Chapter 17
FitFams’ head office, on West 18th Street, next door to WeWork’s headquarters in Chelsea, was the kind of place you’d never take a toddler to unless you wanted him to suffer a traumatic brain injury. There were sharp corners and glass tops everywhere. A set of silver bleachers used for staff meetings rose at least six feet off the floor. If none of that got your kid, he’d likely die from Dee’s withering glance or after getting shoved by an employee’s bony elbow.
All of that was fine by Dee, who — in a company-wide memo, sent after her then-COO brought in her special-needs son when his nanny was sick — made it abundantly clear that children were forbidden to set foot in any studio or any part of HQ. She liked that she could maintain control over this space and the people in it; children were far too unpredictable. And annoying. They tended to say stupid things about the black-white photos of Dee on the wall, shot by Ellen von Unwerth in the style she’d used with Claudia Schiffer for Guess (“Why are you shiny?” “Boobies!” “I see your heinie! It’s bright and shiny!”).
A long, pink banquette stretched out under the windows. In a corner sat four stools that looked like pink marshmallows. A soft pink Mario Bellini Camaleonda sofa was placed in another corner.
Employees were not permitted to sit on any of the above.
They stood at first-come, first-served spots and worked on matching rose-gold laptops at big, white conference tables in the middle of the room, where Dee could see them from her glass-walled office. They couldn’t always see her, though; she’d installed electrochromic glass that, at the push of a button, could become dark and opaque.
She could also see the open kitchen from her office. She knew, without investigating, that the refrigerator was always empty. Nobody really had time to eat, and it wasn’t encouraged. In fact, after Dee spotted a staffer helping herself to one too many free snacks dropped off by a rep from Kashi, Dee installed a mirror next to the snack table and placed a digital scale underneath.
“Are you sure you want to eat that?” she’d said to the staffer, who was halfway into her third cherry dark chocolate bar of the day. The wide-eyed staffer shook her head slowly and — when she saw that Dee was staring at her expectantly — gingerly spit the chewed-up bite into a napkin and threw it out.
The pink lighting here seemed soft, but pink wasn’t soft for Dee. It wasn’t the color of sweetness or submission, or of a warm womb. It was the color of a scrap of blanket she’d held over her face, imagining it made her invisible, when she’d hide in her closet as a child. It was the color of survival.
The tinkling sound of wind chimes cascaded through the office, signaling the impending start of the Executive Leadership Team meeting, a “West Wing”-style walk-and-talk that took place outside, no matter the weather (“Bundle up, buttercup,” Dee had been known to say to a shivering underling with two-percent body fat).
Dee was joined at the elevator by her assistant, Sheldon; her training lead, Tara; her financial lead, Shelly; her marketing and communications lead, Coral; her branding and merchandising lead, Georgina; and her operations lead, Ben. Her tech lead, Jimmy, was close behind. She’d uninvited him from these meetings a few months ago because he’d put on weight and his labored breathing was too distracting. Today he was back in the fold after losing 40 pounds by taking six FitFams classes a week.
“OK,” Dee said, pressing the elevator button while also looking at her phone. “Sheldon, tell us what’s first on the agenda.”
The elevator dinged and the team climbed in. “The new merchandise,” Sheldon said, scrolling on the screen of his rose-colored iPad.
“Right,” Dee said. “So how are the yoni eggs doing?”
Jimmy snickered quietly, then immediately and profoundly regretted it.
“Are vaginas funny to you?” Dee asked, giving him a hard look. “Would you and your penis prefer that women have limp, floppy vaginas? When’s the last time you even saw a vagina?”
Jimmy’s face reddened. He knew better than to answer.
“Right,” Dee said. “So we need to send out a ‘what to know’ memo to our studio managers, with information on all the genital benefits of yoni eggs, and include five sales pitches they should attempt each day. We need to get these things off the shelves.”
“Got it,” said Georgina, tapping into her phone.
They exited the elevator and briskly walked out of the building, then headed West on 18th Street toward the Altman Building and 7th Avenue. The team tried to type and swipe at their iPads while also not falling through an open manhole or crashing into a tourist. Dee rolled her eyes. She was wearing FitFams weights around her wrists and ankles, and these lazy shits couldn’t keep up? She made a mental note to require two extra classes from each of them this month.
“Let’s talk about the booking process,” Dee said as they passed the Rubin Museum of Art. “I want to make it more difficult.”
Ben looked puzzled. “More difficult?”
“Yes,” Dee said, impatiently. “So we set up the system so that the booking window for the week’s classes opens at 6 a.m. on Mondays, and we make it so clients have to keep refreshing and refreshing the screen in order to get into the classes they want.”
“Like trying to get tickets on Ticketmaster?” Tara asked.
“Yes, exactly,” Dee said, picking up the pace. “Clients will get shut out, and that will make them want it more. It’s withholding. It’s unfulfilled material desire. It’s psychology.”
“It’s brilliant,” Cora said.
“A lot of studios do that,” Jimmy said. “Other businesses too, like Kim Kardashian’s ‘Skims’ line. They pretend to be out of a tank top, or a pair of bike shorts, or whatever, so people will fiend for them when the next ‘drop’ happens.”
Dee stopped abruptly. “What did you say?”
Jimmy looked at his teammates, but they all suddenly had really important things to look at on their screens.
“I was just saying that other —“
“I don’t want to hear you talk about ‘other’ ever again,” Dee said, moving closer to him. “I don’t care what ‘other’ studios or businesses are doing. We are not like the others. We are unique, we are special. We are FitFams. Got it?”
Jimmy gulped. “Yes.”
“And never mention Kim again. She barfed on my boots one night at 1 OAK,” Dee said, grimacing. Then, to the team: “Go back to the office, get those yoni eggs sold, and work up a plan for the new booking system. Now.”
Then Dee sped up and disappeared around a corner.