New York Pilates’ Cofounder Brion Isaacs Was a Drummer First

Noor Lobad
·4 min read
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New York Pilates cofounder Brion Isaacs was 16 years old when he formed his first band.

“We were called The Sexy Magazines,” said Isaacs, who was the designated drummer of the punk group, while his best friend Franco V. was on vocals. From the beginning of their friendship, the pair bonded over music. “When we were five or six, we dressed up as Guns N’ Roses for Halloween — I remember playing the drums on my suitcase,” Isaacs said.

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Because Franco’s mother was a music agent, Isaacs spent much of his adolescence tagging along to shows by the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Neil Young and Elvis Costello, and it wasn’t long before The Sexy Magazines was opening for heavy-hitters like Kelly Osbourne and Courtney Love, too.

“Our biggest moment was when we got to play Coachella,” said Isaacs, who took the stage at the festival in 2005, one year before the The Sexy Magazines — gone but never forgotten — disbanded.

Afterward, Isaacs turned his focus to DJing, getting his start curating shift playlists for the now-closed Diesel store in New York’s Upper East Side.

“I became friends with one of the guys working at the Diesel Style Lab, he heard I was in a band and was like, ‘Oh my god, you should DJ,’ I was like, ‘Yeah, totally’ — I had no idea how to DJ,” recalled Isaacs, who was in his late-teens at the time and spent the next 12 hours piecing together a mix of songs on his laptop which he presented the next day at the store. (He curated the store’s playlists for the next four years.)

Brion Isaacs, drummer.
Brion Isaacs, drummer.

But it was in the trenches of New York’s late-2000s nightlife scene that Isaacs truly found his sound.

“I was DJing at The Beatrice Inn playing punk, dico and soul — also a lot of hip-hop,” Isaacs said. “I remember one time [at The Beatrice Inn] Chloë Sevigny was like, ‘Hey, can you play Kate Bush,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah, of course,’ — that was my first time hearing Kate Bush.”

Fittingly, it was at a performance at Bowery Ballroom that Isaacs met his soon-to-be New York Pilates cofounder and wife, Heather Andersen. “We met backstage, and we’ve been together since that first night we met,” Isaacs said. For the pair’s third date, Isaacs tagged along while Andersen, who was then a ballerina, received a pilates certification.

“I liked it right away,” Isaacs said. At the time, he helmed a branding agency called Rivington Design House and put his skills to work to get New York Pilates’ website up and running in 2013.

“Heather was running the company for the first three years, and then we brought in my whole team to be the creative arm of NYP,” he said.

Today, the reformer-based fitness studio has more than 100 employees across eight locations in New York City and the Hamptons, where Isaacs and Andersen reside. Though it was an uphill battle, New York Pilates made it through the pandemic without shuttering any locations, despite having no external funding and not hosting classes for a year and a half.

“It felt like going through a tidal wave — it was a battle and a half negotiating with our landlords and keeping everything going, but getting back now to where we were pre-COVID-19 and back to opening stores, it feels amazing,” Isaacs said.

Soon, the pair will open their first Brooklyn location in Williamsburg, and are eyeing a potential first out-of-state expansion to Miami.

But it just so happens that when New York Pilates was in its earliest days with just one location in Bowery, Isaacs’ side hustle played a role in getting the word out. “When people would make DJ requests, I’d say ‘No, but I’ll give you a free pilates class’ — we were getting all these people into [the studio] from nightlife,” said Isaacs, who also began recruiting female DJs — who weren’t so prevalent at the time — to come in for class. “These women went on to become some of the top female DJs of our age — that had such a massive impact on the business.”

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