Their first crack at something was selling tapes of the class. With Aghion on board to manage operations, they recorded Perez and 200 of his students dancing on a beach and played it for the CEO of Fitness Quest, an Ohio company that sold Total Gyms and similar products. Fitness Quest produced a collection of tapes and DVDs and marketed them through an infomercial. "They are selling a few hundred thousand units on TV," says Perlman. "But their call center keeps hearing from people who say, 'I don't want to buy a video. I want to take a class.' " The Albertos realized then that instruction might be at least as good a business as DVDs. (They later bought back the video rights.)
The partners expected 30 or 40 people to show up for their first training session, in a Miami hotel in 2003. Instead, they drew 150, from as far away as California and Kansas. Most were fitness instructors or dancers who wanted to teach Zumba at their gyms. They needed licensing, but even after several classes, some weren't very good. The Albertos didn't want to deny a license to anyone who took the training. "We thought, If we test them, they will fail, or we will have to lower the bar so much that it becomes kind of a joke," says Aghion, Zumba's president and COO. They decided to license all comers and let the market decide who would succeed.
By 2005, the company had trained roughly 700 Zumba instructors, who were pollinating the country. But many kept returning to Miami. "They wanted to meet with Beto and get a new routine or film his class or talk to him about new music," says Perlman. "In training, we teach you one or two classes, but students get bored. They want new routines every month. They want new songs.
"We decided to turn these instructors into entrepreneurs," Perlman continues. "They need students. They need ongoing education. They need music and choreography." So the Albertos created the Zumba Instructor Network, or ZIN, a community and educational platform. They also produced new infomercials and began plowing money into media designed to drive consumers to classes. (That investment continues. The company will spend $50 million on advertising in 2012 and $63 million in 2013.)
But how to differentiate Zumba from classes already in gyms? Up to that point, the company's message had focused on weight loss. Then, one day, Jeffrey Perlman, Alberto Perlman's brother and Zumba's chief marketing officer, spied a poster for a David LaChapelle movie called Rize. It depicted a man and a woman lost in the ecstasy of dance. He photographed it and showed the partners. Instant epiphany. Zumba wasn't about weight loss. It was about emotion. Joy. Release. The company captured its new identity in a tag line: Ditch the workout. Join the party.
I have gone walkabout at the Zumba convention. In one room, scissor-wielding attendees sit at long tables carving Zumba shirts into Zumba scarves. In another, a standing-room-only crowd peppers a speaker with questions about buying insurance for studios. In auditoriums and banquet rooms, the neon hordes, sweat and tassles flying, practice new routines. A wide range of abilities is on display, but that's OK. With Zumba, keeping spirits and energy high trumps mastering merengue. Perfection is the enemy of perspiration.
The music, like the instructor base, is global: kitsch-exotic. One class is conducted to sprightly Russian tunes. Another teaches belly dancing. I am too late for the Bollywood session but find a long line of people waiting to have photos taken with the instructor. It turns out she is Bhavna Vaswani, wife of The Sixth Sense's director, M. Night Shyamalan. I ask several people whether the class had a twist ending, but no one knows what I am talking about.
Zumba won't disclose how many instructors it has licensed--in part, one source at the company suggested, out of fear of discouraging prospective instructors, who might worry that the market is saturated. But The New York Times put the number at more than 100,000 last spring, and Zumba says the ranks swelled 5 percent in July alone. Zumba is taught in more than 140,000 locations around the world. Roughly 65 percent of instructors are employed by fitness facilities. The rest--including the 2 percent of instructors who operate their own studios--start businesses, renting space in community centers, schools, and hospitals. "They will go to a church and say, 'I want to rent your basement,' " says Perlman. "And the church will charge them $40. And they'll charge each student $8 and get 40 people. And they have $280 in profit for that hour. It's a pretty cool model."
Instructors pay, on average, $250 to be licensed. Once licensed, 85 to 90 percent of them sign up for the ZIN, the razor blade in Zumba's Gillette-style business model. For $30 a month, ZIN members receive CDs of new music and DVDs of new choreography; marketing collateral, including posters, fliers, and punch cards for class regulars; website hosting; educational videos; and access to a global online network that covers dance steps, business tips, and job openings. Through a new affiliate program, ZIN members earn 10 percent of each sale when their students buy Zumba apparel online. About 50,000 ZIN members log on to the network each week.
Another new venture is the ZIN Community Council, a way to formalize the amorphous United Nations of Zumba. Bilingual instructors from around the world are elected to represent their countries, passing along problems and requests to the home office and forging relationships across cultural divides. "We'll see, for instance, that the Middle East needs a different kind of marketing material, due to more modest cultural nuances," says David Topel, Zumba's preternaturally cheerful community manager. "Our European markets consistently request television spots that feature fitness and strength rather than weight loss, because weight loss is not a primary concern."
Zumba's international business represents roughly 50 percent of revenue, a percentage expected to grow substantially. At first, the company hired business people to establish overseas offices; now, that is handled by top-tier instructors in each country, with plenty of online support from headquarters. It's an unusual strategy: in essence, enlisting customers to create your global presence. But it is low cost and low risk and fits nicely with Zumba's DIY philosophy.
