Align & Define Pilates: A Reformer Studio for the Finger Lakes
Last Updated on 23 July, 2026
After 30 years in Manhattan media, Susan Natoli moved home to Geneseo, New York, and opened the first Reformer Pilates studio in Livingston County — and chose WellnessLiving to do it.
A Career Pivot, a Hometown Return, and a Reformer No One Else Has
Susan Natoli spent three decades inside the most recognizable rooms in American media. She ran marketing for NBCUniversal, Paramount, and Us Weekly, building campaigns across linear, digital, social, and print for properties ranging from Yellowstone to Keeping Up with the Kardashians to the Video Music Awards. Then the industry restructured around her — pandemic layoffs, AI disruption, and consolidation eliminated the senior roles she had spent a career building toward.
So at 51, Susan walked away from Manhattan and moved back to the Finger Lakes region of New York, where she grew up. She is also a certified Pilates instructor, and she has won a New York State grant that funded the equipment for a studio of her own. Align & Define Pilates was the result: a small, intentionally paced Reformer studio in Geneseo, the college town where she is also an alumna.
It’s the first Pilates studio with a Reformer apparatus in Livingston County. Until Align & Define opened, anyone in the area who wanted to try a Reformer had to drive 30 minutes to Rochester or an hour to Buffalo.
A Studio That Refuses to Be a Pilates Factory
Susan’s philosophy is shaped as much by what she won’t do as by what she will. She had taught inside large, high-volume Manhattan studios and had a clear picture of what she didn’t want to recreate in Geneseo.
“This isn’t going to be a Pilates factory like a lot of the places I taught in New York City. I want clients to come in and feel completely different once they step off the equipment. That’s the experience that’s going to get them to come back, and that’s why I don’t want to stretch myself so thin.”
That conviction shapes every operational decision. Align & Define runs on six Reformers in an intentionally smaller space. No assigned machines, no reserved spots — the room is small enough that everyone can hear the instructor from anywhere. The studio is built around a soft-launch mindset: start lean, learn what the community actually wants, and grow from there.
Susan is clear-eyed about her audience. Geneseo is a college town, but it is also home to retirees and first-time Reformer clients who have only ever seen Pilates on social media. She wants the studio to feel equally inviting to a 21-year-old student and to a grandmother who wants to bend down to pick up her grandkids more comfortably.
What Align & Define Pilates Offers
The studio runs on a deliberately contained schedule built for a solo instructor. Monday through Friday, Susan teaches morning and evening group classes on the Reformer, with private appointment windows mid-morning and mid-afternoon. Saturday mornings hold two group classes. Sundays are closed. Class capacity is capped at six — one per Reformer.
The class progression runs three tiers: Align Foundations, Align Classic, and Align Restore. A 30-minute “First 30 Reformer” intro class, priced at $20, is designed for clients who have never been on a Reformer and acts as a prerequisite for the longer 50-minute sessions. Newer clients build a foundation before joining a full class.
There are no memberships by design. Susan offers drop-ins at $35, plus 4-packs and 8-packs that expire in 30 days. Private sessions run $85 for a 50-minute appointment, available as singles or packs. No auto-renew at launch — Susan plans to introduce a VIP auto-renew tier later, once she knows who her most committed clients are. Grippy socks are sold in-studio as a required item for first-timers, with branded merchandise planned for later.
Susan is the sole instructor for the time being. She is open to bringing on another certified Reformer instructor when the right person surfaces, a challenge in a region where the certification runs upwards of $8,000.
Why Susan Chose WellnessLiving
Susan evaluated five platforms before signing: Mindbody, Arketa, Momence, Punchpass, and ClassFit. Each was eliminated for a specific reason tied to how she planned to run the studio.
Mindbody was the platform she knew best from her Manhattan teaching years — and the one she was most certain she didn’t want. “I’m not going to have a lot of competition. I need something that’s a little more specialized.” Mindbody is built for dense, high-competition urban markets. It assumed a scale and overhead that Align & Define didn’t need and couldn’t justify.
ClassFit was inexpensive but UK-based, meaning no support during her working hours. Punchpass lacked feature depth. Arketa came in at the high end of pricing and felt built for established franchises rather than a soft-launch solo studio. WellnessLiving offered the operational depth Susan needed at a price point that fit a first-year business, with responsive support during the evaluation process. “You’re always responding to my questions, and you do it in mostly real time.”
She also needed a pack structure without forced auto-renew. Susan had seen billing disputes at studios that ran on auto-renewal and wanted no part of that at launch. WellnessLiving’s class pack structure (configurable expiry windows, visit caps, no auto-renewal required) mapped cleanly onto her 4-pack and 8-pack model.
And she needed integrated booking on her Wix-built site without a development team. WellnessLiving’s embeddable widgets and color-skinning controls let her match the studio’s brand palette without custom code.
How WellnessLiving Fits the Operating Model
Three operational realities shape how Align & Define runs inside WellnessLiving: Susan is the only instructor, the studio runs on packs not memberships, and the local audience includes first-time Reformer clients who need a structured entry point before they join a full class.
Solo-operator scheduling with guardrails. Susan blocks her private appointment windows directly in WellnessLiving so clients can only book privates when she is genuinely available. A three-day advance-booking requirement prevents last-minute private requests on days she is not in the studio. Recurring appointments can be scheduled to match a client’s pack size — an 8-pack client books eight standing appointments and nothing more.
Liability waiver built into the booking flow. Reformer Pilates carries real injury risk for someone who has never used the equipment, and Susan’s insurance required signed waivers. WellnessLiving’s required waiver triggers at booking, so no client can reserve a class without signing first. A separate optional health intake form attaches to client profiles for private sessions. For walk-ins and open-house events, a kiosk-mode QR code lets prospects sign the waiver and share contact information without creating a full profile.
Class packs, prerequisites, and an intro funnel. The “First 30 Reformer” intro class is configured as a prerequisite for the longer Reformer classes. New clients in a market unfamiliar with the equipment cannot book themselves into a 50-minute session before they are ready. Pack expirations are set to 30 days with no auto-renewal, matching Susan’s pricing philosophy exactly.
What Susan Is Building
Align & Define Pilates is already the studio Susan set out to build: the first Reformer studio in Livingston County, run by a hometown alumna who chose Geneseo over another decade in Manhattan.
The soft-launch model is deliberate. Start lean. Learn what the community wants. Grow the schedule as demand earns it. Bring on a second instructor when the right person appears, and the membership base justifies the hire. Introduce a VIP auto-renewal tier once the most committed clients have identified themselves.
Align & Define is a studio designed to feel completely different from the volume-driven places Susan taught in New York. A community that runs from college students to grandparents, served by one instructor who moved back to build something she couldn’t find.
That is Align & Define: a small studio with a specific point of view, in a market that was waiting for it.
Opening a Pilates or Reformer studio and weighing your software options? If you’re comparing WellnessLiving to Mindbody, Momence, Arketa, Punchpass, or ClassFit — or building a soft-launch model that needs to grow with you — book a demo to see how the platform fits a studio like yours.
