How Embodi Mat Pilates Filled Its Classes Without a Single Reformer

Walk into almost any new Pilates studio and a row of reformers greets you. Carriages, springs, straps, and a price tag to match. The industry has spent years selling the equipment as the main event. When Emily Ramirez opened Embodi Mat Pilates in Vero Beach, Florida, she left all of it out and put down a mat. That was the point of the whole studio.

“I’d always done reformer Pilates, and I had that common misconception that the reformer is the harder, more serious workout,” Ramirez says. “Then I started doing mat, and that’s when I saw the most change in my body, because on the mat there’s no cheating. There’s no sliding to the other side of the reformer, no taking a break while you switch out your springs. You’re working the entire time.”

Five months in, the bet is paying off. Classes fill up, some now run waitlists, and a core of members have decided this is the only workout they need. This is how she built it, and why she runs the whole thing on Zipper.

Choosing a studio over a house

Ramirez didn’t set out to be a studio owner. She grew up in Miami, earned her master’s there, and worked for a Fortune 500 company before moving up the coast to Vero Beach last September. Then work travel kept her on the road until nearly January.

“By the time I got back and was finally living here, I thought, okay, what am I actually going to do?” she says. What she found was a small, quiet town where the kind of studio she’d grown up with simply didn’t exist yet. “Coming from Miami, where the fitness scene is top quality, I couldn’t find anything like what I was used to.”

She thought about trying something new, then talked herself out of it. “Pilates had been my thing for five years. Why would I sacrifice something I already loved?” So instead of buying a house, she put the money into a studio. Her goal was to introduce a town that had never really known Pilates to what it could be.

Why mat, and why nothing else

The decision to go mat-only was part conviction, part math. A reformer studio would have meant a bigger upfront investment and a smaller room. The deeper reason was that the mat is where Ramirez believes the real work happens, and where a total beginner can still feel welcome.

“The mat is less intimidating than the reformer,” she says. “It’s more approachable, more welcoming. It’s still going to challenge you, but nobody walks in feeling like they have to figure out a machine first.”

Her style is modern. She pulls from classical Pilates but builds every class as a progression. “We start with something so simple, so basic,” she says. “And by the end you’re thinking, oh my God, I didn’t know I could do that. It’s all little baby steps that build people up to the hardest part of the class, and then they finish feeling like they conquered it.”

The energy is the part she guards most carefully. Pilates is traditionally slow and calm, and she wants the control without losing the intensity. “We keep the traditional Pilates concept, that slow, deliberate movement, but not slow on energy,” she says. “There’s a fine line between bringing enough energy that people leave saying that was the most fun I’ve had working out, and still keeping it safe. That’s the line I’m always working to get right.”

Classes run 45 minutes, and every one is a full-body workout.

One workout, every single day

In an industry that loves to multiply — more formats, more equipment, more tiers, more add-ons — Embodi runs on simplicity. One format. One kind of workout every day. Pricing anyone can follow. For Ramirez, that clarity is a marketing decision as much as an operational one.

“Going in, I knew I didn’t want to overcomplicate it and make it less inviting, especially for this community,” she says. “In Miami, I can book a class that says X, Y, and Z and know exactly what it means. Here, I can’t expect someone to open an app and decode the format of every class. I didn’t want that friction.”

She also didn’t want anyone feeling like they had to supplement Embodi with additional workout styles. “Every day is a full-body workout. Whether you come once a week or five times a week, you always get a complete workout when you walk in,” she says. “You never think, well, Mondays are upper body, so now I need a gym membership for everything else.”

That shows up in how members actually behave. “A lot of my unlimited members tell me, I don’t want to do anything else, I just want this,” she says. “They’re not paying for a gym and a cycling class and everything else on top. They come in, work for 45 minutes, feel it for the next three or four days, and come back. It saves them money in the long run.”

A grand opening that was mostly a mystery

Embodi filled its classes with no launch event, no discount blitz, and no owner anyone in town had ever met. For a few months before opening, Ramirez just dropped hints. A little word of mouth, a few ads, no real explanation. She posted a single concept photo to signal it was a mat studio, and that was basically it. “People were so intrigued because it was clearly coming, but nobody actually knew what it was,” she says. “It was all just vibes and curiosity.”

It worked. Within five months some classes had waitlists, and this is the slow season in Vero Beach. “I saw a waitlist and thought, oh, that’s cool,” she says. “If I have one full class a day right now, I’m happy, especially since it’s still just me teaching.”

Running it all on Zipper

Doing all of this while holding down a full-time job means the back end has to run itself. Ramirez started on Square’s booking tools but kept looking for something purpose-built, without landing on one of the big legacy platforms.

“I always wanted a legitimate booking platform, but I didn’t want to go with the giant names like Mariana Tek or Mindbody,” she says. “I’d only ever heard bad things. Then I came across Zipper on Instagram and thought, this sounds perfect.”

What she values most is how little she has to think about it. Zipper sends a notification every time someone books or cancels, so the studio reports to her all day long. She finishes her day job with maybe 20 minutes to get to the studio and prep, and she already knows whether she’s walking into a full class. “I don’t have to go digging through an app to see what’s happening,” she says. “It’s right there on my phone. It’s perfect.”

The system runs cleanly enough that her clients barely need her between sessions. “It’s really self-sufficient,” she says. “They book, they show up, they leave. I get the notifications, I show up and teach.” For a solo owner building a business on the side, that’s the difference between sustainable and not.

Asked what she wished someone had told her before opening, Ramirez doesn’t hesitate, and it comes back to exactly this.

“The booking platform is the heart and soul of a studio. You can do everything right to make the space inviting, but if it’s not easy to book, people won’t come. Zipper was simple to set up, and my clients find it just as easy to book and manage their own accounts. That’s exactly what you want.”

— Emily Ramirez, Founder, Embodi Mat Pilates

What comes next: instructors, then community

Ramirez teaches every class herself right now, but that’s changing. One new instructor, a transplant from Orlando, starts within weeks. Another is getting certified at the end of the summer. She’s in no rush to compromise. “I don’t want to compromise on quality,” she says. “It’s a slow process, but we’re looking good.”

Getting one or two instructors on board is her biggest near-term goal, because it would free her to build the thing she’s most excited about. “I want to focus on events again, and make Embodi more of a community than just a studio,” she says.

Whatever comes next, her reason for starting is easy to name. She sees it every class.

“I see the women, and the guys, becoming obsessed with Pilates, telling me they love the way they feel,” she says. “That’s exactly what I wanted. I just wanted people to feel good about themselves, to feel good every day. Getting to share that is the best part.”

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Embodi Mat Pilates is a modern, mat-only Pilates studio in Vero Beach, Florida, built around high-energy, full-body classes that challenge beginners without intimidating them. It handles booking and payments through Zipper.

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