Although at an institutional level as well as at an educational one, sport has been increasingly neglected in Romania, the country’s inhabitants are more and more interested in putting their body to work, while their appetite for movement is becoming more pronounced, whether it's jogging and/or cycling outdoors, or working out at the gym. In addition, team sports also remain popular in Romania, as did swimming.
However, there are very few spaces which are able to offer participants a good combination of different kinds of sports as well as a subscription capable of containing all of them. Indeed, I must admit that such multifunctional sports centers began to appear in Romania, but, ultimately, they only contain a limited number of activities.
Thus, for a long time it was evident that such sports complexes represented the pinnacle of sport services in the country; still, getting everything you wanted to do under the same subscription was somewhat difficult, not to mention expensive; this problem seems to have been solved long with the creation of the 7card. The service has the merit of proposing a new approach in its domain, enabling users to choose what they want to do, when they want to do it, and placing all this under one monthly subscription.
In more concrete terms, the initiators of this service were able to form partnerships with various gyms or places that offer sports service, therefore being able to give the customers access to any gym in the network, as often as their agenda permitted. As a result, the 7card concept had an immediate appeal to the public, sports lovers in Bucharest (where the concept was first launched) resorting without hesitation to such a service. The idea was also taken up relatively quickly by the large corporations in the city which were obviously offering sports benefits to employees.
Thus, through 7card, they were able to offer their staff a wide range of sports services all at an affordable price for both the employee and the company. Of course, such an initiative could not remain bound to the capital city. Step by step, other major cities in Romania were added to the 7card list, some with more, others with fewer gyms, but regardless of the city, one thing remains certain: that the number of sports centres which are part of 7card is constantly growing.
Therefore, the potential of the concept was immediately spotted and seized by major players in the market. Sodexo, probably the most influential company in the area of the meal tickets, recently acquired 20% of the shares of Benefit Seven, the holding company of 7card, and also the company that managed to become one of the largest, if not the largest, provider of employee wellness and sports subscriptions in Romania (mainly because of the 7card).
Following the transaction, the 7card brand will remain the same and the executive and management teams of Benefit Seven will also remain unchanged. However, Sodexo’s input will enable the business to further develop, the 7card founders already envisaging a doubling of the company’s turnover until the end of 2016.
Sources:
https://7card.ro/
Claudiu Bolcu
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