From Gatekeepers to Enablers: How Equinox Cultivates Elite Talent with Collaborative Learning 

The Challenge: A lackluster experience in a high-stakes industry

For a luxury brand like Equinox, "good enough" isn't an option. Their team of personal trainers, sales associates, and Pilates instructors are the face of the brand—each requiring deep, proprietary knowledge to deliver the premium experience clients expect.

However, their legacy LMS wasn’t keeping pace.

Eddie Dunn, Learning Development Specialist, and the Equinox L&D team were facing classic enterprise hurdles:

A clunky interface that felt like a chore. The previous platform's outdated UI/UX didn't reflect Equinox's design-forward brand, making learning feel like an administrative burden rather than a growth opportunity.

L&D as gatekeepers, not enablers. The team wanted to tap into Equinox's robust network of internal experts, but their previous platform made it difficult for SMEs to contribute. As Danny Phang, Equinox’s Head of Learning and Development, explains: "We were kind of the obstacle because we were guarding the gates of the LMS."

Limited visibility into what mattered. Without robust reporting, the team couldn't move beyond vanity metrics to understand real business impact.

The team needed a way to capture proprietary knowledge from their internal experts, deliver it in an engaging way to every employee in the time of need, and prove its impact with data.

The Solution: A modern platform built for collaboration

Equinox chose 360Learning to move away from top-down, antiquated training and toward a culture of collaborative learning. Here's how they did it:

1. A UI/UX that matches their brand standard

For Equinox, aesthetics aren't superficial—they're strategic. The learning platform needed to reflect the premium experience their brand delivers every day.

"The UX and UI of 360Learning is modern, it's intuitive, and it's well suited to our brand," Eddie explains. "As a design-forward brand, 360Learning matches the vibe and experience that we try to cultivate for both our clients and our employees."

Beyond looks, 360Learning offered deep customization. Each function—sales, personal training, Pilates—got its own branded group page. "We have different banner images, carousel images, gallery widgets to take them to different places and provide information that's useful and specific to those particular functions," Eddie notes.

The result? Learning became central to the employee experience rather than an administrative box to check.

2. Democratizing learning: From gatekeepers to enablers

Equinox didn't just switch platforms—they shifted their entire learning philosophy.

"One of the big reasons we made the shift to 360Learning was the premise of democratizing learning," Danny explains. "We wanted to open up that funnel to a larger audience for them to be able to teach courses and content that they are experts in, that they feel passionate about."

Now, Equinox's network of world-class fitness educators and sales experts can co-create content directly in the platform. The L&D team provides quality control, but they're no longer bottlenecks.

To scale this approach, they've built a "Theme Toolbox"—a “teach the teacher” course that guides subject-matter experts on how to become course authors. 

For Theresa Thurau, an Instructional Designer who worked on Equinox’s groundbreaking women's health certification, collaborative learning accelerates knowledge transmission: "We've been in the habit of making learning activities where they have to talk to each other in the comments—creating our own version of a discussion board within the courses. That's where we see collaborative learning helping our learners too, having them bounce ideas off of each other and have conversations because that's how our field learns best: by talking to each other."

3. Flexible authoring: Innovative assessment design

For Equinox's women's health certification, the team needed to test coaches on complex decision-making across multiple women's life stages.

Traditional LMS platforms would have forced coaches to write laborious essays covering every scenario. Instead, 360Learning's modular architecture enabled something more innovative.

"We built a 'choose your own adventure' style final assessment," Theresa explains. "Because of the modular nature of 360Learning, instead of having our coaches create one word document with a whole case study, we were able to chunk it. We built out one quiz question per question within each case study."

For other programs, 360Learning's AI-powered authoring tools help capture knowledge from Equinox's world-class experts in a fraction of the time—ensuring the most up-to-date, elite-level techniques are documented and scaled across the organization.

4. From vanity metrics to strategic insights

Equinox replaced surface-level data with reporting that drives real decisions.

"There are several ways to report in 360Learning," Eddie explains. "The custom reporting feature—being able to share reports with people either on a schedule or just giving them access to the report—has been very helpful. There's a lot of granular customizability in the reports."

The custom dashboards feature gives stakeholders live views of completion and engagement metrics. And the manager dashboard provides what Eddie calls "a hands-off way for managers to get insights into their reports' completion of different trainings"—no L&D bottleneck required.

The team can now answer questions like: Are new sales hires completing their one-week intensive on time? How are personal trainers progressing through their year-long curriculum? Which compliance trainings need follow-up?

The Impact: Upskilling at the speed of business

By switching to 360Learning, Equinox has done more than update their software—they've future-proofed their talent strategy.

Built a sustainable learning culture

By empowering subject matter experts to create content and enabling peer-to-peer learning through collaborative features, Equinox has ensured that expertise stays within the company even as people move through the organization. In this set up, everyone can contribute to the upskilling strategy, specially the internal experts who are passionate about sharing their knowledge.

Personalized onboarding experiences

Since joining 360Learning, Equinox has completely rebuilt several new onboarding programs and full curriculums within the platform. Each function—from sales to personal training to Pilates—now has its own e-learning onboarding path tailored to their specific needs. 

Supported business performance

Tailoring learning programs isn’t just about personalization - it’s about driving business results: "Over the past couple years since we joined 360Learning, we've completely rebuilt several new onboarding programs,” Eddie explains. “We've also launched several big initiatives this past year like missions and the women's health certification, and I would say that their success in large part has been due to the learner experience on the platform."

He continues: "While it's difficult to draw the arrow of attribution, we've seen an increase in sales over the past year. I would argue that our sales training development has been partially responsible for that lift. The sales onboarding has been completely redesigned within 360Learning as well."

Danielle Picot, EFTI Curriculum Designer, adds: "360Learning has really helped improve our sales and offerings that we can get to clients. The women's health certification was a full new PT service that we were able to lift up and launch given the education we provided."

Scaled alongside business growth

Equinox significantly expanded their personal training (PT) employee base over the past year, and engagement with PT learning kept pace. "We've had more engagement with PT learning," Eddie notes, crediting the platform's flexibility for enabling more coaches to complete their core curriculum despite rapid headcount growth.

Looking ahead: building out a transformative L&D strategy

Today, Equinox is a learning organization in the truest sense. With 360Learning, they have the tools to ensure every employee—from the front desk to the weight floor—is performing at the highest level. And they're doing it with a platform that matches their brand, democratizes expertise, and delivers the data-driven insights they need to prove impact.