Third Space: Building Atlas, the digital foundation for London’s leading luxury gym collection
The Challenge
Third Space is London’s luxury health club collection that blend fitness, wellness, and hospitality. Members expect the best of everything: from spa treatments and personal training to technology.
But behind the scenes, their existing third-party systems were struggling to keep up with growth and member expectations. Bookings were unreliable. Timetables were slow to update. Downtime was a recurring frustration for both members and staff.
Third Space needed a platform built around their brand promise - a premium experience at every touchpoint. And they wanted full control to innovate and evolve.
“We’d outgrown our off-the-shelf solution. Stability was a real issue, members couldn’t always book classes, which was a crisis for us.”
Colin Waggett, CEO, Third Space
The Solution: Atlas
Working in close partnership with Talk Think Do, Third Space rebuilt its entire digital ecosystem, from backend systems to mobile apps, on Microsoft Azure. The new platform, Atlas, is the operational and digital core for everything from bookings and payments to instructor scheduling and notifications.
Rebuilding the foundation
At its heart, Atlas is a cloud-native, microservice-based system hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service. It delivers 99.99% uptime through serverless design, active monitoring, and zero-downtime deployments.
A complete digital suite:
- Member App: A redesigned experience that feels as premium as the clubs themselves - faster bookings, richer class discovery, and personalised recommendations.
- Instructor App: Built with instructors for instructors. Real-time schedules, cover management, pay visibility, and performance data - all in one place.
- Atlas Portal: A web-based operations console where staff manage timetables, notifications, and member interactions with ease.
- Integration: Deep integration with key systems, including HubSpot to enable rich push notification and transactional email workflows.
The platform integrates:
- Azure SQL and Redis for performance and caching
- Azure Cognitive Search for member discovery and content indexing
- Event Grid and Service Bus for asynchronous messaging
- Key Vault and Managed Identities for secure, secretless operations.
- GitHub Entrerprise and GitHub Advanced Security for automated, safe deployment
Together, these tools deliver a seamless experience - for members booking reformer Pilates at 6am, or for instructors managing hundreds of classes a week.
“We’ve gone from hours of admin to instant updates. It’s given us endless time back and a seamless experience for our instructors.”
Amanda Chambers, Group Exercise Studio Operations Manager, Third Space
Impact
The transformation has reshaped how Third Space operates and how members experience the brand.
- Stability and scale: Atlas delivers consistent uptime, supporting over 13,000 classes a month across 13 clubs with confidence
- Efficiency and empowerment: Automation and streamlined workflows save more than around 40 hours a week on cover and scheduling administration alone, freeing teams to focus on members.
- Performance and insight: Real-time data on occupancy, covers, and ratings helps managers optimise timetables and member experience.
- Brand experience: A sleek, responsive app now mirrors the quality of the in-club environment, reinforcing Third Space’s premium positioning.
- Security and compliance: Managed identities, encrypted data, and proactive monitoring protect both staff and members without slowing development.
The result is a platform that feels effortless to use and robust to operate - a true reflection of the brand promise.
The Partnership
Talk Think Do’s role extended far beyond technology delivery. From the first architecture workshop to ongoing feature releases, the relationship has been defined by collaboration, transparency, and shared ambition. Our business analysts, engineers, and delivery leads have worked in close collaboration with Third Space’s internal teams throughout, providing continuous technical leadership, roadmap planning, and agile delivery.
We understand the importance of brand in high-end markets and pride ourselves on collaborating effectively with external creative partners, integrating design and engineering to deliver cohesive, high-performance experiences. To this end we also work collaboratively with Third Space’s brand and UX agencies to align new creative directions with the underlying technology.
The team’s sector understanding and deep Microsoft expertise enabled rapid delivery while building a foundation for continuous innovation.
Third Space’s teams describe Talk Think Do as “an extension of our own” - aligned on culture, pace, and quality.
“They’re an innovative team, culturally and technically a perfect fit. Together, we’ve built something that can grow with us.”
Michelle Ripley, IT Director, Third Space
Looking Ahead
Atlas isn’t just a platform, it’s a foundation for innovation.
Third Space and Talk Think Do are already working on the next generation of features: AI-driven personalisation, gamified member engagement, and data-led decision tools to power the next phase of growth.
“We’ve created something that scales with our ambitions - stable, flexible, and ready for the future.”
Colin Waggett, CEO, Third Space
What This Means For You
When your organisation depends on a back-end platform to run daily operations, every outage and inefficiency matters. Talk Think Do designs and delivers robust, user-focused systems that can handle scale, reduce operational risk, and evolve with your business.
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