The Roof Climbing Gyms: Inside a Sturdy Cooperative Model
- Matthieu Amaré
- 1 day ago
- 11 min read
As France’s private climbing-gym market struggles, the independent gym network The Roof looks like it’s found another way forward. Built on a cooperative structure and a mutual-aid network that’s unusual in France, these gyms aim for shared governance, capped pay gaps, and deep local roots. This is a look inside a model that’s holding up—somewhere between hard-nosed financial discipline and what its builders call a “sincere utopia.”
The scene has become a modern cliché. Stand in the right spot and you can take in the whole mural commercial climbing gyms have learned to paint: stylish twenty-somethings sipping beer in the warm glow of a trendy bar. Only in the back—behind big glass walls—do you finally spot the panels of steep terrain studded with bright holds. Like plenty of others, The Roof’s gym in Toulouse checks the boxes of what people now call a “third place” (a hangout that’s not home or work). People drift through the big entry hall with the body language of regulars. Lots of them won’t climb. They’re here for what the place is—and, sure, for the craft beer and the small plates too.
A Good SCOP
The Roof Toulouse opened in 2023 inside Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, a former factory turned cultural hub in western Toulouse. Since its makeover, the place has become an institution in the Pink City, drawing more than two million visitors a year. You pass the gym’s terrace—palm trees and all—before stepping into the vast nave that holds the city’s biggest food court, plus a performance venue, coworking spaces, and even squash courts. Planted right in the middle of it all, The Roof feeds off the buzz.
On this winter weekend, the gym is even hosting an eco-focused festival with Les Halles, called “Faire écologie,” bringing together nonprofits, activists, and public figures for two days of discussions. That’s probably why Pierre-Olivier Dupuy—co-founder and co-manager of the climbing gym—looks even more slammed than usual. Between scanning people in at the door, pouring pints, and getting ready for classes, he’s also greeting the next panelist and making sure the conference room is set.
“We wanted to open a gym, but we could see where the business world goes wrong. We didn’t want to become a standard company”
Pierre-Olivier Dupuy, co-manager of The Roof Toulouse
Somewhere in the middle of his thousand daily tasks, Dupuy sits down to talk about the model behind his gym. He’s 44, and he’s celebrating the start of The Roof Toulouse’s third year in business. He rubs his scalp, glances around, then smiles.
“See this festival?” he says. “This is exactly what we wanted here—bringing a bunch of different people together around shared values. For me, that’s what The Roof is. Not just a climbing gym, but a place that actually means something.”
A former academic researcher, Dupuy has been nursing the dream of making a living from climbing since 2015. Back then, he was climbing in a club with his friend Aurélien Guesdon, who would become his first business partner.
“We wanted to open a gym, but we could see where the business world goes wrong,” he says over an espresso. “We didn’t want to become a standard company. At the same time, we didn’t want to stay a nonprofit either, stuck depending on time slots and public subsidies.”
The “third way” they landed on was France’s Entreprise Sociale et Solidaire (social and solidarity economy). That’s where they found the legal structure that, in their eyes, checked every box: a SCOP—a Société Coopérative Participative, essentially a French worker cooperative.
It took Dupuy and Guesdon seven years before they could finally open the doors. Linked to the massive redevelopment project at Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, The Roof Toulouse depended on a complex project package, bank negotiations, and plenty of administrative headaches. But since opening in 2023, it’s done fairly well: €1.6 million in revenue, up 14% from 2024 to 2025.
That number looks even more striking next to figures recently shared by L’Observatoire de l’escalade, which reports an average 5% decline in revenue for private climbing gyms in France. Today, Dupuy’s company employs 22 people—eight of them are also member-owners. That, he says, is what he’s proudest of.
“We decide together,” he says. “That was one of our guiding principles from the start.”
Like a conventional company, a SCOP has a general assembly where members vote on big decisions: strategy, investments, pay, leadership appointments, and more. The difference is that in a cooperative, one person equals one vote.
“Decision-making is disconnected from capital,” Dupuy says. “Aurélien and I each put €30,000 into the company. Our vote still carries the same weight as someone else’s who put in three times less.”
Under the Same Roof
The Roof Toulouse’s SCOP bylaws give employees three years to decide whether they want to buy into the cooperative. So far, most of the first wave of staff have said yes, and two more people are expected to join this year. For Dupuy, it’s “a real lever to get involved in strategic decisions instead of just executing.”
It’s also how the model’s other pillars take shape: pay gaps capped at 1-to-3 (editor’s note: in conventional companies, the average is closer to 1-to-7), and a required minimum share of profits that must be reinvested in the company—at least 15%.
“Most of the value created has to be put back toward the people who actually work here,” Dupuy says.
Those choices help explain why The Roof says it sees very little turnover—despite running a gym with 750 square meters (about 8,100 square feet) of climbable surface, plus a yoga and Pilates studio, a restaurant, and a bar.
Still, a SCOP doesn’t protect you from everything. The broader economy hits everyone the same way, and in 2025 it has landed hard on climbing gyms.
“We might have good revenue, but we’re barely breaking even,” Dupuy says.
With 2,500 members, The Roof Toulouse’s attendance hasn’t dipped. But everything around it keeps rising: food, energy, holds, cleaning—while customers’ purchasing power slides the other way. It’s a tough equation, and it demands strict management if you want to avoid what just happened next door: Les Halles de la Cartoucherie, despite growing popularity, has been placed into court-ordered reorganization.
To better ride out headwinds, The Roof Toulouse is also part of a larger network: The Roof France, itself organized as a cooperative—more specifically a SCIC (Société Coopérative d’Intérêt Collectif, a French “collective interest” cooperative). The network now includes nine gyms across France: Bayonne, Brest, Poitiers, Rennes, Le Havre, Saint-Brieuc, Albi, Bourg-de-Péage—and Toulouse.
“Each gym is completely independent—free and autonomous in its decisions and choices,” Dupuy says. “At a minimum, we share a name—The Roof—a visual identity, and a collective commitment to help each other.”
Every Thursday morning, the managers across the network meet in a “co-dir” (a co-leadership meeting) to compare notes.
“For a lot of us, it’s our first time building a business,” Dupuy says. “So we all feel the need to share our thinking—our doubts, our challenges, and what’s working.”
When Dupuy and Guesdon first heard about The Roof network at the start of their own journey—more than ten years ago—it didn’t take long to buy in.
“We’d just gone all-in on the social and solidarity economy, and the people there already shared those values,” Dupuy recalls. “Everyone was trying to build an alternative to the excesses of the standard economic model.”
In other words: a whole crew of committed builders—led, at the beginning, by a trailblazer who didn’t exactly plan on becoming the face of a national network.
UCPA, Mont Blanc, and Isabelle Autissier
The story starts not far from Toulouse, in Durfort-Lacapelette, in 2012. Benoît Lacroix, then a specialized educator at Fondation d’Auteuil, didn’t know it yet, but he was about to fall hard for something besides climbing: the city of La Rochelle.
On a weekend trip with his then-partner, the two became so taken with the “Ocean Gate” that they started hunting for local crags to climb. Problem: Charente-Maritime is famously short on real relief. So on the train back to Montauban, they scribbled a wild idea on a scrap of paper: build their own climbing gym.
“It was sincere and kind of utopian,” Lacroix tells me over the phone. “We were kids—maybe 23 or 24—but we had a sense of the values we wanted in the project. We wrote that our goal wasn’t to extract value at all costs, but to make sure the value flows back to the people who make the place run. But once you say that, you still have to choose a structure—and we had no idea how.”
So they did what most people do when they need help: they called friends. With a small crew in Montauban, they took over a former boat dealership building and built the gym the old-fashioned way—by sheer effort. Along the way, they crossed paths with people from the world of ecology and cooperation, including the sailor Isabelle Autissier. They convinced elected officials and local stakeholders, and soon The Roof La Rochelle opened its doors—in December 2013.
The gym took off quickly—and it drew the attention of other local project leaders, first in Bayonne, then in Brest.
“That’s when I started thinking the model could be shared,” Lacroix says. “I wrote this document called ‘Recipe for Making a The Roof’ and started supporting other entrepreneurs. And I realized I’d developed a real passion for putting projects together.”
Lacroix, it turns out, collects passions. The former Montauban resident also got hooked on solo offshore sailing.
“That’s actually what pushed the first Roof gyms toward the Atlantic coast,” he says, laughing. “At the start, I thought it’d be cool to visit them by boat!”
He never did, but that sailing obsession led to a meeting that would reshape The Roof network.
“I was training for a Mini-Transat and looking for sponsors,” he says. “I’d met the guy who was going to become CEO of UCPA during a climb on Mont Blanc, so I knocked on his door. He told me, ‘Your Mini-Transat doesn’t interest me, but your climbing thing does—I want us in.’”
That’s how UCPA—the large French nonprofit known for outdoor sports centers—entered the The Roof France project. And it changed a lot.
“They first put equity into the network structure, which indirectly helped finance the creation of The Roof in Brest,” Lacroix explains. “Then we benefitted from their financial backbone, legal support, and expertise.”
The First Cracks
Years later, UCPA is still there. The organization even holds the presidency of The Roof France within the SCIC. And every Thursday morning, it’s Ludovic Marchant—head of sports activities and events development—who runs those co-leadership meetings for The Roof managers.
“We stay humble and at a distance,” Marchant insists. “The cooperative is really run by the gyms. We do have signing authority as president, sure, but the gyms remain the majority.”
Marchant calls himself “an administrative link.” But his inbox is where the first membership requests land. He’s also the one who calls the group together when a local project looks promising. Candidates then go through an onboarding path: they present their project to the network and get challenged on it.
“We’re not thirsty for growth. We’re not ultra-capitalists. We don’t blow money. We stay careful. We help each other. It forces us to constantly question ourselves. And it reaffirms our values.”
Marine Papa, co-founder of The Roof Bayonne
By his own account, that structure reassures people.
“We’re a big organization, and bankers like seeing that we’re there when it’s time to put together a financing package,” he says.
Dupuy agrees.
“Without UCPA, we probably wouldn’t have as much room to maneuver,” he says. “Even if, again, you still have to know how to stand on your own.”
UCPA was drawn in by the agility and social-economy values The Roof network carried. But it also saw a growing market.
Looking back, Lacroix puts it plainly: “I think there was an idea of using the engineering we’d developed with our projects to get a foot in the door. Was that fully clear to them at the time? I don’t know. What I do know is that later on, I was asked a lot to help them think through their own UCPA Sport Nation model.”
Today, across France, UCPA has built five indoor-sports centers, and each one includes a climbing wall.
If UCPA gives the network a stronger backbone, it also helps it push through turbulence. In 2016, after UCPA joined The Roof France, things sped up. Toulouse started to emerge. Rennes came knocking.
“But those were projects on a totally different scale,” Lacroix says. “Two gyms tied to massive redevelopment programs—Les Halles de la Cartoucherie in Toulouse, and Hôtel-Dieu in Rennes.”
Lacroix poured time into it—lots of time—and got pulled under.
“Between that, my Mini-Transat project, and other stuff, I think I ended up projecting a kind of instability back onto Brest and Bayonne,” he says.
The result: in 2018, Lacroix was voted out of the presidency. A year later, he and his former partner removed their La Rochelle gym from the network.
“It was one of the worst moments of my life—hell,” Lacroix says. “But that’s the game. They didn’t want me as president anymore. I knew the rules of democracy. That’s how it goes.”
He has since launched another climbing-related project in La Rochelle called Les Cabanes Urbaines.
After that rupture, UCPA took the helm and kept supporting the network’s growth in places like Albi, Saint-Brieuc, and Le Havre.
From behind the bar noise in his Toulouse gym, Dupuy zooms out.
“Like any human organization, being a cooperative doesn’t exempt us from a lot of issues—financial difficulty, management problems, burnout,” he says.
He even points to a hard truth:
“Overwork is a real issue in SCOPs. You see the same pattern of over-investment from some employees because the work feels meaningful. You throw yourself fully into projects you care about—and it can lead to mental overload and trouble unplugging.”
Alone, With People All Around You
Every The Roof gym founder says some version of the same thing: you have to learn to rebalance your life, and you often have to give something up. Dupuy says he’s lost friendships. Julien Muller, a director in the Vercors, learned what it means to work 90-hour weeks. In Le Havre, Antonin Salze learned to live on the SMIC—the French minimum wage.
Even so, while financial results vary from gym to gym—The Roof Vercors saw a 20% revenue increase from 2024 to 2025, while The Roof Le Havre saw a 17% drop—every gym in the network is at least breaking even.
“It’s very solid,” Marchant says. “Every Thursday, I’m surrounded by people who love climbing—but first and foremost, they’re business leaders.”
Agile, sincere, and convinced their model can’t survive without a certain amount of hard rationality.
“We’re not thirsty for growth,” says Marine Papa, co-founder of The Roof Bayonne. “We’re not ultra-capitalists. We don’t blow money. We stay careful. We help each other. It forces us to constantly question ourselves. And it reaffirms our values.”
“We wanted to do social good, so we had to be social all the way through,” adds Muller, whose Vercors gym runs sport-and-health programs and works with local associations to broaden access to climbing.
In Le Havre, Salze and his team welcome groups of patients in remission from long illnesses or addiction, as well as children with disabilities.
Most of all, none of them say they would have opened their gym without first getting a green light from the nearby clubs and associations.
“Those groups became our ambassadors—bringing in more climbers,” Salze says.
“That’s the heart of The Roof,” Dupuy says. “These are projects rooted locally. UCPA, the network, the other gyms—they help. But what matters most is what you manage to do with your own local ecosystem.”
“In the cooperative model, there’s a collective toughness that feels incredibly safe. It gives you this warm, steady energy. As an employer, it carries me. And this collective adventure I’ve fantasized about forever—I feel like I’m living a piece of it.”
Benoît Lacroix, founder of Cabanes Urbaines in La Rochelle
For more than a decade now, the independent gyms in The Roof network have been carrying a different model than the big commercial chains. With no outside investors and no promise of double-digit growth, they even seem to be holding up better than their competitors now that the market has flattened out.
Dupuy, though, won’t declare victory.
“Is our model more resilient?” he says. “Only the future will tell.”
Back at the beginning of this cooperative horizon, Lacroix never imagined that an idea scribbled on a train would grow this big. Today, with Les Cabanes Urbaines, he’s careful too. Still, when he looks in the rearview mirror at SCOPs, SCICs, the PACTE law, and the rise of “mission-driven companies,” he allows himself one breath of relief:
“Clearly, this isn’t a year where we’ll be handing out bonuses or big raises,” he says. “But in the cooperative model, there’s a collective toughness that feels incredibly safe. It gives you this warm, steady energy. As an employer, it carries me. And this collective adventure I’ve fantasized about forever—I feel like I’m living a piece of it.”
Lacroix quotes his business partner, Serge Papin—former president of the Système U cooperative and current Minister for SMEs, Commerce, Crafts, Tourism, and Purchasing Power:
“Purpose creates the reason for being, which creates the reason to come.”
Proof the model attracts interest: UCPA’s development director says he has counted around a hundred inquiries in his inbox over the last three years. In the summer of 2026, the network is set to welcome its tenth independent gym—in Cherbourg.
