Photo: Heather White/instagram
Heather Whitehad been afitnessdevotee for years — but it wasn’t until her early 20s that she started to look more critically at the industry.
After graduating from Boston College, the native New Yorker landed a marketing job at Puma in Boston. “That’s the first time I had access to a corporate membership at a really incredible luxury gym,” she says. “Once I started going there, I realized that the only people of color that I saw in this space were the facility staff, and they were cleaning the floor. I was like, Black people need a place to work out — what does that look like?”
From there,White, whose dad is from Jamaica and mom is from Belize — decided to throw a one-off hip hop-inspired workout event for communities of color. “That’s howTRILLFITstarted, as a test in 2015. It sold out before we had even had our first event, and that’s how we knew we had proof of concept.”
One pop-up became five. Notable iconic names in the community were coming to the sessions, White recalls, including Ayanna Pressley, now a Massachusetts congresswoman. “We would see her at brunch afterwards — she would come up to our table, like, ‘Hey girls, how’s it going?’ The way that we built, grew and fostered our community was so authentic, and people really liked it. That’s how we got our reputation.”
Hip hop has always been at the core of the brand, says White. The term “trill” — a combination of “true” and “real” that originated in hip hop — means genuine and authentic. “I feel like hip hop is a great democratizer in terms of culture, style, music, everything,” White says, noting that classes have the same feel. “Hip hop, R&B, and music from the islands make up the soundtrack to our classes, which include cardio dance, sculpt, cardio boxing and yoga.”
White admits it was a challenge to start the business, as she had zero background in fitness except as a consumer. In fact she had studied poetry in college, “which at the time everyone thought was like such a loser thing,” she says, laughing. “It was like, ‘How are you going to get a job? Why would you do this?’ My immigrant parents were like, ‘We came to America for you to study poetry? How could this be a thing?’ But through that study I fell in love with words and persuasion and learned how to take big complex ideas and make them salient and understandable.”
TRILLFIT co-founders Heather White and Melisa Valdez.Heather White/instagram
She also had to put in some physical work. While White “loved boutique fitness” she had never worked in the space. “I used to feel sensitive about that,” she admits. “So for the first two years of TRILLFIT when we were doing pop-ups, in the back of my mind I was like, ‘Do we have the credibility to do this?’ It’s already hard enough to feel like you are credible to do a thing being a Black young woman in America. But then it’s like, but I don’t even have any fitness experience.”
White, who operates the company with her business partner and co-founder Melisa Valdez, enrolled in instructor training that “changed my perspective on everything,” she says. “I went from a place of having no fitness experience to having an incredible amount of fitness experience and becoming one of the best instructors on the TRILLFIT teaching staff.”
It paid off for the CEO, who continued to scale up the business, opening astudioin the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston in 2019. “Everything with this new business involves having to think big, having to redefine your perspective, having to turn things over and look at things in a different way.”
The idea for broader expansion came during COVID. “We put out ourdigital platformand kept it free, and suddenly all of these different people had access to us and would come to our classes,” she says. “We started seeing people from Singapore and London and Uganda and all of these other places.” And while White had always wanted to expand to New York — “I’m from there, so it’s always been a part of the plan”— the pandemic kicked it into high gear.
“We came across a really incredible deal for a beautiful space that’s like five times the size of Boston. So it’s a really, really big extension,” she say of the newBrooklyn studio,slated to open in early 2023. “We’re chugging on this train and now that we’re working to raise capital, we’re on this plan to open 18 studios across the next 10 years.”
PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF
Part of TRILLFIT’s mission is to expand health and fitness access and opportunities for communities of color and the LGBTQ community. “We want to diversify the wellness industry and show people that there’s a different way,” says White, 34. " We want to be united with public health and extend the lives of people of color."
source: people.com
