Pilates with Valerie

The project

Valerie is a French-born, L3-qualified Mat Pilates instructor who has lived in the UK for more than 20 years. Her studios in Bushey and Elstree run small mixed-level group classes, 1-to-1 sessions, orthopaedic-condition support, and massage and facial treatments, alongside a full programme of online classes over Zoom. The way she teaches did not fit any off-the-shelf booking tool, so rather than bend her business to a template, we designed and built a booking system around it, then wrapped it in a personal site that feels like her studio rather than a franchise.

Why off-the-shelf booking did not fit

Most studio booking apps assume a fixed timetable of identical classes. Valerie does not run that way: she mixes group mat classes at different levels, private 1-to-1s, orthopaedic support sessions and Zoom classes, each with its own capacity and its own package pricing. Forcing that into a generic tool would have meant either watering down how she teaches or managing bookings twice, once for the room and once for the screen. Neither was acceptable, so the booking logic became the project rather than an afterthought.

What we built

We built a booking system shaped to her actual formats, capacity limits and package prices, with Zoom sessions and in-person classes living on a single timetable so a class never gets booked past its limit and online students are handled in the same flow as the room. Around it sits a warm, uncluttered brochure site that reflects a personal instructor rather than a chain, and the local SEO foundation that keeps her visible for Pilates searches in her home postcodes without paying for ads.

Key outcomes

• Bespoke booking system built around Valerie's real class formats, capacity rules and package pricing, not an off-the-shelf plugin's constraints
• One timetable that handles in-person and Zoom students together, so nothing is double-booked or managed twice
• Page-one rankings for Pilates searches across Bushey, Elstree and the surrounding WD and EN postcodes