‘Hyper-Urban’ Rock Climbing Brand Ascends New Heights Despite Real Estate Challenges

Building a rock climbing crag indoors is a formidable enough challenge for the sport’s proprietors; imagine jamming a collection of cliffs into the middle of the city. But that’s what distinguishes this “hyper urban” brand from all the new climbing gyms that open every year in old industrial sprawl: Brooklyn Boulders brings rock climbing downtown.

“Brooklyn Boulders more or less invented the whole category of urban climbing,” Vice President of Development Ty Foose told LoopNet while touring its new facility in the Eckington neighborhood of Washington, D.C., ahead of its grand opening. “Locations in urban centers are core to our brand.”

Foose has watched indoor rock climbing evolve since his foray in some of America’s first climbing gyms three decades ago, but one aspect that hasn’t changed, even as the number of gyms in the U.S. continues climbing every year, is the real estate.

“The standard has been that you pick up some square footage and do an inexpensive build in the cheapest real estate you can find,” he explained. “The much-higher rent rates in dense urban areas has always been a barrier that pushed our [now-]competitors into suburbs and more rural areas. And that's just how climbing gyms had been for a really long time when Brooklyn Boulders built its first gym in Brooklyn in 2009.”

People called it ridiculous, he said. “‘Why would anybody spend that much on rent in an area that doesn’t even have real rock climbing?'” he remembers hearing in industry circles at the time. “It was very much a departure from the norm, but it’s worked out really well.”

The costs pencil out because the brand is able to tap into a broader, more diverse customer base for its memberships and drop-in passes, “introducing the sport of climbing to people who normally wouldn't have that exposure or opportunity.” The brand also offers more than a gym — some of its locations even host events and feature dedicated, amenity-rich coworking.

“There's already a perceived high barrier of entry to the sport,” Creative and Environments Director Andrew Ching explained. “Every time we open a new location, we ask how we can make it easier and more welcoming for people to get into it.”

It starts with location. “The first thing we look for is density of population, because we want to serve larger communities and bring people together,” Ching said. Then, the team homes in on walkable areas that have easy access to transit. “You should be able to walk or bike to our locations,” he continued. “We’re not in the warehouse areas that are just … out there.”

Demographics and psychographics play a huge part in site selection, Foose explained, but “it's a process of really just learning the neighborhood and having conversations with landlords. A lot of it comes down to what’s available, because there's definitely less opportunity for new construction.”

A lot is demanded of the physical space as well. Read: an urban location that can house artificial rock climbing walls. “We have quite a long list of building requirements” that also severely limits the options, Foose said, quipping: imagine having your broker narrow down your search results to just downtown locations with a 40-foot clear height. For roped “sport climbing” on tall cliff-like walls, some of Brooklyn Boulders’ six locations have clear heights of 28- to 30-feet, but, he said, “I prefer to look for something that's 40 feet or taller.”

In the 31,000-square-foot Eckington location, Brooklyn Boulders, true to its name, focuses on “bouldering” — a more-accessible, no-ropes-required form of the sport defined by cushy floor mats under shorter, varied walls around 20 feet tall or less.

But even with bouldering walls, rather than taller roped-wall features, “we still need open spaces that are unobstructed by columns,” Foose said. “And that's not easy to find in a dense urban area. In some of our locations we’ve had to do a roof pop. Sometimes zoning prevents that, but sometimes it’s an option.”

Walkthroughs with landlords narrow the scouting process even further. “A lot of times a certain clear height will be listed, but then there are pipes and ducts and beams in the way," Foose noted. "So I need to see the space, look at the structural elements in the configuration of the building itself and make sure that we can envision the space as a climbing gym."

The team can then start conceptualizing the flow of the facility. “A lot of locations in urban areas will be very mixed in terms of what that building offers,” Ching said. “There will be [portions of] the space that don't have the clear height, and we have to think how those might work as a yoga room or fitness areas or coworking and event areas.”

And that community aspect — or placemaking, as Ching calls it, is another Brooklyn Boulders differentiator.

Walking through the new facility, even while the plastic holds were still being drilled into the walls, it was plain to see that the gym’s vibe is like many of its ilk: colorful, dynamic and lively; a spot where people literally hang out and climb walls.

“We like to think of our locations as community centers. We're hubs for people to not just work out, but to hang out.”

Andrew Ching, Brooklyn Boulders

It’s different from most climbing gyms in that, alongside the fitness center, for instance, garage doors open onto a “Stroget” walking street, flanked on both sides by new retail, restaurant and apartment locations for lease. This is a purposeful synergy for all its locations, Ching said. “We definitely like to have complimentary lifestyle brands, like [certain] retail stores, clustered in the area.”

Known for being one of the oldest neighborhoods in D.C., the mostly residential area has been experiencing a "mixed-use renaissance" for some time now, according to local real estate blog Urban Turf. Though it’s still somewhat up-and-coming in terms of real estate, Brooklyn Builders believes it’s a neighborhood that embodies the spirit of the brand and vice-versa.

Placemaking required for that sort of synergy also comes in the form of adapting to the hyper-local, very specific market of where any particular gym is located, Ching continued. When Ching joined just after launch he envisioned, along with the founders, how the brand could template “the spirit of Brooklyn" that the flagship site in the Gowanus neighborhood of New York City represents in its expansion into new cities, all while still “reflecting the actual market and being authentic to that local city.”

Brooklyn Boulders’ second location, opened in the Somerville neighborhood of Boston in 2013, for instance, brought coworking to the mix. “We have a bunch of academia and tech startups in this market so we thought, let's tailor it to include collaborative workspaces,” Ching explained. It’s still climbing- and fitness-focused with exercise balls for chairs, standing desks and pull-up bars, but it also hosts hackathons and academic speakers. “It’s basically ‘innovation alley’ now,” he said. “There's now a brewery there, there's a biotech coworking space and there's a makerspace. We've helped create a neighborhood by tailoring our space to the market’s specific needs.”

With D.C. being a “hyper-political city,” Ching continued, “we're sensing right now that this could be a place for debate.” One nonprofit has already approached the team requesting to host events there as a partner in the space. “We like to think of our locations as community centers. We're hubs for people to not just work out, but to hang out.”

Sensitive to the authentic nature of each location, Brooklyn Boulders is aware of the “negative side of gentrification,” Ching said, but noted there are "some positives that can come out of a brand coming from a different city into a new market.”

Existing architectural and design elements of the building are essential. “We try to find the little piece of character that the building has and play off of it, always giving a nod to its history,” he said. In the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, for instance, instead of tearing up the structure left behind by the grocery store that it had housed for decades, the team kept some beams with names of grocery vendors imprinted on them to facilitate conversation and pay homage to the neighborhood.

The Gowanus building has been around for more than 100 years and was once occupied by the New York Daily News. “We kept the news branding on the outside of the building,” Ching said. “We want people to feel connected to the roots.”

Inside, the furnishings, fixtures and equipment, along with the general design aesthetics, have “60-% to 80% branding consistency across locations,” he continued. “The other 20% to 40% is hyper-local. We’re bringing in local art and customizing the space to the market.”

In D.C., for instance, the team is working with 11 local muralists, “supporting the local community and bringing those people into it instead of just throwing a bunch of money at famous artists because it’s trendy.” It’s also installing a piece of art with historical newspaper articles from Eckington and a plaque that elaborates on the site’s history.

A lot of brands excel at conveying their appeal on websites and social media, he added, but Brooklyn Boulders strives to “actually reflect that experiential feel in our spaces, in how you experience it as a whole,” in the “flow and the feel” of each unique space and also from one location to the next.

Crafting that experience in the finishing touches was extra challenging in the D.C. location given vendor supply disruptions during the height of the pandemic. The Lincoln Park facility broke ground, through a design-build contract with Arco Construction Co., “basically a week after the all the shutdowns started,” Foose said. “Actual construction went reasonably smooth and we were pretty much on time and on budget.”

By contrast, “in Eckington, the long-term effects of the shutdowns and slowdowns in the world were finally really reflected in the construction industry,” he noted. “You can always expect to run into some difficulties … ” but with the new location, built throughout the pandemic, “… it happened in every department and every part of the project from labor to plumbing to electrical to furniture to the actual climbing walls.”

The team was thrilled to wrap up inspections and put final touches on its space for its grand opening this month.

So what’s next for Brooklyn Boulders? Even fresh on the heels of the new opening, the team is continually scouting new locations. “We’re actively pursuing things right now,” Foose said. “We have a few other markets that are on our radar that we're kind of dipping our toes into a little bit, but it's not our main focus right now. Instead, we’re trying to reinforce the markets where we already have presence. We're actively looking at locations and negotiating with landlords on a few different spaces in New York, Chicago and Boston, for example.”

“We get really good partnerships with landlords in terms of tenant improvement allowances. They end up being a capital partner in the venture.

Ty Foose, Brooklyn Boulders

Increasingly compact footprints may play a part in the brand’s growth as well, Ching continued. So small, he said, that the real estate talks may be with multifamily landlords, for example, who are considering adding Brooklyn Boulders’ climbing experiences as part of their amenities package.

The concept that he and Foose have been championing, he explained, is basically a proprietary “smart wall,” or “arcade wall,” similar to a MoonBoard or Kilter Board, which are smaller, 7- to 12-feet rectangular, hydraulicly-titled walls with lots of holds that are commonly found in climbing gyms and used for climbing training.

Brooklyn Boulders’ version will come with more interactive and even responsive features, Ching said. “The wall is smart. It knows when you pull a hold, so it can trigger another action, another activity as you climb. You can do games, you can do training classes.” The technology is already being featured and tested in the two newest locations and can be added into other locations as well.

“It gives us the ability to pack a lot more climbing into a much smaller space and potentially even have more offerings with less overhead,” Foose said. “This provides us the opportunity to be able to expand in a different way than the climbing industry typically does.” It opens the door for faster build-out, smaller markets and even shorter-term leases, he continued.

Getting more compact, becoming more accessible and digging deeper into existing markets seems to be the general direction the brand is going in. Asked if the team has ever thought about purchasing properties, Foose noted that “it’s definitely not off the table, but we just don't have the internal capacity to create a whole division focused on the purchasing and ownership of real estate for now. We commonly agree that doing leases is a faster path for us when opening new markets and getting more facilities in the markets where we already are.”

Another advantage of leasing? “We get really good partnerships with landlords in terms of tenant improvement allowance,” Foose said. “They end up being a capital partner in the venture, really helping us with our speed of expansion.”

That’s especially true as the decision to lease a space, despite it being extremely challenging to find one that fits the bill, ultimately comes down to what landlord can offer and often comes with significantly long-term deals. “I think our shortest lease is an eight-year with options, and our leases range all the way up to a 20-year term.”

And with the industrial segment really heating up as of late, the team is aware of how important those partnerships, and real estate in general, is for its brand differentiators. “We haven't done a whole lot of searching in industrial areas so we’re just not as familiar with the state of the market. But I would imagine that with those rent rates going up, we'll probably start to see a little more competition in the urban areas just because the population density makes it more attractive.”