Now they’re taking on Saudi Arabia
Paint fumes lingered inside the airy new studio, where my thighs were burning from the endless squats. Around me, Lululemon-clad women with bare arms and lustrous hair gripped the wooden ballet barre and assessed themselves in the mirrors, while our instructor cheered us on. “Put on your brake lights,” Rihanna chanted over the sound system. “You’re in the city of wonder.”
Outside the windowless room, this city of wonder was shining. Palm trees waved gently near the outdoor plaza, at a picturesque remove from midafternoon traffic. Fountains gurgled next to a large Shake Shack, while the patrons at two adjacent Starbucks sat basking in the sunlight of a large patio.
That is, the men basked. They were the ones allowed to occupy most of the patio, and the front Starbucks. The women, some fully veiled and all covered in flowing black abayas, were restricted to a few tables in the back corner.
These women were the potential future customers of the upstairs fitness studio, where our spandex-clad bodies had moved on to pelvic thrusts. It was the inaugural friends-and-family class at the newest location of Physique 57, a 13-year-old New York City–based chain that specializes in ballet-style barre workouts and caters largely to wealthy, well-traveled women. And two of the women in this particular class, Physique 57 co-founders Jennifer Vaughan Maanavi and Tanya Becker, had traveled far indeed—from New York to Riyadh, the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
“We’ve opened 13 studios, and nothing is more exciting than this moment,” Maanavi, a former banker with a quick laugh and a quiet steeliness, said the next evening, at a lavish launch party for the new studio. “I have wanted to be in Riyadh for so long.”
Yet the culmination of her ambition—one that involved partnering with one of her Saudi customers and waiting years for the government to allow women to work out in licensed gyms—came at an awkward time. Maanavi, Physique 57’s CEO, and Becker, its chief creative officer, had already spent months dealing with the mundane and not-so-mundane headaches of expanding into a distant and relatively unknown market with fast-changing regulations.
Then they found themselves traveling to Riyadh in early November—a month after Saudi assassins with government ties had gruesomely murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and a couple of weeks after the top executives of Uber, SoftBank, Ford, Goldman Sachs, and many other prominent businesses had publicly if temporarily distanced themselves from Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS.
female-only gyms, where women can strip down to spandex and more sweatappropriate gear, weren’t fully legal until 2017.
Suddenly, for most Western businesses, talking about Saudi Arabia was PR kryptonite. Yet the country
