STUDIO NOIR

Private · Master Plan · v1.0
STUDIO NOIRBRAND BOOK

STUDIO NOIR

Brand Book

The anchor document. Every downstream piece (site copy, signage, member letters, staff scripts, investor decks) resolves back to here. If it contradicts this book, this book wins.

Written in plain English so Taj and any team member can read it out loud and understand every rule.

1. What STUDIO NOIR is

STUDIO NOIR is a luxury pole and movement studio in Raleigh, North Carolina, run at 5-star hospitality standard. Phase 1 opens in 2027 as a boutique studio. Phase 2 expands into a full luxury wellness club with recovery amenities, café, and broadcast-grade competition floor. Phase 3 franchises the concept nationally.

One line: Where athletes train and artists perform.

STUDIO NOIR is not a gym. It is not a strip mall pole studio. It is not a spa. It is a members’ club built to the standard of a hotel, programmed to the standard of a training facility, and staged (Phase 2 forward) to the standard of a broadcast venue.

Prosecco at the door. Concierge greeting by name. Music curated by Trill’s in-house team, never streamed. Lighting warmed to skin, not to camera.

2. Positioning

Category: Luxury movement studio (Phase 1). Luxury wellness club (Phase 2).

Primary reference frame: Aman Hotels crossed with a real training studio, staged like a broadcast venue.

Positioning statement: STUDIO NOIR is where world-class movement training and hotel-grade hospitality live under one roof. Members come to work, to be seen well, and to belong to something that treats their body and their time with reverence.

What we are not: - Not a big-box gym - Not a women-only studio (all genders welcome, programming and staffing read premium and inclusive) - Not a nightclub with mirrors (the pole and dance programs are athletic, trained, respected) - Not a spa cosplaying as a gym - Not a franchise yet (Phase 3 opens that door, on our terms)

3. Brand promise

Three things every member gets, every visit, without exception:

  1. Recognition. Greeted by name. Preferences remembered.
  2. A room worth being in. Materials, air, sound, and light held to hotel standard, even at Phase 1 boutique scale.
  3. Programming that respects the work. Class quality, coach quality, equipment quality. Nothing rushed.

If any of these three breaks, the visit failed. Staff are trained to notice and fix in real time.

4. Five pillars

Every service, space, and communication traces back to one of these.

Pillar 1: Movement

Pole. Dance. Strength conditioning. Mobility. Taught by real coaches (not influencers). Classes have a curriculum. Progress is tracked. Members leave stronger, not just tired.

Pillar 2: Recovery

Phase 1: streamlined (breathwork, mobility, occasional cupping and stretching partnerships). Phase 2: full recovery wing (sauna, cold plunge, contrast therapy, treatment rooms). Held to spa standard, included in membership (not upsold).

Pillar 3: Performance

Phase 2 forward: THE NOIR INVITATIONAL (annual pole and movement championship) and the in-house broadcast stage. Members can compete, showcase, and be filmed at broadcast quality. STUDIO NOIR is one of the few clubs where the room itself is worth performing in.

Pillar 4: Hospitality

Prosecco at arrival. Concierge desk. Staff trained on hotel hospitality, not retail service. This pillar holds even at Phase 1 boutique scale because it costs almost nothing to do well and everything to do poorly.

Pillar 5: Belonging

Members’ club, not a punch card. Named onboarding, member events, a room that feels like yours before class starts.

5. Audience

Not defined by age or gender. Defined by relationship to their body and their time.

Primary member profile: Adults, roughly 28 to 55, Raleigh-Durham and inner-ring suburbs (with West Cary, North Raleigh ITB, and Chapel Hill as the highest-density catchments), household income $150K and up (Phase 1) or $200K and up (Phase 2), who already spend on multiple memberships and have quietly outgrown all of them. They want a room that matches the rest of their life. The center of gravity for our launch cohort is the wealthy stay-at-home mother-wife who is also a lifestyle creator on Instagram and TikTok — she sets the aesthetic tone for the room and her friends follow her in.

Secondary profiles: - Athletes and dancers training seriously, who need real equipment and (Phase 2) a stage - Artists and performers passing through the Triangle who want a real place to train - Recovery-first members (Phase 2) - Small friend groups who join together and treat STUDIO NOIR as their third place - Wives of RTP tech and finance executives (Cisco, IBM, Epic Games, Red Hat, Fidelity Cary); wives of Duke and NC State head coaches; CAA/WME agent spouses who’ve relocated from LA/NY

Not the audience: - Discount shoppers - Members who want to be sold to at the desk - Anyone looking for a fitness influencer aesthetic

6. Competitive frame

We do not benchmark against gyms. We benchmark against the top of hospitality and the top of training.

Hospitality benchmarks: Aman Tokyo, The Peninsula Chicago, 1 Hotel, Faena.

Training benchmarks: Equinox flagships, Life Time Athletic, The Class by Taryn Toomey.

Performance venue benchmarks (Phase 2): Broadcast-grade dance rooms, small theater black boxes, editorial photo studios.

STUDIO NOIR is what happens when someone who belongs in all three worlds decides those three worlds should have been one room.

7. Brand architecture (summary)

Full detail in 04_NAMING_ARCHITECTURE.

Parent brand: STUDIO NOIR.

Phase 1 sub-brands: - STUDIO NOIR membership tiers (Access, Studio; The Founders is the charter designation) - STUDIO NOIR Apparel (small print-on-demand drops Phase 1, real line Phase 2)

Phase 2 additions: - THE NOIR INVITATIONAL (competition IP, produced by The Walker Group) - STUDIO NOIR Café + Lounge - The House Shop (retail micro-boutique) - STUDIO NOIR Digital (remote and travel membership) - Named private studio rooms

Phase 3: - STUDIO NOIR franchised units (branded by city: STUDIO NOIR Atlanta, STUDIO NOIR Miami, STUDIO NOIR Charlotte, etc.)

All sub-brands wear the STUDIO NOIR wordmark. Nothing breaks away.

8. Founder and creative direction

Founder, face, and creative director: Tajanay (“Taj”) Hines. Widow, mother, athlete, entrepreneur. Pivoting from SoftPlay Era into STUDIO NOIR as her wealth vehicle.

Taj is the face of STUDIO NOIR. She sets the taste, the standard, and the tone. She is not the operator. Phase 1 runs on Taj + contract instructors + booking software. Phase 2 hires a General Manager. Full founder story in 01_BRAND_STORY.

Chief Strategy Officer: Trill Walker. Marketing Director: Tia Dunn. Producer of competition IP (Phase 2 forward): The Walker Group.

9. Rules of the brand

Non-negotiable.

  1. Prosecco at the door, always. It is the signature. Never swapped for water or tea.
  2. Greet every member by name within thirty seconds of entry.
  3. No influencer partnerships that read thirsty. Members are the story.
  4. No green in any brand asset, ever.
  5. No em dashes or en dashes in any copy. Commas, colons, periods. Hyphens only for compound modifiers.
  6. Music curated by Trill or an assigned in-house team, never streamed from an algorithm.
  7. No promotional signage on the training floor. Marketing lives at the concierge desk (Phase 1) or in the lounge (Phase 2), at most.
  8. Photography of members is opt-in and never used without written permission.
  9. Staff dress code is uniform, tailored, and quiet. No logos larger than a coin.
  10. Every space is a room worth being in, or it is closed until it is.
  11. Taj is never the operator. If nobody can cover a class, we cancel the class. We do not solve staffing by putting Taj on the floor.
  12. No neon signage on walls (a common pole studio trap; we do not).
  13. No pampas grass as staging.

10. Success, defined

STUDIO NOIR succeeds when: - Phase 1: A member cancels their other gym or studio membership within 90 days of joining STUDIO NOIR, tells one specific friend, and stops mentioning price. - Phase 2: The same, plus the flagship becomes a Triangle-scene fixture that press covers unprompted. - Phase 3: A prospective franchisee flies to Raleigh, tours the flagship, and says “I want to build this in my city.”

That’s the metric. Not member count. Not revenue. The rooms it wins and the words it earns.