A Note From Our Founders

About Us

To everyone who's ever walked through our doors, and everyone about to -;

We built Persona because no two bodies are the same. Most studios hand you a class. We wanted to build you a practice.

Persona Pilates started with three friends: Matt Smith, Steve Young, and Jeremy Davis; who'd known each other since high school and had spent enough time in enough fitness studios to notice the same problem everywhere: the workout never changed for the person doing it. Same reps, same pace, same instructor script, regardless of who walked in the door. You adapted to the class. The class never adapted to you.

We built Persona to flip that. And we're writing this to tell you why, because if you're part of this community, you deserve to know what you're actually a part of.

Our Mission

To become the most personalized fitness studio anywhere. A place where your workout is actually built around you: your goals, your body, your history, and the instructor who knows all three.

That's not a tagline we put on a wall. It's the only metric we care about. Every rep of progress you make should come from a plan that was shaped for you, not handed to you.

Personalized Isn't a Buzzword Here. It's a System.

Generic workouts ask everyone to move the same way and hope it works out for most people. We didn't want to build for "most people." We wanted to build for you.

So personalization at Persona isn't a vibe. It's data plus a relationship, working together:

• The Persona-lized Assessment figures out who you are as a mover from day one, sorting you into one of five Personas: Vitality Voyager, Balance Builder, Zen Starter, Power Pursuer, Recovery Resilient, each with its own approach to pace, intensity, and goals.
• Instructor Summaries put your profile in your instructor's hands before you even walk in, so they know your goals and your history before you take your first rep with them.
• Body Scanner tracks your progress over time, so your plan keeps evolving as you do and not staying static because that's how the class was always taught.

The data tells us where you're starting. The instructor is a real person who knows you, session after session is what actually moves you forward. Neither one works without the other. That collaboration is the whole method, and it's what we ask of every instructor who joins us.

We Didn't Just Personalize the Plan. We Evolved the Movement.

Personalization only matters if the method underneath it is worth personalizing. So we didn't stop at data. We rebuilt the workout itself.

Persona's method combines slow, intentional, controlled movement with instructors trained through our own proprietary system, built in-house, not borrowed off the shelf, to actually read your form and coach you in real time. No rushing through reps to hit a class quota. No cookie-cutter choreography. Just deliberate movement, precisely coached, calibrated to a body that isn't like anyone else's in the room.

It's slower. It's more exact. And it's the difference between a workout you survive and a practice that actually gets you where you're trying to go.

Where We're Headed

We believe the future of fitness isn't bigger classes or louder music, it's studios that finally know who's in the room.

We're building toward a world where nobody has to choose between the accountability of an in-person practice and the precision of a plan made for them alone... where your workout adapts to you as fast as you change, where your instructor is a true partner in your progress instead of a voice leading a room, and where "personalized fitness" stops being something studios claim and starts being something Persona simply is, everywhere we go.

One Last Tribute

In December 2023, we lost our best friend Jeremy. He was a visonary that believed deeply in human connection and was one of the most personable people we knew. He inspires us everyday to carry on his love for one another. We hope we make him proud.

❮ ❯