Cure.Fit, a health, fitness and food start-up jointly floated by former Flipkart and Myntra executives Mukesh Bansal and Ankit Nagori, has laid off at least 1,000 people in India.
As per employee sources, the company had around 5,000 people in January this year.
Cure.Fit has multiple formats such as Care.Fit, Eat.Fit, Cult.Fit and Mind.Fit, that cover businesses including health and diagnosis, food delivery and cafes, gym and fitness and mind health and yoga, respectively.
As per several centre managers, fitness trainers and other employees of Cure-Fit, the company had ‘forcefully’ sought resignations from hundreds of people on May 1, and all employee social media chat groups and work emails were deactivated the next day. However, they said the company had agreed to pay salaries for 30 to 45 days.
A text message and email sent by The Hindu to Mr. Bansal and Mr. Nagori did not elicit any response at the time of going to the press.
Surjit Singh, a boxer from Kolkata, who is employed as a trainer at Cult.Fit in Bengaluru, said, “So many of us have lost jobs. One of our WhatsApp groups has over 160 employees who lost jobs. My manager called me and gave me two options and both the options were about resigning the job.”
Aarthi, a yoga trainer at Mind-Fit, said: “ Most of the communication was done on phone calls or voice messages and they did not want to send us an email. However, they insisted that we should send them our resignations in email.”'
Cure.Fit is backed by Temasek Holdings of Singapore. The COVID-19-prompted layoff comes just a month after the company raised ₹832 crore in funding.
In the first two years of its inception in 2016, the company built touch points and service centre across the country around a bunch of formats covering all aspects of health and fitness. All its centres in India, Dubai and UAE remain shut. However, the company recently started online services.
Meanwhile the company said in a statement that “Given the current pandemic and restrictions across the country, our business is going through significant changes. The lockdown has affected all our business offerings and we do not see the situation improving for quite some time, considering the pandemic spread has affected all the markets we operate in.” This unprecedented situation has forced us to close operations in small towns in India and the UAE. While we are doing everything we can to solve for our customers, we also need to adjust to the new realities and manage costs to ensure the long-term viability of the business. We have downsized our employee base across markets where we have shut operations and have initiated pay cuts across levels. The founders have taken a 100% pay cut, the management team 50% and the rest of the staff, depending on seniority, have a reduction of 20 to 30%, the company said.
