Les Mills

Les Mills creates group exercise programmes using music and science to help people enjoy fitness. Its programmes are licensed by over 17,500 partner clubs globally and taught by 130,000 certified instructors. The company offers fitness programmes for various purposes, along with on-demand home workouts.

With instructors based all over Europe as well as further afield, Les Mills faced the challenge of taking recurring payments in a range of currencies, including euros, Swedish krona and pound sterling.

To achieve this, at first Les Mills was using a Direct Debit setup that required extensive manual administration along with bulk uploads to the bank.

But this was a time-consuming and resource-intensive option. Les Mills wanted to find a more efficient method to bring together all the different strands of the company’s UK and European payments landscape. GoCardless was the online Direct Debit solution Les Mills needed.

Les Mills built its own GoCardless integration for the Magento eCommerce platform. Out of all the integrations they’d previously built into Magento, the team at Les Mills said the GoCardless experience was the best, thanks to the well-documented and reliable API, which features a user-friendly REST design.

Once the integration was up and running, the Les Mills team were able to automate their customer SEPA Direct Debit sign-up process, making their previous manual process obsolete. Having GoCardless in place has also saved significant work with manual administration.

Adding Direct Debit via GoCardless has changed the service Les Mills offers by opening up additional payment options for its instructors. What’s more, in some regions like Germany, Direct Debit is one of the main payment methods.

The results speak for themselves. When Les Mills started using GoCardless, none of its UK customers were using Direct Debit. Now there are around 1,800. And in Germany Les Mills transferred around 2,600 existing Direct Debit customers to its new GoCardless setup.