Boutique Barre Studios is Madrid's original boutique barre studio, a women-only fitness community built around a more intense, faster style of barre that most of the city had never encountered when it opened. Founded by Vital de la Torre and his wife Mariana Muñoz, the studio was built on Mariana's expertise, having spent over five years training in Mexico City, where barre evolved to this new method. That experience makes her one of the most accomplished teachers of this style in the country.
What started as a single studio in Goya has grown into two Madrid locations, a growing online programme, and a teacher training course scaling from one intake per year to three. The studio also runs exclusive pop-up classes at the Four Seasons Hotel Madrid for their community.
Before opening Boutique Barre Studios, Vital worked as a project manager and CTO in the telecommunications industry. That background brings a different kind of expertise to the business and means he thinks about software the way most studio owners don't, which made the technology problems that followed all the more difficult to ignore.
Before Momence, Boutique Barre went through two other platforms, each one created problems the business couldn't afford to keep absorbing.
The first was Glofox. The integration with Wellhub was broken in a way that stopped late cancellations from registering correctly. Urban had no integration at all. Once clients realised there were gaps in the system, they used them. Revenue was walking out the door through cracks in the software.
They moved to Mindbody hoping for something more reliable. What they found was an interface Vital describes as a patchwork of old and new code, poorly suited to a Spanish and Latin American client base. Accents and special characters weren't rendering correctly. Exporting customer data was a manual, time-consuming process. And because Vital felt Mindbody's CRM tool was not a worthwhile investment, he was running MailChimp separately just to manage newsletters and follow-ups, which meant maintaining two systems instead of one.
For a business already managing two studio locations, rotating teacher schedules across both sites every month, an online content programme, and a growing teacher training operation, that overhead wasn't sustainable.
"When your booking system hurts the business, you have to change."
By the time Vital started evaluating alternatives, he wasn't just looking for a booking tool. He was looking for a platform that could hold a complex, growing business together without creating more work than it saved.
Vital evaluated Momence and bSport side by side. Both were comparable in price and features. What made the difference was how everything worked together.
With Momence, the booking tools, marketing suite, CRM, and automations all sit in one place. That meant Vital could stop running MailChimp externally and manage the full customer journey from a single platform.
"I felt that Momence had it better integrated and more mature. I chose Momence and I have not regretted it."
During migration, he built out around 50 to 60 automated sequences covering newsletters, win-back flows, and ongoing customer communications. It was a significant upfront investment, and a deliberate one. If he was going to build it, he was going to build it properly. Once it was done, it ran itself.
Momence also gave Boutique Barre a clear, logical backend that Vital could configure with confidence. Because teachers rotate across both studios on a monthly cycle with no two months the same, every class needs to be manually assigned each month. Momence handles the complexity of that without adding to it.
One thing Vital didn't anticipate was how useful the Community Posts tab inside the Momence app would become. After noticing that some clients weren't opening emails, didn't have a phone number on file for SMS, and weren't on Instagram, the posts feed offered an additional way to reach them directly through the app.
"We were ignoring this feature until we realised it could work for us. I think it's getting traction because it's in the app, and even by accident they can find it."
Across two studios, a rotating teacher schedule, and a growing range of programmes, Momence now holds the operation together without demanding constant attention. After years of platforms that generated noise, confusion, and operational drag, the biggest thing it has delivered is quiet.
Vital no longer receives complaints about booking errors or cancellations going missing. Clients aren't confused by the app. Support issues have dropped away. The platform works in the background the way it should, and Vital can focus on the business rather than the software.
"The best feedback I can give about Momence is that I don't get confused customers anymore. When you run a studio, no news really is good news."
More bookings now come through the Momence app than through the web, which Vital sees as a signal that clients have adopted the platform comfortably. The sequences built during migration run automatically, handling the communications work that previously required two separate tools and ongoing manual effort.
With plans to expand into other Spanish cities and launch an online teacher training programme for teachers who can't travel to Madrid, Boutique Barre is in a period of deliberate growth. Having a platform that works without getting in the way is what makes that possible.
"If you want a comprehensive tool that has everything you need to grow your business, Momence is the right choice."