ClassPass Boosts Its Visual Media Fitness and ‘Mobility’ With Cloudinary

ClassPass gives users worldwide access to thousands of top-rated gyms, fitness studios, salons, and spas by bringing together the world’s best classes and experiences into one app. As the leading fitness and wellness membership service, it’s all about motivating people to live inspired lives by connecting users to soul-nurturing wellness and fitness experiences. Leading-edge tech is as much at the heart of this largely app-based experience as the inspiring, detailed imagery people need to see when making purchase decisions. ClassPass users want to know if that gym in the new city they’ve just moved to is clean, well-equipped, and welcoming. By delivering up-to-the minute, accurate, and optimized imagery via Cloudinary, ClassPass users are assured that what they’re seeing is what they’ll get.

ABOUT

The World’s Favorite Way of Achieving That Next ‘Personal Best’

A subsidiary of the leading experience technology platform for the wellness industry, Mindbody, Inc., ClassPass is now the world’s largest health club aggregator by number of club partnerships. Since 2013, from the U.S. to Thailand, Hong Kong to the U.K., people pursuing their health goals use the ClassPass app or website to connect to wellness experiences offered by thousands of gyms, studios, salons and spas in more than 30 countries. More than 100 million reservations have been made through the system, which also offers corporate wellness benefits to companies of all sizes.

THE CHALLENGE

‘In Our Market, Quality is Inferred Through Imagery’

Behind the beguilingly easy idea of ClassPass’s monthly subscription service is a lot of smart technology. It takes a certain amount of complexity to make it super easy and fast to connect users to the hottest new fitness and wellness services partners in geographies around the globe.

A lot of work has gone into the company’s backend infrastructure, confirms ClassPass Director of Engineering Neil Kimmett. But just as much effort needs to go into the user interface.

When asked how satisfied they are with the quality of photos and reviews on ClassPass, members gave a high 4.3 out of 5 (5 being extremely satisfied) rating. The main driver for that satisfaction is Cloudinary sitting at the heart of everything the brand does with visual assets.

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

An Engine of Smooth Image Delivery

Embracing new headless, composable technologies is key to enabling the speed and agility that ClassPass needs to deliver its services. The company is moving away from an older, Python-based monolithic microservice orientation to a more API-connected tech hybrid stack that includes Contentful and Cloudinary. With the integration of Programmable Media’s automatic format and quality selection (aka f_auto and q_auto) into image delivery workflows, Classpass users are ensured that their viewing experience is both high quality and fast loading regardless of device or bandwidth.

“There is always a build-versus-buy discussion. Much of the core tech was developed in-house, and then we use different vendors for different parts of the stack as appropriate,” confirms Kimmett.

This design philosophy is both the main reason Cloudinary was selected and why it endures, Kimmett affirms. “Unsurprisingly, we had some tough decisions to make during COVID as our wellness partners were closed. But even then Cloudinary was a really useful tool for us. Billing works in relation to usage, which went down significantly, so this flexibility was really essential.”

THE RESULTS

‘Testament to How Well the Integration Has Worked’

During Kimmett’s five years in the company, he’s never had to stress over visual assets despite there being more than 1.25 million media assets in the ClassPass image repository — and growing. “Apart from some very minor cosmetic changes, we’ve not had to mess with the digital asset management side of the business since I joined,” he says. “Our employees use the Cloudinary Upload Widget which is a very slick, drag-and-drop, optimized process that makes excellent use of Cloudinary core features. I think the fact this is zero-touch for us is testament to how well the integration has worked and continues to work so well for us.”

Cloudinary adds new value throughout the app, he stresses. “Recently, we realized that when users add a profile photo when they sign up, we weren’t resizing that image and we were uploading it,” he says. “So that was a PNG with transparency around it but using way more bandwidth than we needed. We immediately went to our Cloudinary console, where you can see what are your most bandwidth-using images in a second, made the appropriate changes to the app to upload smaller and get the right set of transformations on the download, and our problem went away at once.”

Summing up his experience with digital assets Cloudinary-style, for this busy developer — working in a market where great images quickly served is the name of the game — that flexibility, and the fact that such a core function “just works,” is almost as pleasant as a hot shower after a ClassPass workout.