Madonna’s fitness chain customers in Berlin stung by closure

When singer Madonna went to Berlin in 2013, she promised to take fitness training into the 21st century. With an eye on her retirement, the Material Girl singer set up Hard Candy, a fitness studio franchise with global ambitions.

But now Hard Candy gym members in Berlin – motto: “Harder is Better” – have learned the hard way that we are living in a material world. Standing before shuttered gyms yesterday, their hard candy dreams crumbled to tough cookies.

The first warning came in June when lights went out in Hard Candy studios. The local franchise owners had not paid their electricity bills.

After news spread, they told members it was a short liquidity problem and asked for one more chance. Two months on, deeper and deeper in debt, a liquidity problem has turned existential.

“As things stand now it is not realistic that the branches closed now will open again,” said administrator Torsten Martini to the Tagesspiegel daily.

Worse, the fitness studio’s financing model – offering discount pre-paid membership – means that many customers’ money is gone, too.

High rents

He is in talks with other fitness chains about buying some of the nine Hard Candy facilities – a challenge given top locations and corresponding rents.

“I cannot imagine that any purchaser would allow [Hard Candy] customers train for years for free,” he said.

The only hope for gym members is to join the long queue of creditors: the Berlin electricity company, the gym landlords, even the cleaning firm with unpaid bills of €35,000.

The collapse of Hard Candy ends a strange business arrangement that began in 2013. Madonna caused a commotion at the launch of the chain, flanked by Berlin’s portly gym-owning brothers Jürgen and Ralf Jopp.

The idea was simple: Madonna collected licence fees but had little to do with the day-to-day running, the Jopp brothers meanwhile could use her heavily Photoshopped image to pull in the customers.

"To be honest, we would have wished for a little more engagement," the brothers told the Tagesspiegel newspaper, miffed over how the singer, in their view, never followed through on her end of the deal.

“Apart from our studios one club opened in Toronto but closed again,” they complained.

“We’d hoped and assumed that Hard Candy Fitness would become a worldwide brand with hundreds of studios, where members could train. Sadly that didn’t happen.”