Harvey Spevack got a call from Steve Stout one day telling him Kanye had just put Equinox in a song. His first reaction wasn't celebration. It was nerves. I said, "Okay, how do I feel about this?" Stout told him he was going to be okay. And he was. But that moment — sitting with the information, not knowing whether it was good or bad yet — tells you something about what Harvey actually built. He built something with enough identity that it shows up in other people's art uninvited. That doesn't happen to a gym. That happens to a brand with a point of view.
Harvey is the executive chair of Equinox. He joined in 1998 when the company had four locations. They now have 116, with a pipeline of 50 more, opening eight to ten a year. There's a hotel on the list of the world's 50 best, sitting next to Aman in that ranking. There's a Norman Foster–designed resort opening in Saudi Arabia this spring. None of it was roadmapped. Most of it was anticipated — which is a different thing entirely, and the thing I kept coming back to in this conversation.
You can't ask people what they want
Harvey said it directly and without much ceremony: you can't ask people what they want, because most people don't know. What you get when you ask is something safe and somewhat boring. You get the average of existing preferences, not the leading edge of unmet ones.
This is the idea the entire episode pivots on. Equinox's history — from the Jane Fonda aerobics era to a global luxury lifestyle brand — is a story about anticipating a consumer who didn't know yet what they were about to need. The Equinox Hotel is the clearest example. Members weren't asking for an Equinox hotel. Nobody was filling out a feedback card saying what I really want is a sleep chamber designed around circadian science with a five-star gym in the basement. What Harvey's team noticed instead was behavior: members staying at bad hotels across the country just to stay close to an Equinox location. Nobody told them to look at that signal. They looked anyway.
That's the move. Not asking. Watching. And then acting before the data fully confirms it — which it almost never will, because the data is always a picture of yesterday.
I think about this in the context of my own investments. I've been in rooms where the pitch was bulletproof — every data point aligned, every comparable pointed in the same direction — and the company went nowhere. I've also been in rooms where the founder couldn't quite explain it yet, just felt it, and was right. The skill isn't reading a survey. The skill is pattern recognition built on deep understanding of who your customer actually is, not who they say they are. Harvey's been building that pattern recognition for 27 years in the same brand. That's not replicable by data alone.
The category of one isn't a niche — it's a position
Harvey used a phrase that's stuck with me: category of one, not in industry, but out of industry. He didn't mean they have no competition. He meant the relevant comparison set isn't other gyms. It's other luxury lifestyle brands — the ones that carry emotional weight, that people wear as identity, that end up in Kanye songs not because of a marketing deal but because they mean something in the culture.
Most fitness companies compete in industry. They benchmark against each other — price per square foot, class formats, equipment brands. Equinox decided to benchmark out of industry, against the brands that make people feel something about themselves. That's a completely different design brief. It's why they partner with Architectural Digest top-100 designers for their clubs when nobody else in the fitness world would even think to make that call. It's why the locker room amenity isn't generic shampoo — it's Kiehl's in 2009 when the economy was collapsing, and La Mer's Labo now. The detail signals what category you're actually in.
The business case for this is real and it shows up in the real estate math. When you're a luxury lifestyle anchor, landlords come to you. Harvey mentioned it plainly: they get favorable terms because developers and landlords want the brand in their building — whether it's activating a mixed-use project, serving the local community, or just signaling what kind of address it is. Hudson Yards had no people, no residential buildings, nothing but train tracks when Equinox committed to going in. Related's Steve Ross and Jeff Blau were selling Harvey on the bet, not the other way around. The brand's positioning created the leverage that made the economics work.
I've spent a lot of time on the real estate side of sports and development. The asset that gives you negotiating power isn't just capital. It's the thing the other side of the table wants to be associated with. Harvey understood that about the Equinox brand before most people would have called it a brand at all.
The art is knowing when to ignore the science
Harvey talks about the science and art of real estate site selection — the demographic and psychographic mapping, the data on where existing members live, the predictive modeling. That's real and it matters. They can use it to identify where to go next with meaningful confidence.
But the more interesting part of the conversation was what he said about when to ignore all of it. When are you pioneering? his word. Hudson Yards, West Loop Chicago, Time Warner Center — those weren't data decisions. There was no population to map, no member concentration to extrapolate from. The data said there was nobody there. The instinct said that's exactly why you go now.
Ian Schrager gave Harvey the clearest version of this when Harvey was trying to figure out what the hotel should be. He sat down with Schrager, told him he was talking to everyone, trying to get it right. Schrager stopped him. Stop talking to everybody. Just go with your instinct. You got great instinct around the consumer. He said Harvey might make some mistakes, but to just go.
That's the advice that travels. Not because instinct beats data — it doesn't, always — but because for certain decisions, the consultation process itself is the enemy of the decision. You can analysis-paralysis your way into a mediocre outcome by treating a creative and cultural call like a financial model. The Equinox Hotel isn't one of the 50 best hotels in the world because they focus-grouped the room design. It's because Harvey had a clear point of view about what high-performance living felt like when you were away from home, and he committed to it before the data existed to validate it.
I had a moment like that in 2008, though mine was about staying in school rather than entering the draft. The data at the time — where I was projected, what my family needed, what the financial pressure looked like — all pointed toward leaving Nebraska early. My mom told me I was staying. I stayed. A year later I was the second overall pick. That extra year wasn't a data decision. It was a longer view of what the right position looked like, made without full information. Those are the decisions that compound.
PULL QUOTE: "Stop talking to everybody. Just go with your instinct. You know what you're doing." — Ian Schrager, to Harvey Spevack on building the Equinox Hotel
The brand only holds if you know where the line is
The thing Harvey was most consistent about — and he came back to it more than once — was knowing exactly where the Equinox brand will and won't go. Multiple hotel flags came to him over the years asking him to rebrand or redesign their rooms under the Equinox name. We're not putting our name on that. The answer was no every time, even when it would have been fast revenue, even when the deal was probably attractive.
Most brands in expansion mode say yes to those deals. They tell themselves it's brand extension; it's reach; it's a way to test new markets without full capital commitment. What it actually is — and Harvey understood this — is a slow dilution of what the name means. Every time a brand appears in a context it doesn't control, it borrows a little equity from the context it does control. Do it enough times and the name stops meaning anything specific. It becomes a logo on things instead of a promise about things.
The $40,000-a-year Equinox Optimize membership went viral. The Kanye mention hit different than a celebrity endorsement would have. The J Balvin Mental Health Day collaboration worked. Those things worked because the brand has enough of a point of view that every move it makes reads as intentional — even when it's organic. That's only possible if you've been saying no for 27 years to things that would have muddied the signal.
Three things I'm taking from this conversation
- The anticipation muscle is built by watching behavior, not asking opinions. Harvey didn't survey members about the hotel and then build what they described. He watched them staying at bad hotels to stay near his gyms — behavior that revealed a preference they couldn't have articulated — and designed the product to meet the need they were demonstrating. The practical version of this for anyone building a brand or investing in one: identify what your customers are already doing that your product doesn't fully serve yet. The next product is usually hiding in that gap. Surveys show you where you are. Behavioral observation shows you where to go.
- Pioneering and optimizing are different skills, and most organizations are built to optimize. Equinox has a world-class real estate science operation that maps demographics and predicts where locations will perform. That operation is not what created the competitive advantage in Hudson Yards or the West Loop. What created that advantage was someone willing to commit capital before the data existed, because the instinct said the moment was right. Most management teams reward the optimization skills because those are measurable and defensible. The pioneering skills are harder to reward because they look like recklessness until they don't. Harvey's found a way to hold both — the discipline team that keeps spending in line, and the executive chair who occasionally says we need more space, go get it. That tension is productive. The organizations that lose one side of it end up either bleeding cash or missing every inflection point.
- Brand equity is destroyed faster than it's built, and the destruction usually comes from deals that feel reasonable at the time. The hotel flag partnerships Harvey turned down were probably reasonable deals — favorable economics, low risk, easy expansion. He said no because putting the Equinox name on something he didn't control would cost him something he couldn't get back. Brands take decades to mean something specific in culture. They can stop meaning it in a few bad licensing cycles. The test he was applying, implicitly, is: does this move clarify what we are, or does it blur it? Every brand decision is one or the other. The blurring ones are usually the ones that came with a check attached.
COVID nearly ended Equinox. Hundreds of millions in cash into a 100% loss with no pivot available. Harvey told the board to model for four months; they thought he was being dramatic. In LA they were closed for nearly two years. They came out of it with a record year last year and a bigger one projected for this year. The brand held because the identity held — even when the doors were shut, the thing Equinox represented didn't change. That's what 27 years of knowing where the line is actually buys you.
The gym you join because it's convenient closes when the world shuts down and you forget about it. The brand you belong to survives it.