How Idolem Grows Together With Its Tech Partner, bsport

How a flexible technology partnership is helping the Canadian wellness franchise support a complex operating model and ambitious expansion

In four years, Idolem has grown from 21 hot yoga studios to 40 active locations and is planning to open 175 studios in total across Canada and EMEA. Behind that trajectory is a founder who built the company the way she wanted to be a customer, and a technology partner that has had to keep pace.

When founder and CEO Melody Benhamou set out to build Idolem, she started with a question.

“What would my dream studio look like?” she recalls asking herself. “It’s clean. They recognize me. I have a lot of classes, and classes are on time. And I can go everywhere, because I’m on the road and I travel a lot.”

She was a customer before she was a founder. She had to become a yoga teacher along the way, but her perspective on the business never changed. “When we built Idolem, we built it from the customer point of view,” she says. “When we make a decision, it’s always from the customer’s perspective. Never from a yoga teacher’s. Never from a business perspective. We wake up every morning for our customers.”

That instinct shaped everything about the model she built, including the technology decisions that followed.

One Membership, Every Studio

By 2022, Idolem had grown to 21 studios across Quebec with a structure that set it apart: a single membership worked across the entire network, but the location where the membership originated kept the revenue. Customers could train at any studio and franchisees kept their financial independence. It was a simple experience for the customer, but a complex model for the technology behind it.

“We work as a team,” Benhamou says. “One location is paid, but other locations welcome the student, because we really want to be there for the student. And we think that, in that way, we’re going to bring other customers by being really open.” 

Benhamou required one connected brand and membership experience, without taking independence away from individual franchisees. After roughly a year researching platforms, Melody found that only bsport could support that model.

Details That Change Everything

One detail stood out above the rest. bsport lets customers explore and book a class before they create an account. The account comes after, once they’ve already decided to show up.

“This looks really like a small thing,” Benhamou says, “but it changed everything with the customer cycle. They just want to register. Let them register. And then when they’re ready, you have their information. That is so important for everybody. It’s a game changer.”

For a founder who built her company by putting herself in her customers’ shoes, that design logic was familiar: bring people in before asking them for anything.

A centralized franchise view giving head office visibility across all locations in one place rounded things out. As the network grew, having everything consolidated meant Melody’s team could focus on running the business rather than tracking down information across systems.

Putting the Partnership to the Test

Switching platforms at 21 established studios, each carrying years of customer data, is a decision you want to get right. Benhamou wanted evidence before committing.

“We decided to do a real test,” she says. “Not just a quick trial. We paid for it ourselves to make sure it was complete. We really tested the import of the data.”

The test succeeded, giving Idolem the confidence to move forward. All 21 studios then went live on bsport within four days and Benhamou says the change was felt quickly. Idolem’s previous system had struggled with reliability during the pandemic, precisely when advance reservations were mandatory and the platform mattered most.

“It was a nightmare,” Melody says. After the move, she remembers that many of the recurring problems disappeared almost immediately.

Every Idolem studio opened since has launched directly on bsport. Today, the network has 40 active locations, and the platform supporting it has continued to evolve alongside the business. 

For any founder hesitating before a platform change, that test is worth noting. The fear of switching is understandable, but so is the cost of staying on a platform that can’t keep up. Running a full, paid test before committing, one that covers your hardest scenario rather than a controlled demo, turns that hesitation into an informed decision. Idolem ran that test, and passing it gave both companies a foundation to build from.

Keeping Up With Customers’ Needs

Growth doesn’t stop at new locations. Idolem’s customers have been coming for 10, 11 years, and Benhamou thinks carefully about what keeps them. “Our concept is great. The studios are nice. Everything is clean. And I’m like, you know what? Your customer is going to stop using their card. Why? Because they’re getting bored with yoga. They want to try something else.”

So Idolem kept adding reasons to stay. New formats, new workshops, new ways to show up for members at different moments in their lives. Melody approached the yoga-on-reformer program the same way she built the original concept: as a customer thinking about what would make her happy inside, not just in shape. “I didn’t want my customers to just feel in shape but not really happy inside. So we did yoga on a reformer.” The classes filled instantly. 

This willingness to listen, experiment and adapt is also central to Idolem’s relationship with bsport. As Idolem has entered new stages of growth, its needs have changed. Some could not have been predicted at the beginning.

“You cannot think about everything before you reach that moment,” Benhamou says. “Every day is new.”

What mattered was having a technology partner willing to keep working through those needs.

“Bsport was always saying yes to our demands,” she says. “‘OK, we’ll work on it.’ Things keep moving. And then things happen.”

Xiaoyun Tu, CMO of Bsport, says that relationship has pushed the platform forward in ways that benefit the wider industry. “Thanks to Idolem, we’ve improved our product. Their feedback on how franchise architecture should look has been really valuable.” The needs of a fast-growing franchise network are the signal that shapes a platform built to scale.

The Support to Grow

For a network at Idolem’s scale, a few things have to work without friction.

Data has to be usable without depending on support. Idolem connected Power BI to Bsport’s open API, giving head office a view across all locations in real time. “We have data, but it needs to talk,” Benhamou says. “You need to compare and crunch it. The customer lifecycle, conversion rates, which studios perform differently.” An open API gave the team the freedom to build that view on their own terms, rather than routing every new report through technical support.

Franchisees need enough independence to stay focused on the customer rather than the system. “The easier the system, the more we can focus on something other than just making the day go well,” Benhamou says. “We can work on the business, not just in it.” Idolem has a full-time person internally whose job is Bsport support, and the goal is always to reduce how much that person is needed.

And the people behind the platform have to be reachable when something can’t wait. On Bsport’s side, VP of customer success Kévin Bagayoko is the person Benhamou calls at those moments. “When we feel blocked, we know we can call him and he makes things move,” she says. “After a while, even big customers get forgotten. We have not been forgotten at Bsport.”

Benhamou’s advice to any founder weighing a platform change: “Sleep now, because you won’t sleep after. But if you do your homework and find a partner that grows with you, it’s worth it. Bsport is growing with us and with our needs. That’s what a long-term partnership looks like.”