About F45 Training

F45 Training⁠(opens in a new tab or window) (“F45”) is a global fitness franchise that provides 45-minute functional workouts. It was founded in Australia in 2013, and just two years later, the company had expanded internationally. Now, F45 has a network of approximately 2,000 franchises across 66 countries.

The Challenge

Before Canva Teams, F45 faced significant hurdles in upholding brand compliance, an essential component of any franchise enterprise. Their previous platform struggled to meet their diverse design needs, causing significant bottlenecks within the design team. These delays caused franchisees to create their own assets with relatively modest degree of brand control.

“From a strategic point of view, we needed to support our franchisees with a fully functional design tool,” says Marilyn Bretherick, Global Director of Franchise Systems and Operations.

The Solution

F45 knew that Canva Teams would provide the necessary tools for their franchisees to create professional, on-brand designs quickly and easily. Canva's easy-to-use platform and robust design capabilities quickly won over F45's franchisees.

Canva Teams has fostered collaboration and growth within the F45 franchise ecosystem by enabling idea-sharing, live feedback, and dissemination of best practices in one place. Director of Digital and Social Content Zachary Astran has seen a dramatic increase in brand compliance.

"Developing our franchise toolkits and execution guides has been an absolute breeze with Canva," says Zachary. "Canva has a user-friendly interface that allows me to effortlessly share assets across teams and our extensive network of franchisees."

“We're finding that so many more studios are using the locked templates or editable templates because they are all centrally located. I closely monitor our social accounts, and every day can see the power of Canva templates in action.”

Canva's Brand Kit has revolutionized the design team's efficiency, enabling designers to deliver detailed templates in a fraction of the time.

"What once took ten days or more to accomplish now can take less than 24 hours,” says Zachary.

These templates empower franchisees to customize their own designs, while staying on-brand. Since adopting Canva in January, F45’s 1,400+ users have created over 34,000 designs across the globe.

Content management, the key to brand compliance

Effective content management is essential for maintaining brand compliance, especially for businesses with multiple brands and sub-brands like F45.

“Our content library is relatively large,” says Zachary. “To be able to navigate that in an easy way is incredibly beneficial. Brand compliance has increased and our job is easier as we’re reaching out less to franchisees from a compliance standpoint.”

Using Canva’s Brand feature, F45 has set up each brand with folders of localized content in one central location, ensuring franchisees can access the content they require while allowing designers to update or introduce fresh content swiftly.

Kirsty Forbes, F45's Marketing Director, recognizes the transformative impact of this system. “We have multiple brands and sub-brands with their own unique style guides,” Kirsty says. “We could never reach high compliance as our franchisees grappled with confusion over the diverse visual identities associated with each brand.”

“With the ability to list all our brands and exercise precise brand control, the Brand feature empowers us to grant access solely to the specific brands and assets each franchisee needs for their operations.”

Greater collaboration

F45 saw a huge number of new studios open post-COVID, creating massive demand for brand design assets. They needed a platform that could facilitate better collaboration.

“Collaboration is key for our internal use,” Marilyn says. “The F45 HQ structure is based on facilitating cross-functional communication – how do we get teams to collaborate in Whiteboards and other docs to produce presentations, manuals, and guides?”

The F45 team was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to collaborate in Canva.

“Canva Whiteboards were pivotal in laying the foundation for our brand ecosystem,” says Marilyn. “We underestimated how easy it would be to collaborate and seek feedback with live sharing and using the comments feature. With the assistance of the Canva team, we created our entire enterprise account by collaborating in this dynamic environment."

More output from a more efficient workflow

Alongside 23,000 designs created by franchisees this year, F45 has streamlined its marketing team’s workflow with Canva Teams. This has resulted in a 60% increase in content creation.

“That's been the most exciting part about the Canva platform,” says Marilyn. “It really drove us together to design, create, collaborate, be creative.”

Setting up templates in Canva has further streamlined their workflow and created faster turnaround times, and greater output without overloading the marketing team’s designers.

"It would take us two to three weeks to create a monthly presentation. Now, it takes us less than three days to create two to three presentations within any given month," says Zachary.

Empowering franchisees to work faster

By setting up Brand Kits in Canva Teams, F45 has empowered more people to help with simple design requests. In turn, it enabled the team to be more effective with over 300 templates designed in the first 2 months.

"From a collaboration standpoint, it's a lot easier than any tool we've used previously," Zachary says. "We have a massive network of studios, a large portfolio of brand partners, and one and a half designers. My job is to manage all of those creative requests. Canva allows me to create simple, quick designs rather than having to utilize designers for every asset request."

Kirsty says the marketing team’s new workflow has saved even more time for themselves and franchisees by streamlining their feedback process.

“We’ve created a Canva Slack channel that enables us to have conversations with our franchisee network quickly and efficiently. We are able to get live feedback on brand templates with the added ability of Canva to make adjustments almost instantaneously,” Kirsty says.

Using design to empower

F45 has successfully used Canva Teams to tighten its brand identity and solve its most pressing marketing challenges. Marilyn attributes its success to Canva’s ability to act as a functional solution – an all-in-one platform that people enjoy using to create designs.

"Design is not just about aesthetics. It's about creating functional solutions that inspire and connect with our franchise partners across F45. Canva Teams has enabled F45 to achieve just that," she says.