Courtesy / The Boulos Co.
A lease at 449 Forest Ave. in Portland worked for a fitness studio catering to parents and their babies.
Updated: February 13, 2023
Growing business offers workouts using movements of everyday life as a new parent
Courtesy / Molly Brubaker
Molly Brubaker started Baby Booty with one class per week in 2021. It’s grown to three locations now.
Molly Brubaker founded her workout business, catering to parents and their babies, in June 2021 with one class per week held in studio space that she rented by the hour, at a fitness facility called Salud Portland at 275B Marginal Way.
Today she’s up to 12 classes per week in Maine, where she serves close to 300 parents. And she’s expanded to locations in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
Market demand prompted her to find her own studio rather than rent space in other facilities.
To that end, Brubaker recently signed a lease at 449 Forest Ave. in Portland and opened her own studio for the business, called Baby Booty.
Sasha Bogdanovics of the Boulos Co. brokered the deal.
“Salud has been a great place for her to establish a customer base and community of mothers as well as develop her business, but she was ready for her own space when we met a few months ago,” said Bogdanovics.
Exercises for the 30-minute workouts, followed by 30 minutes of social time, are based on movements of everyday life as a new parent, such as squatting, hinging, lifting and bending. The target market is prenatal and postpartum parents.
Brubaker has locations in Portland, Brookline, Mass., and Portsmouth, N.H. She also offers classes through livestreams and on-demand recorded classes.
Brubaker is certified as a group fitness instructor, pregnancy and postpartum exercise specialist and barre instructor. She said the idea for the workout started during her own pregnancy, when she wanted to stay active and took spin, barre and Pilates classes.
After giving birth, she took her daughter Ella for a while to the Pilates class. But once Ella became mobile, Brubaker conceived of workouts that could be done with babies and toddlers, wouldn’t require child care and would provide an opportunity for parents to socialize.
“I decided to create a class and see what happened,” she said. “I started teaching one class per week and came up with workouts based on movements of everyday parenthood.”
The workouts started as “a baby-wearing workout” with babies in a carrier. “The baby was kind of along for the ride,” she said.
Today the classes welcome children up to 4 years old. Parents can bring multiple children.
Brubaker has been renting space from other studios in Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. But in Maine, she decided she wanted to find her own studio.
“I started looking in the summer of 2022,” she said. “I probably looked at 15 places around Greater Portland. Then we found this place at 449 Forest Ave.”
Driving the business’s growth, she said, is her own entrepreneurial aspirations, along with word-of-mouth through connections with parents. She did a lot of social media marketing and reached out to prenatal and postpartum providers in Greater Portland to let them know about the class so they could share it with their clients.
She also started hosting events for postpartum service providers and new parents, and “moms' night out” events.
“It was a slow build,” she said. “We started with one class per week. Within a year I was up to four classes per week. I also did Zoom classes. I had moms calling in from New York City and Boston.”
In December 2021, she did a pop-up class in Brookline, Mass., at a studio owned by an acquaintance. The pop-up drew 20 participants.
She expanded to New Hampshire in July 2022.
Today, she employs 10 instructors throughout the three states. Five of them are in Maine. She trains her instructors in the workout routine she created.
Having her own studio in Portland was a big evolution for the business, she said.
“Before, I had to work around the schedule of the gym,” she said. “They had classes and would let me come in and run my business when there was time. This is an expansion and now I can schedule classes whenever I want.”
Fit-up took about two months. The space was previously occupied by retail tenants. Brubaker removed paneling, painted, added a wall, and installed floor-to-ceiling mirrors and three ballet barres. The work was performed by Brubaker, her husband and the building’s property manager.
The work was financed through Coastal Enterprises Inc.’s Women's Business Center, which offers courses, cohorts, workshops and networking events geared toward aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners.
Brubaker bootstrapped the business’s startup.
“Everything goes back into the business,” she said.
Eventually, she said, she’d like to have additional locations.
“I do have visions to eventually franchise the business,” she said.
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