Recent York Pilates cofounder Brion Isaacs was 16 years old when he formed his first band.

“We were called The Sexy Magazines,” said Isaacs, who was the designated drummer of the punk group, while his best friend Franco V. was on vocals. From the start of their friendship, the pair bonded over music. “After we were 5 – 6, we dressed up as Guns N’ Roses for Halloween — I remember playing the drums on my suitcase,” Isaacs said.

Because Franco’s mother was a music agent, Isaacs spent much of his adolescence tagging along to shows by the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Neil Young and Elvis Costello, and it wasn’t long before The Sexy Magazines was opening for heavy-hitters like Kelly Osbourne and Courtney Love, too.

“Our biggest moment was once we got to play Coachella,” said Isaacs, who took the stage on the festival in 2005, one yr before the The Sexy Magazines — gone but never forgotten — disbanded.

Afterward, Isaacs turned his focus to DJing, getting his start curating shift playlists for the now-closed Diesel store in Recent York’s Upper East Side.

“I became friends with one in every of the fellows working on the Diesel Style Lab, he heard I used to be in a band and was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s best to DJ,’ I used to be like, ‘Yeah, totally’ — I had no idea tips on how to DJ,” recalled Isaacs, who was in his late-teens on the time and spent the following 12 hours piecing together a combination of songs on his laptop which he presented the following day at the shop. (He curated the shop’s playlists for the following 4 years.)

But it surely was within the trenches of Recent York’s late-2000s nightlife scene that Isaacs truly found his sound.

“I used to be DJing at The Beatrice Inn playing punk, dico and soul — also loads of hip-hop,” Isaacs said. “I remember one time [at The Beatrice Inn] Chloë Sevigny was like, ‘Hey, are you able to play Kate Bush,’ and I used to be like, ‘Yeah, in fact,’ — that was my first time hearing Kate Bush.”

Fittingly, it was at a performance at Bowery Ballroom that Isaacs met his soon-to-be Recent York Pilates cofounder and wife, Heather Andersen. “We met backstage, and we’ve been together since that first night we met,” Isaacs said. For the pair’s third date, Isaacs tagged along while Andersen, who was then a ballerina, received a pilates certification.

“I liked it instantly,” Isaacs said. On the time, he helmed a branding agency called Rivington Design House and put his skills to work to get Recent York Pilates’ website up and running in 2013.

“Heather was running the corporate for the primary three years, after which we brought in my whole team to be the creative arm of NYP,” he said.

Today, the reformer-based fitness studio has greater than 100 employees across eight locations in Recent York City and the Hamptons, where Isaacs and Andersen reside. Though it was an uphill battle, Recent York Pilates made it through the pandemic without shuttering any locations, despite having no external funding and never hosting classes for a yr and a half.

“It felt like going through a tidal wave — it was a battle and a half negotiating with our landlords and keeping all the things going, but getting back now to where we were pre-COVID-19 and back to opening stores, it feels amazing,” Isaacs said.

Soon, the pair will open their first Brooklyn location in Williamsburg, and are eyeing a possible first out-of-state expansion to Miami.

But it surely just so happens that when Recent York Pilates was in its earliest days with only one location in Bowery, Isaacs’ side hustle played a task in getting the word out. “When people would make DJ requests, I’d say ‘No, but I’ll provide you with a free pilates class’ — we were getting all these people into [the studio] from nightlife,” said Isaacs, who also began recruiting female DJs — who weren’t so prevalent on the time — to are available in for sophistication. “These women went on to turn out to be a number of the top female DJs of our age — that had such a large impact on the business.”