Interview with Kristi Cooper of Pilates Anytime

Oct 16, 2019

Interview with Kristi Cooper of Pilates Anytime

B: Hi Kristi how are you doing?

K: Hi Brett I’m great today

B Great so tell us about your start in Pilates, please.

K: I moved to Del Mar, Southern California, as a 13 year old girl. I was at the stage of being out of control in my mind and hormones – I wanted to be skinny is the long story short. A friend of mine, Justine, just happened to be the daughter of Kathy Corey, Kathy had started a teen Pilates class which I joined – and that’s how I discovered Pilates!

B: So you’ve been teaching since your early 20’s?

K: I started teaching when I was 15. Kathy let me teach the teen class itself, so I started there.

B: You started Pilates Anytime in 2009, is that correct?

K: Correct, we launched on January 1st of 2010

B: How did you get the idea to do it?

K: Ted and John are my business partners. Ted, one of my business partners, is married to my best friend and he knew I wanted to leverage my time. I loved teaching, but eight hours – day in and day out – with no insurance etc. was not great. Ted couldn’t understand why I didn’t have a product, or why I wasn’t “a master by now” since I’d been doing this since I was 15. But it just wasn’t in me to do that kind of thing. So long story short, Ted and John were already partners looking for their ‘next thing’ – and so we started.

We first tried video podcasts for iTunes, trying to build up a subscription base, but it was just way too hard.

In 2008, Ted and John asked if I was ready to put my videos online, and I said “not me”. Then they showed me Pilates content on YouTube. People were watching “Pilates” (Kristi makes quotes with her fingers there) and I’m doing a little air quotes because the workouts were ten minutes long (the limit at the time on YouTube) set to hip-hop music with the title of “Booty Forever” or something like that. Seeing that convinced me that not only that we are going to do it, but we HAVE to do it … and then it just came rushing through.

A pic of us at Kristi’s Pilates Anytime studio.

B: I think you have tremendous influence because of the popularity of Pilates Anytime.

K: I think we HAVE had great influence, we were the first ones out with this type of service. I made sure that I worked with the people that I knew had been in the Pilates world all along. I had a vision of respecting the people that came before us, and helping people understand why this tradition is important to preserve.
For example, there were a lot of people doing Pilates who hadn’t met you, hadn’t met Kathy Corey, or Rael. We made available wonderful teachers showing how great Pilates can be – at a very affordable price.
That’s how I think we had the most influence. It gets harder and harder every day to have an influence, I can tell you that right now, much much harder.

B: What are you most proud of with Pilates Anytime?

K: I’m proud of the original vision working, I’ve never said that before, so I have to think it through. I knew that if you enter into something with some version of clarity and definitely with integrity, that you aren’t doing it at the expense of someone else but rather for someone else, then it works. That’s how the world will keep spinning in the right direction. It’s hard to remember that sometimes.
I’m most proud of the Pilates Legacy Project we did, it was very exciting to do. I learned so much and I think if anything if nothing else we have this record including just the actual classes but this whole section of the site that I’ll be promoting again. The project took everything from me to do it so I had to back away a little. But now I’m ready to share more. I think it is a very rich resource.

B: Kristi, what I’m impressed with in you is how kind and generous you are and how honest and direct you are in your communication.

K: Thank you.

B: You’re welcome and that’s what I really think, and I can guess that other people have also said the same, but have people sometimes ripped you off, perhaps?

K: I get that all the time. My whole life I’ve been told I’m gullible but I beg to differ. I do give people the benefit of the doubt. And, yeah, I can get mad but at the end of the day, when that happens, I go back to that vision of clarity and doing for good, in my case to give the world Pilates. When people are unkind, it’s not necessarily a slap to me. I know there are people who dislike me, or they don’t agree with what I’ve put on Pilates Anytime…I get it and I don’t always like everyone either.

B: It’s so easy to be on the outside and criticize, I get it all the time. People lecture me “you should do this and not that with Pilates Intel”. My response is usually, “start your own newsletter and do it better than me.”

K: Exactly, go for it, I say…. I’ll definitely be watching you if you do start your own service. I tell everyone that I invite here to feel free to promote their business. I certainly don’t love it when people come to check out camera angles etc. and copy our methods, that’s a little weird.

A pic of us during the interview.

I am nice and generous, that’s my nature and it does burn me occasionally. But I’m observant, that’s probably the best way I can describe it, yes I am nice, but I see what you are doing.

B: The contact we have had has been truly genuine. Gullible is not a word I would use about you but I just felt like it was something that might could be taken advantage of.

K: Thank you.

B: What is the direction of Pilates Anytime at the moment? You have a lot of content, are you less active about getting more content?

K: I make sure there’s new content all the time, so that won’t change. We are shooting a bit less, marketing has become way more important – I need to get the word of what Pilates is out there. I want to brand Pilates, not Pilates Anytime, or any one teacher.

I think I did spend too much time making sure that we had new teachers and that everybody that I respected got to be here. That just became too much choreography classes. We are seriously focusing on the site being easy to navigate. For example, we are creating Pilates playlists, what we’re calling courses, so classes can be watched individually or then by committing to take a whole course.

B: What do you like to do on your spare time? I can guess to dance, right?

K: I looooove to dance! I love being in the studio of course but dancing in my living room is such an important release. I’ve never been a dancer, but I’m starting to think I’ve always been a dancer!

I also have a growing passion for photography, and that’s where I am probably the most patient. I am not a patient person but I can wait for that dolphin come back up, for hours!

B: And can I share the news that you are newly engaged?

K: I’m engaged! I’m committed.

B: When are you getting married?

K: I don’t know, it might a 30 year engagement!

B: It’s nice to be in love isn’t it?

K: Yes it is, it’s all about laughing and taking care of each one another in ways that are completely independent of everything else.