My Gym Brand Guidelines: The 1983 Children’s Gym Franchise and Its Chinese Chapter

A gym built around young children’s play.

My Gym Children’s Fitness Center dates from 1983. English Wikipedia says the company was formed that year by Yacov and Susi Sherman; a 2019 article on the brand’s business in China, in the Chinese financial paper National Business Daily, names William Caplin as a co-founder alongside the couple. Entrepreneur’s franchise directory also gives 1983 as the founding year, and Chinese Wikipedia describes My Gym as an American chain of fitness centres for young children.

Franchising followed about a decade later. The franchisor, My Gym Enterprises, says it has sold franchises since 1994; Entrepreneur’s directory gives the franchising start as 1995, so the two dates sit side by side. The same directory names the parent company as Gym Consulting LLC and files the brand under children’s businesses.

The franchise website keeps the founding year at the front of its pitch — “Since 1983” — and describes a membership-based model in which parties, camps and events sit on top of the weekly classes. It also says the brand has appeared in Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500 for nearly two decades.

Stations, not queues.

My Gym’s classes are built for babies and young children. A Swellesley Report visit to a newly opened gym in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in April 2026 described classes for children from about three months to 10 years, structured so that there is no sitting or waiting in line: children rotate through stations under instructors’ supervision, with a ball pit, a climbing wall and a trampoline among the equipment. Age ranges vary by source: English Wikipedia gives six weeks to nine or ten years for the classes, birthday parties, summer camps and events, while Chinese Wikipedia gives three months to nine years for the fitness courses. The same report set out the four strands around which the company builds its programming — cognitive development, physical growth, “emotional IQ” and social skills — which are the company’s own framing.

The class list has grown from that base. A March 2026 notice in the same local paper listed foundational mobility, gymnastics, dance, a programme called Gym Ninjas, camps and special events among the offerings of the Wellesley gym. The franchisor says its classes are age-appropriate and non-competitive, that gym layouts and activities change every week, and that every class has at least two teachers. The Wellesley report added that families could start or pause without a long-term contract, that grandparents were welcome to join in or watch, that the entrance had a sofa where parents could catch up on work during class, and that the gym was the eleventh My Gym run by the same Boston-area operator.

The brand has also reached families outside the gym. English Wikipedia says that in autumn 2008 a My Gym DVD, My Gym at Home, won a Parents’ Choice award, and that the company funded a children’s entertainment group, The Activators.

Classes, mascots and franchise pages.

Children’s swim, music and activity franchises sell a weekly class rather than a product, so their identities are built around the session itself. The swim schools present their lessons by age band: Turtle Tots divides its programme into baby, toddler, preschool and independent stages on its website, and Water Babies described parents in the pool as “assistant teachers” when Sports Management profiled it in 2016.

Photography carries much of the brand work. Water Babies sold underwater baby photography alongside its lessons by 2016, according to Sports Management, and pictures of parents and small children in the water are the companies’ own material. This guide reproduces none of those photographs and names no child, parent or teacher.

Naming does similar work. Programmes get names of their own: Turtle Tots calls its pregnancy yoga classes Turtle Tums, and in 2016 Water Babies called its programme for before and after birth WaterBumps. Mascots stretch the brand name further, and Turtle Tots introduced a turtle mascot and asked families to suggest its name. Booking is handled online, through lesson finders, regional location pages and customer portals of the kind on Turtle Tots’ website.

The corporate side speaks in a different register. Founder stories sit on “our story” and “about us” pages, and in the cases of Water Babies and Turtle Tots they begin with founders who were new parents themselves. Franchise pages set out territories, training and head-office support for prospective owners, while trade titles such as Startups.co.uk, TheBusinessDesk and Sports Management record licences, territories and changes of ownership. This guide keeps what those independent titles report apart from what each company says about itself.

An American franchise with a large Chinese chapter.

Much of My Gym’s growth came abroad, and China was a major chapter. Chinese Wikipedia says the exclusive rights to the brand in mainland China were held by Tianjin Meijiemu, which opened the first Chinese centre, under the name 美吉姆 (Meijimu), in Beijing on 14 February 2009. In 2018 Sanlei, a listed maker of high-end machine tools that had begun moving into education the year before, bought all of Tianjin Meijiemu, and in 2019 it renamed itself after the brand, the Chinese business site Jiemian reported in June 2021. The same report described the listed company’s early-education business as centred on Tianjin Meijiemu, and noted that the Shenzhen Stock Exchange had sent the company an inquiry letter in June 2021 about write-downs on the businesses it had bought. In February 2022 Jiemian reported that the company held Tianjin Meijiemu through a subsidiary in which it owned 70 per cent.

Entrepreneur’s year-by-year figures trace that international weight. In 2019 its data showed 694 units, of which 524 were outside the United States; its 2026 data shows 398: 159 in the US, 233 abroad and six company-owned. The Swellesley Report in 2026 gave a figure of more than 600 franchised locations worldwide, so counts depend on the source and the year. My Gym appeared in Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500 each year from 2016 to 2020, ranked between No. 158 and No. 251.

The directory’s counts show how the mix has shifted over a decade. In 2016 it recorded 425 units, 161 in the United States and 264 abroad; by 2018 there were 604, and in 2022 there were 574, with 407 outside the US. In 2025 the total stood at 402, with 236 abroad. The US figure barely moved across the whole period, staying between 159 and 170 gyms, while the count abroad rose to 524 in 2019 and then fell back.

For a design guide, My Gym shows how a short, plain name can travel: two English words at home and, as 美吉姆, a three-character name in China, with a programme vocabulary — stations, Gym Ninjas, camps — that explains the visit before the class begins. Compare The Little Gym, the 1976 American children’s gym franchise, and Gymboree, whose story began with play classes. For this guide we use a deep green, a ball-pit orange and a sky blue with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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