The CS Fit Pilates Grew to 3 Studio Locations with Zipper
A high-touch Pilates studio that caps every class at six clients now runs three New Jersey locations on a single platform — and has the lead flow, retention, and reclaimed hours to show for it.
Cara Schroter knows the name of nearly everyone who walks into a CS Fit Pilates studio. Across three locations in Bergen County, New Jersey, that didn’t happen by accident. When a face she doesn’t recognize turns up on a class roster, she calls her manager to ask who it is. “I want to know everyone who’s coming in there,” she says.
Running a business that personal across three studios should be chaos. For a while, it nearly was. CS Fit Pilates’s website sat on Wix. Scheduling, memberships, and payments ran through Glofox. Lead tracking lived in a third tool. None of it talked to each other, and all of it eventually funneled back to Schroter’s desk.
Then she moved everything onto Zipper, and the math of running three studios changed. Organic traffic to the site climbed tenfold. Leads began arriving at more than fifteen a week and converting to members at roughly 75 percent. Schroter got back better than ten hours a week that used to vanish into admin. Within four months, the switch had generated mid-five-figures in new revenue and more than paid for itself.
“Having everything in one place — website, booking, lead management — has been a game-changer. Zipper is easily our most valuable business investment.”
— Cara Schroter, Founder, The CS Fit Pilates
To understand why that mattered so much, it helps to understand what she built.
Six to a class, on purpose
Every class at CS Fit Pilates is capped at six clients. In an industry that often measures a reformer room by how many bodies it can turn over, that number is a deliberate ceiling, and Schroter guards it.
Six lets her teach the way she believes Pilates should be taught. She keeps notes on every client — an old herniation here, a former dancer there, someone who needs to take it easy after pickleball — and pairs the same people together until a class hardens into a small, accountable group. Miss a session and you’ll hear about it. “You get a text message if you don’t show up,” she says, “from someone in your class that’s used to seeing you.” A bigger room can’t offer that, and it can’t safely spot advanced work. “Six,” she says, “is even a lot.”
The discipline extends to the business itself: no flash sales, no unlimited memberships (“I think it devalues the talent”), and pricing built to pay good instructors well. It’s a model with almost no room for operational slack, which is exactly why the back office matters as much as the studio floor.
From a Zoom call to three studios
CS Fit Pilates exists because of a two-week shutdown that wasn’t. When gyms closed in March 2020, Schroter — a personal trainer and Pilates instructor at Lifetime Fitness at the time — assumed she’d be back in a fortnight. What worried her wasn’t the lost income; it was her clients losing conditioning. So the next day she put them all on Zoom, five days a week, then six, then seven. “It was never the plan to open a studio,” she says. “It was like, I just need to keep these people going.”
A year or so later, she rented the cheapest space she could find, a $600-a-month unit in an industrial park, furnished it with a reformer and two towers off Facebook Marketplace, and started teaching in person again. She’d tried studio ownership once before, around 2009, and it had gone badly: too much rent, too little experience, and an unlimited membership she still calls “the kiss of death in Pilates.” This time she moved carefully. “I wanted to go into it knowing it was going to be fine. I didn’t want to fail.”
The second location came at her husband’s urging, after a year of tax returns made the case for him. “He’s like, we need to duplicate this. And I was like, but you can’t duplicate me.” She set one condition — that her longtime manager, Nicole, was on board — and when Nicole said yes, Allendale opened. Ho-Ho-Kus came next, a third studio Schroter says “completes this triangle”: three rooms within about eight minutes of each other, covering a wide stretch of the county, grown almost entirely by word of mouth.
One platform instead of five
By the third location, the seams in her tooling were impossible to ignore. Every disconnected system meant data entered more than once, prospects lost in the gaps between apps, and no single screen showing how all three studios were actually performing. Glofox created its own drag. Instructors couldn’t manage their own private-session calendars, so even routine scheduling changes bounced back to Schroter, and staff came to her for booking tasks they should have been able to handle themselves.
Consolidating onto Zipper collapsed that stack into one. The Wix site, the Glofox back office, and the separate lead tools became a single system, migrated over without losing the existing content or member history. Booking, payments, the website, and lead management now live behind one login. Instructors run their own private-session calendars. A single dashboard covers all three locations at once, and leads captured on the site flow straight into follow-up instead of slipping away.
For Schroter, the shift was less about any one feature than about finally seeing the whole business in one place. “The difference between our old system and Zipper’s solution is night and day,” she says.
What she’s building next
Ask Schroter what actually makes CS Fit Pilates work and she talks about people before anything else. The hardest part of the business, she says, is finding instructors who teach to her standard, so she made the studio a Peak Pilates host site, where trainees complete their certification hours on the floor in what becomes an unofficial, months-long tryout. “It kind of turned into this really cool internship program without it being an internship.” Temperament counts as much as technique. “There’s no snooty in my studio.”
A fourth location isn’t on the table yet. With her instructors teaching all day and Schroter still wanting eyes on every client, the limit is her time, not demand, which is why she signed on early to test Zipper’s new AI assistant ahead of its launch. Its value to her is unglamorous and exactly the point: it takes the daily admin off her plate — freezing a membership, arranging a sub, pulling numbers she used to chase down by hand — and hands the hours back.
She is, by her own admission, still catching up to the size of what she’s made. “I don’t think it’s clicked that this is happening,” she says. “I’ve just been in the midst of building, building, building. But I’m so proud of what we’ve made — an amazing teaching team, a community that looks out for one another, and all the people whose lives have been dramatically changed by Pilates.”
The CS Fit Pilates offers premium small-group Pilates across three Bergen County locations — Wyckoff, Allendale, and Ho-Ho-Kus. All three run on Zipper for scheduling, payments, website, lead management, and marketing.
Growing past one location and feeling it in your tools? See how Zipper brings booking, payments, website, and CRM into one platform — then book a demo and we’ll map it to your studios.