Katie: This is Katie Laird with the BusinessMakers Overtime Show heard here and online at theBusinessMakers.com/overtime. Today's guest is a passionate advocate of an activity and lifestyle that may resemble something you did as a kiddo way back when, but now it's all grown up and it's taking over many of the more hipper physical fitness scenes. Please welcome Gabriella Redding, owner of Hoopnotica, a company dedicated to improving lives, health and well being through the magic of hoop dancing. Gabriella, welcome to the Overtime Show.

Gabriella: Oh, thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.

Katie: Yay! We are more than happy to have you here and if you were actually in the studio, we would totally try to hoop this like as we're interviewing, but ya' know -

Gabriella: Well, ya' know, I can hoop from here. You can hoop from there -

Katie: Awesome.

Gabriella: You can hoop from there. It'll be seamless.

Katie: Awesome. So, let's start going back to basics. I am certainly a passionate hooper myself and a lot of folks just don't understand what the heck it is that I'm doing. Can you tell our audience what is hoop dancing?

Gabriella: I have to tell you that it warms my heart that you are already a hooper, that you already know this crazy fascination with this weird fitness movement that's gaining so much momentum -

Katie: So much -

Gabriella: -- in the United States and all over the world, but I have the same reaction with people. When I tell them that I own a hula-hoop dance fitness company people think that I either am selling them out of the trunk of my car or how - are you doing that part-time. So the way that I describe hoop dance to other people is that it's a fusion of what they know as hula hooping and belly dance because it incorporates your arms and it incorporates your entire body as flowing and moving and dancing, while a hoop is almost magically rotating around your body from head to toe. So you're bringing the hoop up your body in these beautiful spiral patterns and bringing it back down your body and the hooper looks as though they're almost floating in the middle of this hoop.

Katie: They do and I think this room just got 10 degrees hotter with you just describing that, Gabriella.

Gabriella: What can I say?

Katie: That was intense. So where did Hoopnotica come from? Has this been something that you've been passionate about all of your life?

Gabriella: About five years ago I took my first hoop dance class and at the time we didn't have You Tube. We didn't have the luxury of the internet the way that we know it now and it's hard to believe it was just five years ago that when I searched hoop dancing online I did not get any videos. I got a few still photographs, but there was just one girl offering classes in Los Angeles and at the time I lived about 45 minutes out of the city -

Katie: Okay.

Gabriella: -- and I was actually a new mother, feeling very chunky, feeling like I needed something to take me away from my blessed baby. I needed something that would just help me get back in touch with my body. I'd had a C-section. I was carrying around about 30 or 40 pounds that I really wanted to lose and I was thinking maybe a belly dance class. I started off with yoga and Pilates, but I got bored and I wasn't really getting the cardio results that I wanted. So I thought maybe if I could do that shimmying move I could shake off some of this unwanted weight. When I found hoop dancing I was intrigued. I thought to myself what is this hoop dancing thing and at the time, nobody knew what hoop dancing was. Like the chances of me having an interview with you were none. So I decided to take the class and I decided to get four of my girlfriends to take the class with me. So that way we could take the carpooling. We could go up to L.A., have a nice day and then come back. I transformed all these girls into hoopers. We got up to this class. We were able to visually see what hoop dancing was and we were all like wowed by it. We wanted to learn it. We wanted to be just like Rayna Mcinturf who was teaching the class. After six weeks of working with Rayna I was so hooked on hooping and these big oversized hoops and enchanting people in my front yard, meeting my neighbors, teaching my family. It'd become so much of what I loved to do that I began to question why everybody didn't practice hoop dancing -

Katie: Ahh.

Gabriella: -- with yoga everywhere and Pilates everywhere and belly dance everywhere. Why wasn't hoop dancing more popular.

Katie: Exactly.

Gabriella: I've always been very entrepreneurial and so my questions were really around why hasn't anybody made this a business. When I started doing some research about hoop dancing I realized that it was just very new. That there were a few artists in the United States who were practicing hoop dancers, who performed and then offered classes in their backyards, but nobody had ever given this movement, this dance movement any sort of credibility and I just decided that I wanted to be the one to do it.

Katie: Excellent. Now see, whenever I first heard of hoop dancing, to me I was like oh, that's something that people at Burning Man probably do. That's like a hippie, crazy like woo petrulian, let's do it and not that I don't like petruly. Let's just be honest, but I mean you transformed it into something that I mean I'm seeing in Vogue. Like I think I read something on your website that's talking about Nicole Kidman is in Hawaii and she's hoop dancing with Jennifer Anniston and -

Gabriella: Yeah.

Katie: I mean, it's incredible, this movement.

Gabriella: It's amazing. It's not as amazing to us, you and I, because we're hoop dancers. We get it, but to people who have never seen hoop dancing before, it's so obscure and it's so hippie-dippie with its roots in Burning Man and its roots in the electronic club scene. You really do associate it with being I wanna say almost underground. It has this sort of grass roots following of people who practice while they're watching a jam band outside, like Fish. It never started anywhere so mainstream until Hoopnotica really embraced it as a business. I have a background in art. I graduated from the Art Institute in Chicago.

Katie: Oh.

Gabriella: I'm a very visual person. Ya' know I'm trained in video editing. I'm trained in graphic design and in illustration. So when I decided that I was going to make this statement and this was gonna be my baby, it really is my baby and I'm no hippie.

Katie: That's awesome.

Gabriella: However, I love pretending I'm a hippie and I go to festivals and I dance my booty off. So I have a little bit of those hippie tendencies, but I'm really, ya' know -

Katie: Well you're a business woman who had an amazing epiphany.

Gabriella: Yeah; and I just really wanted to share it. I lost a ton of weight. After I had my first baby I lost 25 pounds in that first summer -

Katie: Oh wow.

Gabriella: -- and I was really empowered and it really set the tone for how I was gonna run this company.

Katie: Now let's talk about more of the business of Hoopnotica. What are you doing exactly to kind of spread this movement around the world? What products and what services? What does your business really look like?

Gabriella: Yeah; there's two things that power this movement. First of all, it's the hippies. It's the grass roots people who go to festivals, people who want to perform with fire, people who are really into these trance-like activities. So it makes sense that they're really driving the movement. They across the United States are performing in public places and people are saying, ‘Oh, so that's hoop dance.' They give my target market a sort of basis for comparison. So then when I come along talking about hoop dance it doesn't sound quite as obscure because they've seen a performer or a local who's gone on the local news program talking about the classes that she offers in her backyard or the hoops that she's selling that she makes herself. I know that you told me that you make hoops. We started off making these hoops and thinking to ourselves if we're gonna get this in the hands of everybody all over the world and we wanna grow this to be the size of yoga, we're gonna need to make some major changes in just the foundation of the business. ‘Cause one, these hoops are big.

Katie: They're huge.

Gabriella: They're not like these Wham-o hoops that were tiny. These are huge hoops. They're 44 inches across; anywhere from 32 to 44 inches is what a hoop dancer dances with.

Katie: Okay.

Gabriella: They weigh more. They weigh a pound and a half. Sometimes you see them as much as five pounds.

Katie: Oh wow.

Gabriella: Yeah; and the five pound hoops to me are just way too heavy -

Katie: Obviously.

Gabriella: But a pound and a half is great for a beginner.

Katie: It is; yeah. Although my abs are kind of hurting just thinking about it, but yes.

Gabriella: Good thing -

Katie: In a good way.

Gabriella: This is a good thing. Any time your abs feel sore as a result of doing anything other than a sit-up, I'm a proponent.

Katie: Yay.

Gabriella: So we decided we're going to need to make a collapsible product and we didn't like the other collapsible products on the market, which were pretty much hoops that folded into a figure eight and then folded on themselves. We found them to warp and we thought they were too clunky. So we decided that we would make a collapsible product that came apart into segments and that those segments would go into a little yoga bag that you could wear on your back that would identify you as being a hooper. They're a great conversation piece, but also allow you to take the hoop on the subway, to bring it on the airplane, to take it with you to Hawaii so you can hoop with your best friend Jennifer Aniston on the beach, right.

Katie: I wish.

Gabriella: So that was number one is okay, let's address this product issue. Number two was how can we physically be in more than one place at once because when we launched our classes here on the west side in L.A. we were packed. Daily Candy launched us. We had a waiting list that had 150 people on it and we only had 3 girls who could teach the Hoopnotica curriculum.

Katie: Oh my gosh.

Gabriella: It was a great problem to have, but it was a problem, right.

Katie: Yeah.

Gabriella: To wait list somebody who wanted to come take a hooping class was like murder, right.

Katie: Yeah.

Gabriella: So we immediately started training other teachers and decided that what our business was gonna have to look like was that we would take responsibility for training people the way that we teach our classes. We have found that we have been in the business the longest, we know everybody's up side and down side. We're not asking anybody to dance on a pole in high heels. We're not asking anybody to parade around in fuzzy boots from Burning Man. We wanted something that would be very straightforward and that could appeal to everyone. So we designed this curriculum that we teach in our training program. We teach yoga instructors and Pilates' instructors and people who have sometimes never hooped before, how to teach a Hoopnotica class in their gym or in their backyard or just for their own knowledge as a hooper. They wanna become a stronger hooper so they take our training program and then offer our classes. That's the bulk of our business is training and education and products.

Katie: Now are you also selling - I mean, do people have to license the Hoopnotica classes from you or do you sell like different curriculums that teachers teach to crazy girls like me?

Gabriella: You have the opportunity to license the Hoopnotica logo and any of our intellectual property for your own classes. If you wanted to put a big Hoopnotica logo on your door you could do that for a fee or you could just take the training and you'll be Hoopnotica certified, but you don't necessarily need to use that as an advertising gimmick. So, as you know, the people in the hooping community who really get into hooping and start offering classes have a tendency to adopt an identity. So mine on my blog when I was losing weight was Hoop Mama. Hoopnotica was Rayna's performance name before she was teaching classes -

Katie: Okay.

Gabriella: There's Hoop Girl and Hoopalicious and Spiral and there's so many names at this point it's really kind of fascinating to me. The advantage of being associated with Hoopnotica is that our phones ring off the hook all day long with people who want to come to a class and live throughout the United States. So we refer people to our Hoopnotica classes.

Katie: That's fantastic. Now what are some of the challenges that Hoopnotica is facing? Are you really getting a lot of pushback from more traditional exercise and fitness movements like yoga and Pilates'? What are some of those big challenges for you?

Gabriella: Well for the longest time we were the big fish in the small pond in that we were the only real legitimate business who was really taking hooping seriously. We're just stronger as a business model in the community, in the hooping community. When I tell people what I do I often times compare it to what it took to launch yoga as a market. When yoga was first introduced in the United States people thought it was a little bit weird, kind of interesting and then the celebrities started doing it, Madonna and whom have you with their beautiful toned bodies. Then the gyms started saying, ‘Maybe we'll invest into a couple of yoga classes.' Now you're hard pressed to find a gym that doesn't offer yoga.

Katie: Oh yeah.

Gabriella: But it was a big shift for the gym people who were used to a certain model of aerobics classes, a certain model for their gym, the way that they buy equipment. It doesn't work with hooping the same way as it didn't work with yoga. For the past several years the big thing that we've come up against is the gyms don't want to adopt our program because it doesn't make tangible sense to them.

Katie: Hm.

Gabriella: You and I both know as hoopers that after a few classes you get the hang of enough moves. Sometimes you don't go back to a class for six months to a year. You hang out with your friends. This takes people out of the gym.

Katie: Ohh.

Gabriella: And this directly is a conflict for the gyms. They want people in there taking classes that build upon each other on a regular basis. So the idea that you would provide somebody with a hoop and then they don't need the gym anymore doesn't work for the gyms -

Katie: That's scary. So they need to kind of step it up and start bringing jam bands into the gym. Like that's the solution, right?

Gabriella: Right. There's more than one way to skin a cat and I really think that Americans, given the present economic climate, as well as just as a culture, I think we're kind of tired of being told that in order to feel good about your body you need to sign up for a 12-week program or a lifetime of classes or a lifetime renewal of products where you're getting something shipped to you every month. The simplicity of hoop dance is it's a weighted hula hoop, you can dance, we're gonna show you how to keep the hoop on your body while you dance and the rest is all you. This doesn't work with the gym model. So I've known for a long time that we weren't gonna work with the gyms, but what was really plaguing me is who is going to be my competition. Now what's interesting is I actually just recently created my own competition -

Katie: Oh.

Gabriella: Gaiam is a major supplier of yoga instruction and they also do Pilates' and they also do some fringe stuff and I thought that they would probably adopt Hoopnotica at a certain point. I viewed them as being a possible partner. Marisa Tomei is a celebrity who started taking our hoop dance classes. She's a really wonderful person. We really like Marissa a lot and at a certain point I had a meeting with her and I said, ‘Look, I think that you would be a great spokesperson for Hoopnotica. Is that something that you'd be interested in doing?' We had a long conversation about it. She brought in her business manager. I talked to him about it and I said, ‘Ya' know, eventually what I'd like to do is take this program and sell it to Gaiam.' Well recently Marissa Tomei developed a hoop dance DVD workout series with Gaiam, who is a bigger company and could offer her more money and ya' know what? I would have done the same thing if I was Marisa Tomei, but can you see how I just created my biggest nightmare?

Katie: You certainly did. You're just that good.

Gabriella: Yay. And now I have a competitor. What's really wonderful is her curriculum; her programming has nothing on the Hoopnotica brand. We are a solid hoop dance company with years of experience and our DVDs are the best on the market and I will stand for that ‘cause I've seen their product as well.

Katie: Well Gabriella, thank you so much for spreading the word of hooping and being with us on the Overtime Show today.

Gabriella: Thank you so much for having me, Katie. It's wonderful to connect with you as a fellow hooper.

Katie: Wonderful. And for our listeners, I'm sure that you are absolutely curious and are dying to get a hoop on you and I certainly encourage you to do so. Check out Hoopnotica online at hoopnotica.com. You're listening to theBusinessMakers Overtime Show heard here and online at the BusinessMakers.com.