for homebound members.
But the truly consequential pandemic-era decision was the Gold's Gym acquisition. Buying a bankrupt American gym chain in the middle of the worst crisis the fitness industry had ever faced was either visionary or reckless — and the line between those two assessments, for Schaller, has always been thin. The deal closed in August 2020, four months into a global shutdown with no clear end date. Schaller was betting that the pandemic would end, that members would return, that the brands that survived would inherit the market share of the brands that didn't. It was a bet on mean reversion — and on his own ability to hold on longer than his competitors.
This is a once-in-a-generation brand. We will bring it back stronger.
The bet, as of 2024, appears to have paid off. Gold's Gym has reopened the majority of its company-owned locations, resumed franchise growth, and leveraged the RSG Group's operational infrastructure to streamline costs. McFit's German membership base recovered to pre-pandemic levels by late 2022, driven by the same dynamic that had fueled its original growth: in a cost-of-living crisis, the cheapest gym in town is the last one you cancel.
The Tragedy at Sea
On October 20, 2022, Rainer Schaller, his partner Christiane Schikorsky, their two children (aged two and six), and a companion departed from Palma de Mallorca aboard a small private aircraft bound for Costa Rica, with a planned stopover. The plane disappeared over the Caribbean Sea near the coast of Costa Rica. Wreckage was found days later. None of the five occupants survived.
Schaller was fifty-three years old.
The death of a sole owner with no succession plan in place — no public-facing heir, no independent board, no institutional investors with governance rights — would normally represent an existential crisis for a privately held company of RSG Group's scale. The immediate aftermath was chaotic. Details about the company's ownership structure, its debt levels, and its operational continuity were scarce. RSG Group was, and remains, extraordinarily private about its financials.
Within weeks, however, the company's existing management team — led by figures who had operated RSG Group's day-to-day business for years, as Schaller had increasingly stepped back from operational roles — asserted control. The group continued to operate without visible disruption. Studios remained open. Expansion plans, including new Gold's Gym franchise agreements and John Reed openings, proceeded. The question of ultimate ownership — Schaller's estate, its administration, the future of the shares — remains largely opaque to outside observers, consistent with the hyper-private operating posture Schaller had maintained throughout his life.
What is clear is that the operating system survived its creator. The centralized, standardized model that Schaller had spent twenty-five years building was designed to run with minimal top-down intervention — each studio a replicable module, the procurement centralized, the brand playbook codified. The very qualities that critics had dismissed as generic and soulless turned out to be the qualities that made the business resilient to the most extreme shock imaginable: the sudden disappearance of its sole owner and animating force.
The Iron Logic of Scale
The discount fitness model, like the discount airline or discount grocery model, is a scale business with a specific and unforgiving logic: fixed costs must be spread across the maximum possible number of revenue-generating units (members), and variable costs must be driven as close to zero as the customer experience can tolerate.
McFit's unit economics, while not publicly disclosed in detail, can be reasonably estimated from industry data and the limited financial disclosures that German corporate law requires:
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Estimated McFit Studio Unit Economics
Per-location financial model (approximated from industry data)
| Metric | Estimate |
|---|
| Average members per studio | ~6,500–7,500 |
| Monthly fee per member | €19.90 |
| Annual revenue per studio | ~€1.6M–€1.8M |
| Rent (% of revenue) | ~20–25% |
| Staff costs (% of revenue) | ~15–20% |
| Equipment depreciation | ~8–12% |
| Marketing (allocated) | ~8–12% |
| Estimated studio-level EBITDA margin | ~25–35% |
The critical variable is utilization. A McFit studio with 5,000 members and one with 8,000 members have nearly identical cost bases — the rent doesn't change, the equipment doesn't change, staffing barely changes. But the revenue difference is enormous. This is why McFit's site selection process, its marketing spend, and its aggressive pricing are all oriented around a single objective: get above the break-even membership threshold as fast as possible, then let the operating leverage compound.
The model also benefits from what the fitness industry euphemistically calls "sleepers" — members who pay their monthly fee but rarely or never visit. Industry estimates suggest that 30% to 50% of gym members in the discount segment visit fewer than once per month. These members are, from a unit economics perspective, the perfect customers: they generate full revenue with zero incremental cost. McFit's pricing, paradoxically, amplifies this effect. At €19.90 per month, the cost of membership is low enough that cancellation feels like more trouble than it's worth — the psychological friction of calling to cancel, or visiting a studio to fill out paperwork, exceeds the financial benefit of saving twenty euros.
This is not cynical. It is structural. Every gym in the world — from the most expensive boutique to the cheapest discount box — benefits from members who don't show up. McFit simply built a model that maximized the denominator.
What the Iron Teaches
There is a particular quality to the McFit experience that resists description in the vocabulary of contemporary brand management. It is not aspirational. It is not curated. It is not, in any meaningful sense, an experience at all — at least not in the way that the fitness industry, with its obsession with "member journeys" and "community building" and "transformative wellness," uses that word.
A McFit studio at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday in an industrial park outside Düsseldorf: fluorescent lights, the industrial hum of treadmills, the clang of metal on metal, a thin film of chalk dust on the free-weight platform, no music or bad music playing through speakers that haven't been upgraded since 2009. Three or four people scattered across a space built for fifty. It is functional. It is unglamorous. It works.
And this absence of pretension is, in a way that the fitness industry has been slow to recognize, its own form of brand identity. McFit's members — the construction worker who comes in after his shift, the university student on a budget, the middle-aged accountant who just wants to do his bench press without someone trying to sell him a protein shake — are not paying for an experience. They are paying for access to equipment. The honesty of that transaction, the lack of upsell, the absence of judgment — these create a loyalty that no amount of design-forward architecture or curated playlists can replicate.
Schaller understood this intuitively. He never tried to make McFit cool. He never chased the boutique fitness trend. He never pivoted to wellness. He built a machine for delivering the minimum viable gym experience at the minimum viable price, and he trusted that the market for that product was larger than anyone else believed.
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McFit & RSG Group: Key Milestones
The arc from Würzburg to global fitness empire
1997First McFit studio opens in Würzburg, Bavaria, at 29.90 DM/month
2001McFit surpasses 30 locations across Germany
2005100th studio opens; McFit becomes Germany's largest gym chain by membership
2010Loveparade disaster in Duisburg; Schaller retreats from public life
2013RSG Group formed as holding company for McFit and new brands
2016John Reed Fitness launches in Berlin as premium concept
2019McFit reaches ~250 studios and 1.7 million members
2020
The Weight Remains
In the months after Schaller's death, something quietly remarkable happened. Nothing changed. The studios opened at the same time. The membership price stayed at €19.90. The new John Reed locations in Frankfurt and Los Angeles opened on schedule. The Gold's Gym franchise pipeline continued to process applications. The marketing machine kept running its television spots. The machine kept running.
This is, depending on your perspective, either the ultimate validation of Schaller's operating system or the ultimate indictment of founder-driven mythology. The man who built the machine is gone. The machine doesn't care. It was designed not to care. Every process standardized, every studio replicable, every decision codified into a playbook that any competent operator can follow. The very things that made McFit boring — the sameness, the lack of charisma, the relentless optimization of a narrow value proposition — made it durable.
In a conference room in Berlin, in the RSG Group's headquarters, there is reportedly a photograph of Rainer Schaller on the wall. The studios he built continue to fill, night after night, with people who will never know his name. They come for the iron. The iron is still there. The price is still €19.90. The lights are still fluorescent. And at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday in Düsseldorf, someone is still doing their bench press.
