Kari Saitowitz on Clubhouse

Bio

Founder + CEO of the NYC-based boutique fitness brand, Fhitting Room.

Prior to creating Fhitting Room, I was a marketing executive at Pepsi. I love consumer brands + experiences. I had the good fortune of building equity for powerhouse brands and launching new product innovations for PepsiCo for 5+ years.

In 2007, I left the world of boardrooms and bubbles and entered the world of diapers and sleepless nights. Exhausted and time-starved, I began Functional High-Intensity Interval Training as a means to work off my baby weight. As someone who hasn’t always loved exercise, I was blown away by the physical and emotional results of HIIT and the efficiency of my new, only 2x weekly, workout routine.

Around this time, specialized boutique fitness studios started popping up, and people were getting instantly hooked on the fun, social dynamic classes provided. I loved the idea of working out with friends but couldn’t find a studio that offered functional HIIT workouts with enough personal attention from certified trainers to replace my trainer. My friends were taking classes 2-3x weekly and seeing personal trainers 1-2x per week, a time consuming and expensive practice.

I took my love of planning unique consumer experiences and finding creative solutions to develop a new way to access the benefits of a personal training session in a motivational group setting. This “Gym Idea” became the subject line of an email I sent to a close friend in 2012 and led to the opening of the first Fhitting Room location in a small studio on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in March 2013. The lease for Fhitting Room’s flagship Flatiron location was signed six months later, followed by the Upper West side flagship in 2017. Two years later, I launched subscription-based Fhitting Room On Demand, and in 2020 when Covid shut the world, my team and I launched our live, interactive boutique class platform, Fhitting Room LIVE! which brings the magic of our in-studio classes into people’s homes complete with personal attention, safety, real-time communication, social connection and a healthy dose of Fhitting Room’s trademark heart.

I have an MBA from Harvard Business School, where I graduated with honors, and I graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Economics from the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania, but be warned, I’m terrible at the name game.