The shortest distance between a Brown University economics class and a dance floor in New York is apparently five dollars. That was what Sadie Kurzban charged students to join the cardio-dance classes she began teaching on campus. She had no formal dance training, no permanent studio and, at first, no grand theory about boutique fitness. She had a room, music and a hunch that moving could feel less like an obligation and more like a Friday night.
The room kept filling. In her first semester, Kurzban has said, those five-dollar admissions produced $40,000. She could count the bodies and read the answer: people wanted this. By senior year, she had entered Brown's entrepreneurship competition and won $25,000. In 2012, degree in hand, she moved to New York and began renting dance studios by the hour. Two weekly classes became 30. The business acquired a name borrowed from the area code of her Miami childhood: 305 Fitness.
Plenty of businesses begin with a pitch deck. This one began with a pulse. Kurzban's early advantage was less mystical: she was paying close attention. The students coming through the door were the academics and athletes, women and men, practiced dancers and people who had no intention of becoming one. She saw that the class worked best when expertise was not the entry fee.
The area code was a compass
Calling the company 305 gave a New York enterprise a Miami accent. Kurzban grew up on Key Biscayne, the barrier island across Biscayne Bay from the city, in a Cuban and Jewish family. She has described that upbringing as expressive, musical and politically engaged. Her father, immigration lawyer Ira Kurzban, argued cases on behalf of Haitian immigrants before the United States Supreme Court. At home, Sadie learned to question things, to state a conviction and to proceed without first consulting the neighbors.
She carried the useful parts north: the physical humor, the music, the confidence to occupy a room. Yet the name was not simple nostalgia. Kurzban said she wanted to build her own version of Miami in another city. That made 305 less like a postcard and more like an act of authorship. The humid glamour could come along; the social pressures could stay behind.
There is a tidy business lesson hiding inside the personal one. A number that meant almost nothing to a New Yorker gave the company a mythology before it had real estate. Three digits held color, rhythm and a place of origin. Later, studios would lean into Miami-style Art Deco interiors, and the live-DJ format supplied its own weather. The brand felt geographically specific even while it expanded beyond geography.
A nightclub with better manners
The 305 format was gloriously unsubtle. A live DJ, rhythmic lights, pop and house music, movement at speed. It borrowed the sensory grammar of a nightclub and removed the velvet rope. The choreography mattered, but the welcome mattered more. Kurzban described her focus simply: get people to “move, laugh, be silly” and connect with themselves. It was an unusually generous instruction in a category that often preferred commands.
I wasn't really looking to build a fitness empire. I just really wanted to create a message that was true and authentic from the heart.Sadie Kurzban, 2019
That does not mean the empire-like parts assembled themselves. Renting by the hour kept the first version light. A permanent studio was a different creature. Kurzban was 24 when she finished 305's first New York home in 2014, and the project cost four times what she had planned. Her friends were two years out of college; she had contractors, rent and a very expensive room that needed to fill again tomorrow.
She later recalled the thought that arrived just a week after opening: “Oh my god, I don't know if I want this anymore.” It is a marvelous founder anecdote because it breaks the usual editing rule. The ceremonial ribbon is supposed to lead directly to triumph. In Kurzban's account, it led to a chair, a breath and doubt. The fear did not disappear; it merely failed to get the deciding vote.
The rented-room years / weekly classes
One-hour rentals let demand grow before a permanent studio did.
By 2019, 305 reported six locations across New York, Washington and Boston, pop-ups in other cities, more than 100,000 clients, a family of 100 instructors and 50 DJs. It was also certifying instructors who could carry the method elsewhere. The stage lights made good photographs. The portable part of the company, however, was the culture: high energy without humiliation, discipline with a sense of humor.
When the rooms went dark
Then the physical rooms closed. In March 2020, 305 shut seven studios and moved classes online. The early broadcasts had more improvisation than polish. One instructor used cans of beans in place of weights; another nearly introduced a vigorous arm movement to the family china. Viewers stayed. The defects had the charm of evidence: there were actual people on both sides of the screen.
Kurzban taught from her parents' home in Miami. During one livestream, after learning the company had not received a federal small-business loan, she told the audience she was upset and demoralized. Then she gave them a pep talk and taught a 40-minute class. It was an uncannily complete portrait of founder life: bad news, public candor, music on.
305 added an at-home membership and leaned further into instructor certification. These were not simply substitutions for a studio. They were a reminder that a community could survive the loss of its preferred room if its rituals were strong enough. The live DJ might be elsewhere. The invitation still traveled.
First, a room where adults could move without auditioning. Next, a camp where children can create without waiting for permission.
The next room has a lake
In 2025, Kurzban announced a change that looked, from a distance, like an abrupt genre switch. She was heading to Washington, Maine, to lead Camp Med-o-lark, a creative-arts summer camp founded in 1967. Devon Branch-Elliman would take charge at 305. Kurzban would remain involved as founder and instructor. “It will always be my first baby,” she wrote.
Camp Med-o-lark now lists her as owner and executive director; its team page names her camp director. When she is there, her biography says, she can be found around the circus and dance studios. New York remains home with her husband and their son. The working landscape has expanded to include cabins, a lake and enough art supplies to make glitter seem restrained.
The camp's structure explains why the move makes sense. Med-o-lark is organized around free choice. Campers build schedules from visual arts, performance, music, circus and other studios. Choice is guided rather than chaotic, and the aim is creative confidence: make a decision, try something, revise it, live with the fact that the papier-mâché owl has one alarming eye.
Kurzban has written that children become more invested when they have ownership of the path. In her announcement, she put the mission in plainer contemporary language: help kids grow confident and log off their phones. The phone-light part may be the more radical promise in 2026. A lake is difficult to scroll.
The art of handing over the controls
Founders are often encouraged to make themselves inseparable from their companies, then scolded when they are. Kurzban's arrangement is more adult. She has remained part of 305's identity and teaching roster while recognizing another leader's authority. Her endorsement of Branch-Elliman was characteristically exuberant and conspicuously free of founder fog: someone else was in charge, and Kurzban was glad about it.
That handoff also creates room for a second operating life. At 305, Kurzban learned to turn personal energy into a repeatable format, to train instructors, to write down a culture that had once fit inside a tiny team and to listen when customers asked for new cities. Camp makes similar demands with higher stakes and older traditions. The job is to preserve what people love while making the institution work for those arriving now.
Her stated ambition once included becoming an investor in female-led businesses. Whether that becomes a formal portfolio remains to be seen. The instinct is already present in her work: distribute agency, teach the method, let other people lead. A good founder likes applause. A durable operator eventually learns to enjoy the sound from offstage.
The format keeps changing. The proposition does not: give people a vivid place to practice becoming more themselves.
This is the connecting line between the pink-lit studio and the Maine woods. Both are deliberately constructed worlds. Both make silliness useful. Both ask participants to choose action over spectatorship. One supplies a beat; the other supplies a long summer day. Kurzban's talent has been to understand that confidence rarely arrives as a lecture. It sneaks in while someone is busy dancing, painting, performing or attempting a circus trick.
The old 305 story was easy to summarize: an economics graduate without formal dance training builds a dance company. The newer story is richer. A founder discovers that the company she made was one expression of a broader craft. She builds rooms with social permission in the walls. Music is optional. Participation is not.