Live Well Durango Built a Movement & Wellness Collective with the Help of Zipper
How a move from Vagaro to Zipper helped a small-town Colorado Massage Therapist and Integrative Bodyworker turn a ten-year vision into a movement and wellness collective — on a platform that finally puts her business first.
Joanna Maguire has been carrying the same idea around for about a decade. She’s a Licensed Massage Therapist and Integrative Bodyworker. She also teaches dance and exercise classes — hip-hop-inspired classes whose students range from their early 20s to their 70s. For years those were two separate practices, and it never quite made sense to her that they should be.
“I always envisioned a place where people could move and feel empowered in their bodies,” she says, “and then, when they needed rest and rejuvenation, get bodywork in the same place.”
She moved to Durango in 2021 and opened her practice there in 2023. But the idea kept outgrowing her own two hands. “It went from ‘I want to offer my services’ to ‘let’s build a collective.’”
Today Live Well Durango is exactly that: a three-treatment-room studio in Durango, Colorado, where independent practitioners rent space, keep their own clients, and market under one shared brand — with 42 five-star Google reviews and a business grown almost entirely by word of mouth. This is the story of how Maguire built it, and why she left Vagaro to run it on Zipper.
Synergy over competition
The collective is deliberately multi-disciplinary. Stephanie is a physical therapist whose passion is myofascial release. Jesse is a mental health counselor doing somatic work. Annika teaches Feldenkrais. Each runs their own schedule, books through their own page on the Live Well Durango site, and appears on the studio’s Google Business listing.
What that gives a newer practitioner in a small mountain town is something they’d struggle to build alone: a front door with traffic already coming through it.
“What these practitioners offer might be considered niche, and people may not know about these incredible services,” Maguire says. “So I tell them: come along. People will find you here.”
She’s clear about why she structured it that way. “I want to support people who are chasing a passion. There’s no competition — it’s synergy.”
The client side of the logic is just as simple. Mind, body and spirit — why send someone across town for each one? “If you trust us, and you feel heard and cared for here, why should you have to go somewhere else for the next thing you need?”
The clearest expression of the model is the quarterly Stretch & Breathe class, a low-commitment hour designed for people who find yoga intimidating. It opens with breathwork and moves into plain-language stretching — no downward dog, no terminology to learn — and while clients stretch, Maguire works reflexology and Stephanie works myofascial release. It’s a sampler of the whole collective in a single session. “You’re stretching, you’re breathing, and you’re getting a taste of everything else we do.”
A referral engine, built one experience at a time
Durango is a small town with a large tourist industry, but tourists aren’t Maguire’s business. Her clients are year-round and part-time residents — including snowbirds who arrive for the warm months — and nearly all of them come by referral.
Her first client came from her dance class. From there it compounded: dancers become bodywork clients, bodywork clients buy gift cards for people they love, and Durango, a town that shows up for its own, passes the name along.
Google reviews reinforce that engine rather than replacing it — and they didn’t happen by accident. Maguire asked for them, by email, after appointments. “People just don’t always think about it. You just have to ask.” She’s now moving that ask into Zipper’s automated workflows, so a review request goes out on its own after checkout.
Growth, in her telling, was never about a splashy launch. “I didn’t come out with bells and whistles — that’s not who I am,” she says. “I built a campfire. You find the right spot, you gather the kindling. It takes time to build something that lasts.”
The breaking point: being a sidenote in your own booking
Live Well Durango didn’t start on Zipper. Mindbody looked expensive for a practice just getting off the ground, so Maguire went with Vagaro instead.
It worked, more or less. It just never felt like hers.
“It was clunky, and it was the Vagaro brand forward-facing,” she says. “I was a tag-along on my own business.” What she wanted was something streamlined that had kept pace with where technology was going. So she asked the obvious question of the obvious source.
“I asked ChatGPT which booking platform was actually using AI. It told me Zipper.”
The switch
The first thing she noticed after moving over wasn’t a feature — it was the process. Her website got rebuilt around what she actually wanted, and the difference showed up in how the build happened.
“I felt heard. Someone asked me what I wanted, listened, and then helped me get there — instead of telling me they knew best.”
Everything now runs through one system: recurring dance classes, one-on-one bodywork appointments, quarterly events, payments and gift cards. Clients noticed immediately. “They tell me how easy it is,” she says. “That’s exactly what I wanted.”
Most of all, the whole experience now carries her name instead of someone else’s.
“With Zipper, the business my clients see is us — our Durango collective, not the platform we’re running on. I don’t want to be the tagline. I want to be the header, and Zipper lets me be.”
— Joanna Maguire, Founder, Live Well Durango
Asked what she’d tell another owner weighing the same move: “If you want a platform that actually supports your vision and helps you get there, Zipper is it. It’s cost-effective, it’s worth every dollar, and it gave me autonomy I wasn’t getting anywhere else.”
The road ahead
Maguire wants to bring the collective model to more communities, and she’s laying the groundwork for it now — writing the SOPs that would let a second location run like the first, recruiting new practitioners, and working toward a space that pairs the treatment rooms with a full studio for movement and strength classes. Durango first, then the surrounding areas. “There’s a need out there that isn’t being fully met,” she says. “And I finally have the traction to know this works.”
However far it grows, the measure of it stays the same: how people feel walking out the door.
“Nourished. Seen. Heard. Cared for — because I truly do care. I catch myself calling clients my friends. I want them to feel good, because when they feel good, there’s a ripple effect.”
Live Well Durango is a wellness collective in Durango, Colorado, offering massage, bodywork, dance fitness, myofascial release, somatic counseling, and quarterly events. It runs booking, appointments, payments, its website, and marketing on Zipper.
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