Climb Up CEO Resigns as an Unprecedented Nationwide Strike Shakes France’s Biggest Climbing Gym Chain

On March 11, 2026, the strike that began at Climb Up’s gym in the western French city of Angers still looked local. A few days later, it was threatening to spread across much of France’s largest private climbing gym chain. The action was supposed to peak on the morning of March 18. But on the eve of that deadline, it was ultimately defused by the resignation of the group’s CEO and by several last-minute concessions. Here’s how one turbulent week unfolded.

During a strike outside a Climb Up gym in Aubervilliers in March 2025 © Vertige Media

On the phone, Justin says it right away: he’s exhausted. For days now, and probably through at least a few scraps of sleep, this Climb Up employee has been hopping from call to call, trying to take the temperature across the country’s largest commercial climbing gym network. Since workers at Climb Up Angers walked out on Wednesday, March 11, his days have turned into a blur of meetings and phone calls. And with good reason. For the first time in the history of France’s for-profit climbing gym sector, a strike movement on a national scale was taking shape. When Justin spoke with Vertige Media on Monday, March 16, 2026, nothing had been settled yet. He had just come out of a meeting with several elected members of the company’s employee council and a representative from FERC-CGT, a French labor union federation, to discuss what should come next after the Angers strike. Around the table, everyone agreed on one thing: this time, the anger was clearly widespread.

“Management invited the employee council to talk,” Justin told us that afternoon. “But we pretty much know what’s going to happen. They’ll probably try to negotiate something.”

He was right. After the meeting, the employee representatives learned that François Charpy, the group’s CEO, had resigned. They also learned that management had agreed to several of their demands.

“Even before a national mobilization was really on the table, we realized all the Climb Up gyms were ready to strike”

Justin, an employee of Climb Up Gerland representing the FERC-CGT.

Ups and downs

According to our reporting, several developments in quick succession helped bring about François Charpy’s fall and pushed management to back down on multiple points. First came the isolated strike by employees at Climb Up Angers on Wednesday, March 11. Then came the more or less coordinated preparation for a nationwide mobilization. That effort appears to have taken on a very different scale when 28 gym managers and assistant managers announced their support in a letter sent directly to the group’s executive committee.

As late as March 16, Justin told us: “Even before a national mobilization was really on the table, we realized all the Climb Up gyms were ready to strike.”

Faced with the unprecedented scale the movement could have reached—potentially affecting most of the chain’s 33 gyms and roughly 550 employees—management chose to give ground on several issues. At this stage, employees have won the reversal of recent decisions that, in their view, symbolized a clear deterioration in working conditions. Among the demands raised by the striking employees in Angers were the restoration of two additional vacation days for workers who do not take four consecutive weeks off between May 1 and October 31, along with the reversal of other cuts to bonuses. But above all, it was the resignation of the group’s CEO that convinced employee representatives not to continue with a strike that, in the end, very few gyms now seem likely to join on March 18. In their eyes, Charpy—a former executive at Quick, the fast-food chain, and at EuroDisney—had come to embody the increasingly obvious disconnect between the company’s headquarters and what was happening on the ground.

“We unanimously wish to express our lack of confidence in the overall management policy currently being implemented within the Climb Up group”

A majority of Climb Up gym managers in a letter addressed to senior management. For Victor*, a former employee representative and group employee, it was really the unprecedented mobilization by gym managers that changed everything. “Their action was quickly joined by operations managers,” he says. “François Charpy suddenly found himself completely isolated.”

In the letter they wrote, which Vertige Media was able to review, the assessment is blunt. It opens this way: “We unanimously wish to express our lack of confidence in the overall management policy currently being implemented within the Climb Up group.”

“The problem,” the letter continues, “is a form of governance and executive leadership that is becoming increasingly disconnected from the realities on the ground and from the teams.” The managers denounce “ineffective strategies” imposed “no matter what, with no effort at explanation,” despite repeated feedback sent through their regional delegates. “Today, the level of commitment being asked of our teams is not aligned with the resources they are being given, which is undermining our ability to engage and motivate them,” they write. The text also points to growing “disengagement” among staff, which “reflects a lack of buy-in to the company’s project—something we, as directors and managers, are the first to experience.”

Climbing versus frozen food trays

Justin has been a coach-setter—a staff member who both teaches and sets routes—at Climb Up Gerland, in Lyon, since 2014, and he also used to manage the gym. More recently, he has been working under a mandate from FERC-CGT to support existing union activity, help it grow, and assist employees across the group. He has had enough time, and enough distance, to watch the split between the gym network and top management grow wider and wider.

François Charpy took over Climb Up in the spring of 2025 as the group’s CEO. In September of that same year, he organized a series of regional seminars to present his strategic plan, branded “Exposition 2028.” Justin was there. “He did it like a campaign rally,” he recalls.

“He said something one day that really summed up his relationship to the job,” Justin says. “‘You will never see me set foot in a climbing gym’”

Justin, an employee at Climb Up, on the CEO who has resigned. Beyond the slogan, the message was crystal clear: national standardization. Communication, events, the bar, instruction—everything had to be standardized.

Food service was the first example Charpy used to justify his approach. After all, the new CEO came out of the F&B world. “He talked about that a lot, a lot,” Justin says. “That everything had to change, that every gym was doing its own thing, and that we were wasting time and money.”

The solution, management said, was to centralize purchasing at the national level. In practice, that meant local products—organic vegetables, craft beer, zero-plastic initiatives—gave way to a standardized lineup. “Coke, Heineken, and frozen meal trays,” Justin says.

The promise was better margins. The result? “We sell less,” he says. “Yes, the margins are better, but sales are way down. It doesn’t work.”

Justin says he also experienced that gap between top-down decisions and day-to-day reality from the inside. As Gerland’s former manager, he remembers seminars where route setting and instruction—two core parts of what a climbing gym actually does—showed up as items nine and ten on the agenda. “It was basically the stuff we ran out of time to cover at the end,” he says.

In his view, everything that is supposed to make a climbing gym run—safety, training, supervision, classes—kept getting pushed to the bottom of the list. In its place came unattainable performance targets and declining service quality. For Justin, François Charpy’s profile perfectly captured that shift. Brought in from major corporate groups, with no experience in climbing, the CEO applied a cost-cutting strategy while sidestepping the specific realities of the sector.

“He said something one day that really summed up his relationship to the job,” Justin says. “‘You will never see me set foot in a climbing gym.’”

According to Justin, the impact was immediate. “It made us lose a lot of time, a lot of coherence, and a lot of customers too.” Some loyal climbers, attached to what he describes as the cooperative and sustainable ethos of climbing, “turned away from Climb Up.”

The management climate also grew harsher. “He was very intimidating,” Justin says of François Charpy. “Most gym managers were stressed out, even anxious, at the idea of going into meetings with him.”

In that reshuffling, François Petit—the founder and chairman of Climb Up—was, according to Justin, pushed aside. “He got erased,” Justin says flatly. Officially moved into a role focused on the “technical management of instruction,” he was “no longer really making decisions in his own network.”

One battle after another

At the end of this sequence, France’s biggest private climbing gym group now has to deal with yet another major shift. Some former striking employees in Angers and in Aubervilliers, outside Paris—where another strike took place in March of last year—told us they were satisfied with the outcome. Justin, however, is staying cautious.

Reached again on March 17, he told Vertige Media that he too was “satisfied that a new balance of power has been established.”

“It’s a balance of power we had never seen before, and it clearly scared management, because they were forced to make radical decisions,” he said.

Now, he hopes those decisions can lead to real progress. According to our reporting, negotiations between management and employee representatives are far from over. They are expected to continue during France’s legally required annual bargaining sessions, which begin on April 10 and are expected to last a month.

“Recognition for our jobs and the quality of our work have been in steady decline for ten years. Ever since climbing started becoming more commercialized, we’ve become adjustment variables” 

Justin, an employee at Climb Up

“Management is going to have to show something real this time, because the anger now goes way beyond a small core of unionized employees,” Justin says.

As he marks his twelfth year with the company, he says he has seen every phase of its history, including the years when the network was thriving. “And even then, we already had all the same problems we have today, long before François Charpy. Recognition for our jobs and the quality of our work have been in steady decline for ten years. Ever since climbing started becoming more commercialized, we’ve become adjustment variables.”

Victor also points to what he sees as a reckless strategy that has put the whole group at risk, even though it was once in strong shape.

“We shouldn’t forget that François Petit is the one who chose this headlong rush,” he says. “Before Covid, we still had this completely unrealistic goal of opening 100 gyms by 2025. By opening gyms everywhere, including some that don’t work at all, he dragged the whole company into a very difficult financial situation.”

What are they hoping for now?

“I’d like us to sit down with management and ask a real question: what kind of climbing gyms do we actually want?” Justin says.

For him, as someone who joined Climb Up because of his love of climbing and because the company once felt like a family business, the current situation shows that the model no longer works. Earlier this year, a study carried out by Union Sport & Cycle in partnership with the Union of Climbing Gyms and the French Mountain and Climbing Federation found that the sector as a whole posted an average 4 percent drop in revenue year over year between 2024 and 2025.

Within the French private gym landscape, Justin believes some operators are doing better than others. And he is convinced they are not the ones that chose a nationally scaled growth model built around pooled costs.

“Independent gyms, and even cooperative ones, show that a model works when it pays its staff well and builds strong local roots,” he says. “And I think that lines up much more with the values of what we do than the McDonald’s or Quick version of climbing.”

Contacted by Vertige Media, Climb Up management said it had decided not to comment on the company’s current situation, “for now.” As of our latest reporting, François Charpy’s role is being temporarily filled by a three-person leadership group made up of François Petit, the HR director, and the administrative and finance director. In the coming weeks or months, the company’s investors are expected to appoint a new CEO to lead the group.

Whatever happens next, as of March 17, all signs suggest that the nationwide action that had briefly been under consideration in many gyms will ultimately be followed only marginally.

*Name has been changed.