A knee injury, a local club and a name built on opening hours.

24 Hour Fitness traces its start to a single club in northern California and to a founder who arrived as a customer. In a 2017 profile republished by CNBC, the writer Kevin Ryan of Inc. said Mark Mastrov injured his knee in 1983 and used the Nautilus machines at a local health club for his rehabilitation. When the owner sold the club, Mastrov invested in it with the idea of running it as an around-the-clock operation, and the business took the name 24 Hour Nautilus. English Wikipedia places that first club in San Leandro, California, and gives 1983 as the founding year; CNN, reporting on the company in 2020, said it began in 1985.

The original name tied the business to two things: its opening hours and the brand of exercise machine on its floor. The CNBC profile says the chain grew quickly and that, about a decade after the start, the company bought out several rivals and rebranded as 24 Hour Fitness. The new name kept “24 Hour” and replaced “Nautilus” with “Fitness”.

The company later built campaign language around the same number: its marketing chief described a programme called “Strength in 24” in a 2022 interview, discussed below.

The chain also spread beyond the United States for a time. According to the Club Solutions trade magazine in August 2012, 24 Hour Fitness had acquired the California Fitness clubs in Asia in 1999, and in 2012 it sold the clubs in Hong Kong, Singapore and China to The Ansa Group. Then-chief executive Carl Liebert said in the magazine that the sale would let the company stay focused on its clubs in the U.S. Wikipedia adds that the company’s European clubs had closed in the early 2000s, leaving 24 Hour Fitness as a U.S. operator from 2012.

Private-equity owners, sponsorships and a 2020 restructuring.

Ownership changed hands several times. The 2017 CNBC profile says Mastrov sold his share when the company was acquired in 2005, a deal Wikipedia attributes to the private-equity firm Forstmann Little & Co. Wikipedia says Forstmann Little sold 24 Hour Fitness Worldwide in 2014 to an investor group led by AEA Investors and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, after an earlier sale process in 2012 had been called off.

Under Forstmann Little the brand leaned on sport. Wikipedia says the company became a sponsor of the United States Olympic teams from 2004 to 2008, with a programme that included memberships for some Olympic hopefuls and upgrades at U.S. Olympic Training Centers, starting with the facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado. From 2005 it co-sponsored a professional cycling team and opened clubs branded with the name of the cyclist Lance Armstrong, an arrangement Wikipedia says the company ended in 2012.

In June 2020, CNN reported, 24 Hour Fitness filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after Covid-19 restrictions had closed its clubs for months. Wikipedia says the company emerged in December 2020 with ownership passing to a group of its lenders, Sculptor Capital, Monarch Alternative Capital and Cyrus Capital Partners, and that it is now headquartered in Carlsbad, California.

After the restructuring the company began to reposition the brand. In a November 2022 interview with DesignRush, Jill Rankin, then senior vice president of marketing, said the company had listened to members through the pandemic and had “updated our brand identity” to reflect what she called a holistic approach to fitness, tied to a campaign named “Strength in 24”. She credited the campaign visuals to the agency InGoodTaste and said the imagery was meant to let members see themselves rather than focus on extremes of physical performance.

The same agency returned at the end of 2024. Athletech News reported on 30 December 2024 that 24 Hour Fitness had launched a brand initiative called “Your Move”, made with InGoodTaste and timed for the new year, with a 30-second spot at its centre. The trade site quoted InGoodTaste chief executive Ryan Lindholm and the company’s vice president of marketing, Miia Suortti, and said the chain had launched a member loyalty programme called FitPerks that year and had begun upgrading clubs with new equipment, lighting and interior finishes. Wikipedia lists later additions including Recovery24 amenities and a Reformer24 Pilates pilot in Southern California in November 2025, and says Crunch Fitness announced in April 2025 that it was acquiring a group of 24 Hour Fitness clubs in Florida.

Design and documentation.

A gym or fitness-studio brand reaches people through spaces as much as through screens, so its identity has to work on a wide range of surfaces. Exterior signage is often the first contact: a fascia or illuminated sign has to read from across a car park or a busy street, which tends to favour a short wordmark, a simple symbol and a colour that holds up at night. Inside, the brand moves onto walls, floor graphics, wayfinding, locker areas and reception desks, where tone of voice and typography carry as much weight as the logo itself.

Lighting is a design tool in this category. Some studios use coloured light to set a mood for a class, while others favour bright, even light and pale finishes; either way, the chosen light changes how the brand colour looks in person. Apparel and merchandise extend the identity onto staff uniforms, towels, bottles and bags, so marks need to survive embroidery, single-colour print and small sizes. Apps and booking tools add another layer, translating the palette and type into icons, buttons and class schedules on a phone. A consistent system ties these touchpoints together without forcing every location to look identical.

A number, a promise and a series of campaign lines.

The 24 Hour Fitness identity puts a number at the front of the name. The numerals “24” describe a service rather than a person, a place or a product, and they survived the 1990s rename intact while the reference to Nautilus machines was dropped. The 2022 campaign line “Strength in 24” returned to the same number.

The company’s recent marketing has been built around people more than equipment. Rankin told DesignRush that the “Strength in 24” imagery set out to show members and the emotions of an active life, and Athletech News described “Your Move” as a new-year message about making a start. Both campaigns came from InGoodTaste.

Partnerships extend the mark into sport and community settings. Wikipedia lists a 2023 tie-up with the nonprofit Playworks and, citing the company’s announcements, partnerships with professional teams including the Los Angeles Rams and the LA Clippers.

For a design guide, 24 Hour Fitness shows how a name that began as a description of opening hours and a machine brand can drop the machine reference, keep the hours and carry on through changes of owner, a restructuring and successive campaign lines. Compare it with Peloton, a fitness brand built around connected equipment and classes, and Crunch Fitness, the gym chain that took over some of its Florida clubs in 2025. For this guide we use club red, night navy and signal amber with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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