Ultimate Longevity Center Sold 200 Franchise Territories Before Its First Center Opens

Cold water immersion, one of the recovery modalities Ultimate Longevity Center plans to pair with sauna and biomarker testing at each franchised center. Photo: Unsplash.

Ultimate Longevity Center has not opened a single location. It has already sold 200 of them.

The concept, built by serial franchisor Anthony Geisler’s Sequel Brands with the longevity personality Gary Brecka and the testing platform Lifeforce, said on July 9 that 70 franchisees have claimed 200 territories, roughly four months after launch. The first centers are slated to open in the coming months in Boulder, Denver, San Diego, Chandler, Arizona, and Boca Raton, Florida. Each one is designed to pair sauna, cold plunge, red light, and hyperbaric oxygen with biomarker panels and hormone analysis.

For the sauna industry, the story is not the longevity pitch. It is the purchase order. Two hundred territories, each carrying a franchisor-specified equipment package that the company’s disclosure document lists at $33,000 to $428,000, is a procurement event before it is a wellness brand. The questions a fitness-trade write-up skips are the ones that matter here: who supplies the heat and the cold, and what happens to the independent studios already running in those five metros.

Key Facts

What: Ultimate Longevity Center (ULC), a longevity and recovery franchise from Anthony Geisler’s Sequel Brands, developed with Gary Brecka and Lifeforce

The claim: 200 territories awarded to 70 franchisees about four months after launch, with zero centers open, a company announcement made via PR Newswire

First metros: Boulder, Denver, San Diego, Chandler (AZ), and Boca Raton (FL)

Per center: sauna, cold plunge, red light, and hyperbaric oxygen, plus biomarker testing, hormone analysis, and a retail supplement line

Cost to a franchisee: $509,000 to $1.2 million all in, including a $65,000 franchise fee and an equipment package the franchisor specifies at $33,000 to $428,000, per the 2026 FDD

Territory: protected, roughly 50,000 people, on a 10-year term

The Number That Matters Is the Equipment Line

Read the franchise disclosure document instead of the press release and one line does the work. The 2026 FDD lists an equipment package of $33,000 to $428,000 per center, due before opening and, in the document’s own words, “as we specify.” That phrase is the story. The franchisor picks the gear. The franchisee buys what the brand tells it to buy.

Multiply that across 200 territories and the sauna and the cold plunge stop being amenities and become a spec. Whoever lands on ULC’s approved list gets something rare in this business: one design win, replicated across up to 200 buildouts, with the brand enforcing the standard. ULC has not named its vendors, and the FDD reserves the choice to headquarters, so the winner is not public yet. The obvious contenders on the heat side are the established commercial heater makers, a Harvia, a Sauna360 brand, a TyloHelo. On the cold side, the specialist plunge builders that have spent the past three years chasing exactly this kind of volume. The point is not which logo wins. It is that a single spec sheet now sits between those suppliers and 200 orders, and that is a different sale than selling one studio at a time.

This is the supply-side face of a shift we have tracked for a while. Commercial sauna is turning into infrastructure, and infrastructure gets bought in volume, on contracts, to a standard. The durable winners will be the operators and suppliers who understand unit economics, not the ones who understand the longevity news cycle.

Sauna Franchising Is Not New. This Version Is.

Franchising thermal wellness is already underway. Sauna House is franchising the Nordic bathhouse, and Sequel Brands itself already owns beem Light Sauna, a red-light and infrared studio concept, so ULC is not even the company’s first heat-and-light play. What is different is the wrapper. ULC is not selling a sauna. It is selling a clinic that happens to contain one, bundling recovery hardware with lab testing, hormone panels, and a supplement line, then moving territories at the speed a boutique-fitness operator moves them.

Geisler is the reason that speed is plausible. He has opened more than 3,000 franchise units across his career, and Sequel’s Pilates Addiction has already awarded more than 300 territories. Selling licenses is the thing this team is built to do. The open question is whether selling recovery-plus-diagnostics is the same muscle as selling Pilates, or a harder one, given the buildout cost and the clinical claims attached.

A Collision Course in Five Metros

ULC is not franchising into empty markets. It is franchising into some of the most contested recovery real estate in the country. In Boulder and Denver, the founder-funded chain Portal° Thermaculture already runs social sauna clubs, and Nuvania is building a $1 million membership sauna club in Boulder. Denver’s RiNo district alone holds a cluster of independent contrast studios. In San Diego, Melita ReGen Lab already sells close to the exact bundle ULC wants to nationalize, a membership recovery facility with clinical positioning and a physician clientele. Boca Raton has Chill Haus, whose own tagline reaches for “wellness, longevity and performance.” Chandler sits inside a Phoenix contrast-therapy market that national chains are already carving up.

Here is the tension. The independents proved the demand. They taught these neighborhoods that paying to get hot and cold on purpose is worth a monthly membership. ULC arrives after that education is done, with a national brand, a diagnostics story, and a franchisee who paid up to $1.2 million to plant the flag. For the local operator who built the market, the competition is no longer the studio down the street. It is a franchised clinic with a marketing budget and a supplement upsell.

Commitments Are Not Open Doors

A signed territory is a promise, not a building. That distinction is the whole risk here, and Geisler’s own history is the reason to hold it in mind. He built Xponential Fitness, the boutique-fitness roll-up behind Club Pilates and CycleBar, on the same engine of fast license sales. In June 2023 the short seller Fuzzy Panda called it “a house of cards” and questioned how healthy its franchisees really were. The SEC opened an inquiry, the U.S. Attorney’s Office followed, and Geisler resigned as CEO in May 2024. Investor lawsuits alleged the company had “snookered” new franchisees, and that Geisler’s public claim the company had never closed a store was false. The SEC closed its 18-month probe in July 2025 with no action, and Geisler had already moved on to Sequel.

None of that is an accusation against ULC, which is a new company with a clean slate. It is a reason to read a territory count as a sales figure, not an operating one. ULC’s FDD declines to publish an Item 19 financial performance representation, so there are no unit economics to check yet, and the franchise-research firm FranchiseVerdict grades the pre-opening system a D. The same caution applies to the health pitch. Brecka’s longevity claims are marketing until the centers open and the outcomes are measured, and the underlying science on contrast therapy is still being sorted out. We have laid out the longevity investor’s case for sauna before. This is a franchise-sales story wearing that case as a costume.

BY THE NUMBERS:

200 territories / 70 franchisees - claimed about four months after launch, before any center opened

$33,000 to $428,000 - franchisor-specified equipment package per center, per the 2026 FDD

$509,000 to $1.2 million - total cost to open one location

50,000 - people inside a protected ULC territory

5 - metros getting the first centers, each with established independent studios

$8 trillion - size the global longevity economy could reach within several years, per a UBS projection cited in the launch coverage

Why It Matters

ULC is the clearest signal yet that sauna and cold plunge are being treated as standardized, franchisable equipment rather than one-off amenities. For manufacturers, that is an opportunity and a trap. The maker who wins a national spec captures scale across up to 200 buildouts, and the makers who lose get designed out of every one of them. For operators, a franchised brand with a diagnostics story and a supplement upsell is about to open next to the independents who built these markets first. The value will accrue to whoever controls the spec sheet and whoever already owns the neighborhood relationship. Everyone else negotiates from weakness.

The Bottom Line

Two hundred territories is a purchase order with an asterisk. Whether it becomes 200 heaters and 200 cold plunges depends on how many of those franchisees actually open, and Geisler’s last company sold licenses far faster than it opened doors. Watch the first five openings in Boulder, Denver, San Diego, Chandler, and Boca Raton. Watch whose equipment is inside them. And watch how the independents already in those metros answer a national brand that showed up after they did the hard work of building the market.