Robin Berkery leads a Jazzercise class at the Santa Cruz Roller Paladium. (Photo by Chip Scheuer)
It’s half past nine on a Tuesday morning, and the Santa Cruz Roller Palladium is alive with a sea of brightly colored Lycra sashaying from side to side. A perky woman in a pink tank top with curly red hair and an enviable body—Marilyn-esque, both curvy and toned—stands on top of a fold-out podium and addresses the crowd of women with a headset microphone:
“Bring your arms front, then back! Make your shoulder blades kiss in the middle!” She chants along with the beat in the Bruno Mars song that’s playing, “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss! All right, now get ready to punch—uppercuts!”
The 31-year-old instructor, Robin Berkery, says she started taking Jazzercise when she was a freshman at college trying to recover from a few too many passes on the dining hall buffet. She began teaching four years ago and today leads seven classes a week, saying it is the highlight of her life.
“Everybody in my life knows that I get up in the morning and I do this almost every morning. No gettin’ in my way. No stoppin’ me,” she says.
With a $50 joining fee and monthly rates between $39 and $98, Jazzercise isn’t any cheaper than joining a gym, many of which include a variety of different exercise classes with their membership fees. So why is it that Jazzercise, founded in 1969 by Judi Sheppard Missett, has lasted for 40-plus years, while other fitness trends like step aerobics and Tae Bo have gone the way of the late queen of VHS aerobics Denise Austin? (Just kidding. Denise is alive and well in San Pedro, but did you have any idea? Exactly.)
Local franchise owner Abbi Hartsell has taught Jazzercise in Santa Cruz for 28 years and says the work ethic she and her instructors bring to their job has made it uniquely successful here.
“Santa Cruz has a few of the top-grossing class owners in all of California,” she says.
Local artist Joan Rose Staffen has been going to Jazzercise in Santa Cruz for two decades.
“It’s seen me through a lot of different stages in my life,” she says. “I felt like I didn’t have a body after I had babies. So that’s when I first started. And then I ran a marketing company for 20 years. I went at last three or four times a week because it’s a lot to run a company. And then my husband passed away, and I kept going to Jazzercise. I went even when I cried. Just to move the body.”
That kind of loyalty is part of why Jazzercise, Inc. is one of the most successful fitness corporations of all time. With $97 million in revenue for 2011, the Carlsbad-based company was ranked No. 1 on the 2012 San Diego Business Journal’s Women-Owned Business List and 27 on Entrepreneur Magazine’s annual list of the top franchises.
Jazzercise’s marketing specialist Nicole Cox says the company, which offers more than 32,000 classes weekly in all 50 states and 32 foreign countries, is more popular in California than anywhere else in the United States. Indeed, one can find 20 locations offering Jazzercise classes in the Santa Cruz–San Jose area and a whopping 57 scattered throughout San Francisco. Compare that to just one paltry location on the island of Manhattan.
Jazzercise also seems to have withstood the ravages of exercise fads because it is trend-driven. But rather than being a super-specific niche itself, Jazzercise routines are constantly evolving, incorporating crazes like Pilates, kickboxing and Zumba while they’re hot and phasing them out when their stars fade.
“They have like, trained people choreographing these routines. They’re not just doing weird stuff with their bodies. They are thinking about physiology and they are thinking about anatomy, and so there aren’t too many injuries, knock on wood,” adds Berkery.
At the Roller Palladium, a pop track by Pink plays, and Berkery leads her class in a difficult move—balancing on one leg and raising the other at a 90-degree angle. But not to worry, ladies. Berkery smiles big and announces into her headset mic, “If you wobble a little it just means your abs are working!”
