Prior to creating Fhitting Room, Kari, was a marketing executive at Pepsi. She focused on building equity for powerhouse brands and launching new product innovations.
In 2007, she left the world of boardrooms and bubbles and entered the world of diapers and sleepless nights. Exhausted and time-starved, Kari began Functional High-Intensity Interval Training as a means to work off her pregnancy weight in her scarce free time. As someone who hasn’t always loved exercise, Kari was blown away by the physical and emotional results of HIIT and the efficiency of her 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. Kari 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. Her friends were taking classes 2-3x weekly and seeing personal trainers 1-2x per week, a time consuming and expensive practice.
Kari took her love of planning unique consumer experiences and finding creative solutions to develop a new way for anyone to access the benefits of a personal training session in a motivational group setting. This “Gym Idea” became the subject line of an email Kari 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.
Kari is the Founder + CEO of Fhitting Room overseeing three Fhitting Room studios in NYC, Fhitting Room On Demand and Fhitting Room LIVE!, the brand's virtual boutique class platform. She has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where she graduated with honors, and she graduated summa cum laude with a BS in Economics from the Wharton School of University of Pennsylvania.