Revel Ride

Bio

Meet Jamie! Jamie is a born and raised Philadelphian and she never plans on leaving. She grew up in the Northeast and went to college at Albright, in Reading, PA. After graduating, Jamie started working as a recruiter for the IT consulting industry, and she’s been doing it ever since. 

Recruiting has always been Jamie’s full time gig, but throughout her life she has taught workout classes on the side. She taught dance and spin classes at a gym in Philly. Although she got paid to teach them, she would have done it for free because for Jamie they were the best few hours of her week. 

Jamie moved to the Graduate Hospital neighborhood in 2014. A couple of years later the wheels started turning for her. She had been in the fitness world long enough to know what worked and what didn’t, and she was ready to build her own community.

Origin Story

Sometime around 2016, Jamie started telling her husband that she really wanted to open her own studio.  “I felt as though a lot of what I saw lacking out there were studios where the members really mattered and where there truly was a sense of community.  Additionally, the spin studios in the city were all ‘one size fits all’ in the sense that you either had to love rhythm or you had to love riding to numbers, and I wanted to offer variety.”

Once Jamie decided this was something she wanted she made sure to do it right even if that meant her doors didn’t open until May 2018. There were a few non-negotiables for her studio.  “First, it was really important to me that we open the studio in the Graduate Hospital area, where I live.  I wanted to give back to my own neighborhood.  Plus, I always intended to keep my full-time job and manage Revel, so it needed to be very close to my house so I could do both.  Lastly, I wanted to hire and train my own instructors whether it be former riders of mine who had a passion for teaching or people I met that I just knew would make incredible instructors.  We spent nine months training before we ever opened the doors of Revel.  For most of the instructors, the day we opened was their first time teaching to a room of people.”  

One of the ways in which Revel is unique, compared to a lot of other fitness studios, is that all of Jamie’s instructors have full-time jobs outside of fitness. She believes this is important because she wanted her instructors to feel that the classes they were teaching were the best part of their week too, just as they were for her.  Jamie didn’t want her instructors coming off of teaching their third class of the day or running from one gym to another.  “I feel like, if you want to see the Revel instructors you need to go to Revel to see them. This was, and still is, very important to me and I think makes a big difference.”