B21 Founder
Meet Sally.
Sally began dancing at the age of 8. Throughout her childhood, dance provided her with a strong connection to her body and offered a channel to self-confidence. She trained in various styles of dance including ballet, jazz, modern, and hip-hop for 17 years throughout childhood, high school, college, and beyond. After graduating college, she began working a 9-5 job in the travel industry, working out at a local gym afterward. She found herself watching the treadmill stopwatch slowly tick by and counting the minutes remaining. This became a dreaded chore in her new routine. At the same time, she couldn’t wait for Monday and Tuesday night dance classes at a local studio. They energized her. She started to wonder if I could capture that same feeling she got in her technical dance classes and bottle it up for anybody to experience. Along the way, she became a certified group fitness instructor, learned the ins and outs of running a business in Colorado, and took a major leap of faith on herself and what she was capable of building.
How it began
In 2016, Sally rented out a dance studio for an hour, dragged 30 of her friends there, and taught the first BLOCK21 class. She had been choreographing and planning for weeks to make sure every moment of class was a success. It was a hit! It was also her first taste of a vision of class that was more about sweating and smiling with your friends than getting the moves just right. For the next year, she began to teach a pop-up style class outside of her full-time job. It started with one class per week and grew slowly and steadily from there. She taught at gyms, conference centers, dance studios, and apartment lobbies. It was exciting to find out how many people were looking for an alternative workout class that was fun and felt good in their bodies.
Lincoln St. Studio
In early 2018, the hunt began for BLOCK21’s permanent home. The goal was to strike the right balance between realizing our vision for a modern, spacious workout studio and staying within budget. This took some creativity :) We found a space that was an abandoned jazz club. It was a run-down building with light fixtures ripped from the walls, outdated plumbing, and dirty concrete floors. It needed a total renovation but had amazing potential.
We signed a lease and got to work on the build-out. This part of the process was a test in patience. What initially began as 3-months, got pushed out a few more, and a few more after that. It wasn’t until July of 2019 that we got the official call that we had passed our inspections. As luck would have it, this call came during Sally’s wedding weekend. She got married, postponed any honeymoon plans, and took the next month to furnish the space. We painted a mural wall using old shiplap boards and a roll of painter’s tape and scampered around on a 10-foot ladder to hang, wire, and program our studio lights. It was finally all coming together! We officially opened the Lincoln Street Studio on August 5th, 2019 and welcoming people to the first class was a joyful moment.
On March 16, 2020, we were forced to close our studio doors to the public for 100 days due to COVID-19
And what happened next? We pivoted the business overnight.
Surviving COVID
When the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to shutter our doors in March 2020, our studio was only 7 months old. We moved classes online overnight and our monthly revenue fell by 75% in the first month. We offer an amazing in-person experience, but, unfortunately, that was not conducive to stay-at-home orders. There was so much unknown in those early days of the pandemic and, with only 7 months under our belt, we were worried about the survival of the business.
In April, we opened our inboxes to a gift card to a local Italian restaurant. A group of our BLOCK21 members had pooled together to buy dinner for each of our studio's instructors. It was such an unexpected act of kindness, and we were so touched by their generosity. Our community at BLOCK21 is so special, and we were not going to let it go down without a fight. We got creative with our offerings, stayed flexible when new local mandates were put in place, and became pretty damn good at solving A/V and livestream issues.
What’s next? Follow us on Instagram to find out!
