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Meet Chloe Tempco
Meet Waking Dreams
Waking Dreams is a community-led progressive movement studio with two locations in the heart of East London. Across both spaces, the team offers a diverse mix of classes including yoga, Pilates, strength training, aerial, acrobatics, dance, and gymnastics, alongside recovery offerings like sauna and cold plunge and a treatment room for bodywork.
But the studio is about more than movement. Waking Dreams was built to create a space where people feel welcome to grow and connect.
“Success at Waking Dreams means a really busy, vibrant, bustling community,” co-founder Damien Brown shares. “We see people arrive not really knowing what’s going on and a few months later they’re stronger, more confident, and going out with friends they met here. That’s what we’re all about.”
The challenge
As Waking Dreams prepared to open its second location, the team was looking for financing to support the expansion. Damien was presented with an interest-free offer that required migrating to Mindbody. It seemed like a practical solution during a high-pressure moment. In reality, the transition quickly became a major setback.
What followed was a chaotic onboarding process, missing data, and a platform that made day-to-day operations much harder. Memberships did not transfer properly. Existing class packs were lost. Reporting was unreliable. The team had limited visibility into revenue and performance and routine admin became unnecessarily manual.
“They showed us this really flashy dashboard during the demo,” Damien says. “But when we actually got inside the system, it wasn’t how the backend looked at all. It felt like these new features had just been layered on top of a really old platform.”
The timing made the impact even worse. Waking Dreams had just launched its new location with a week of free classes designed to build excitement and convert new visitors into long-term members. But when the promotion ended, the memberships had not been set up correctly, meaning people were ready to buy and simply couldn’t.
“We did this amazing week of promo and filled the studio with people,” Damien recalls. “Then when it ended, there were no intro offers. People were calling saying, ‘I want to book classes,’ and they couldn’t.”
Instead of focusing on building momentum at the new site, the team was pulled into constant troubleshooting. Staff were manually handling tasks that should have been automatic and members were left frustrated by broken booking flows.
“It was absolute chaos,” Damien says. “All we wanted to do was get people booked into classes and we couldn’t even do that.”
The solution
After two difficult months, Waking Dreams made the decision to switch software.
“Our community and staff members were actually begging us, ‘Please, can we use Momence?’” Damien says.
The difference was immediate. During the migration, having a dedicated partner made all the difference. Instead of being passed from team to team, they had real support every step of the way. And the intuitive design of the platform made onboarding even simpler.
“Momence is just so easy and user-friendly,” says Damien. “When we bring on new staff, they get it right away. We don’t have to sit with them for hours. And the clients get it as well. It’s a nice, clean experience for everyone.”
Using Momence, the team could once again understand what was happening in the business without piecing together spreadsheets or manually pulling reports.
“We can see everything, from capacity to revenue to bookings,” Damien says. “That’s one of the things I really like. With two studios, multiple membership tiers, and additional offerings like sauna and recovery, having that visibility at a glance is a game-changer.”
Operationally, the day-to-day also became far easier. Tasks like teacher substitutions, which previously had to be handled manually, were now automated. The staff felt calmer and more confident. Members were relieved to return to a smoother booking experience.
The impact
Since switching to Momence, Waking Dreams has been steadily rebuilding.
Before the disruption, the original studio had reached around 75% capacity. Due to the migration to Mindbody, occupancy dropped significantly, with the new location closer to 30%. Now, the team is seeing a steady climb again, with memberships, attendance, and revenue all moving in the right direction.
More importantly, the business has been able to refocus on what actually drives growth. With the software working properly in the background, Damien and the team have been able to get back to marketing, programming, and creating the kind of community-led experience Waking Dreams is known for.
“We’re back on marketing, programming workshops, developing new classes — all of the really nice, fun stuff that we should be doing if everything else works under the hood,” shares Damien. “There’s some really interesting programming happening, good fun bits of marketing going out there, and the socials are up again.”
