Studio
Why we cap every class at fourteen mats
The number isn't a marketing device. It's what fits in the room while still leaving a teacher able to see everyone in it — and it costs us about £34,000 a year.
Every studio has a number. Ours is fourteen, it is printed on the booking page, and it does not move — not in January, not for a friend of a friend, not when someone turns up in the rain having got the day wrong. People assume the number is a positioning exercise. It isn't. It's arithmetic, and it's expensive.
The room decides most of it
The practice room is 9.4 metres by 6.1 metres. Take out the shelf wall, the props corner and a working aisle from the door, and you are left with a usable rectangle of roughly 8.2 by 5.
A mat is 61cm wide. People need about 40cm of clear air on either side to take an arm out sideways without touching a stranger, which means each practising person occupies a bay a little over a metre wide. Two rows of seven fits, comfortably, with a metre and a half at the front for the teacher and enough at the back that the person on the last mat is not doing a forward fold into the door.
Fifteen fits too, if you shave the aisle. Sixteen fits if you also shave the gaps. We know because the previous tenants ran twenty-two in the same space, and there are photographs.
You can always fit one more person into a room. What you cannot do is fit one more person into a teacher's attention.
The teacher decides the rest
Here is the part that actually sets the number, and it has nothing to do with floor area.
A teacher standing at the front of a room can hold a certain number of bodies in working memory — not names, but states. Who is compensating with their lower back. Who went quiet three poses ago. Who is about to do something to a shoulder that they will regret on Thursday. Every experienced teacher I have ever asked puts their own ceiling somewhere between twelve and eighteen, and every one of them can tell you what happens past it: the class becomes a broadcast. The cues stop being for anyone in particular. You are running a video, and the video happens to have a person in it.
Fourteen sits inside every teacher's ceiling on their worst day. Not their best day — their worst one, at 6am, in February, on four hours of sleep. That margin is the whole point of setting the cap below what the room allows.
What it costs
I want to be specific about this, because "small classes" is the kind of claim every studio makes and almost nobody prices.
At $22 a drop-in, six extra places across 31 classes a week is a little over £4,000 a month in revenue we do not collect. Call it £48,000 gross, £34,000 after the extra teacher hours it would not require. That is the actual number. It is not nothing; it is roughly a full-time salary.
We pay it because the alternative is a studio that is indistinguishable from the four others within a mile, and because the fourteenth mat is the last one from which you can still hear the teacher breathe.
What we do instead of adding places
Three things, in order of how well they work.
- More classes, not bigger ones. We went from 22 classes a week to 31 over two years. That is where growth has come from, and it is why there are now four 6am slots instead of two.
- Waitlists that actually move. Roughly one in three waitlisted places comes free, because cancelling is frictionless and free until 9pm. Making cancellation easy is the single highest-leverage thing we have done for availability.
- Telling people no. Sometimes the honest answer is that Tuesday 6pm is full every week and will be full next week, and you should come on Wednesday instead.
Does it work?
The evidence I trust most is not the retention number, though that is good. It is that teachers here correct people by name, quietly, from three metres away, in the middle of a sequence — and that the person being corrected is not embarrassed, because nobody else noticed.
That does not happen in a room of thirty. I have taught in rooms of thirty. You can be excellent in a room of thirty and still be, functionally, a recording.
