Two Kinds of Creation, One Very Small Living Room
I was a month pregnant with my first child when I sketched the WundaFormer (now the Aurum Reformer) on an airplane. He was born the same week the first prototype came off the factory floor, and honestly, half of the machine didn't work. The Wunda Chair pedal was made of solid steel and would groooooooaaannnnn down to the floor even with the strongest springs set up. I laughed so I wouldn’t cry.
What I can tell you from that season of “firsts” is that there's never a perfect time to bet on yourself, and life happens fast, regardless. If work is going to take up 20% your life, make sure it's work you love enough to fill your own cup; and if you have children, to model for your kids.
That's exactly what the next few years looked like. The second prototype - that actually worked! - ended up in our living room, and we had to swap out our coffee table because there wasn't any space left for a Pilates machine. A reformer footprint is about 10’ long.
My son literally learned to walk around that machine the way most kids do around a coffee table.
(cutest plank ever pictured above)
We shot the first training manual with my mentor Marie-Jose Blom in that same living room, pushed the furniture aside and used a white wall as a backdrop with the concrete polished floors.
A perfect, and most importantly for a start up: free, photography studio. My son was running around the whole time. I was still breastfeeding him, and it took about a week of filming for that 350 page manual. This was in 2011 and Pilates manuals were still physical binders. I have a few and they bring a smile to my face every time as I remember the shoot like it was yesterday.
I see it as a gift to use ingenuity, hard work and real joy in what you do. It’s not just the world watching, it’s also your children. He only saw me enjoying the shoot with Marie-Jose Blom and the fit model. He never saw me complain about working hard, because I absolutely love what I do.
This was the first season in my life that I learned to start letting go of perfection. I used to wear it as a badge of honor but now, as an emerging inventor and start up founder…it simply wasn’t realistic to get everything perfect.
When the prototype came off the factory floor, it was truly unusable. We sometimes describe the jump board as a cutting board you put away when you slide it into the machine, but in that first prototype it was thick white plastic and literally looked like a cutting board. So bad!
I had to release the expectations I had and be okay with continuing to improve. And we did, on literally every production run, not just the second one.
If you're a founder, or a parent, or both - here's what I'd tell you: you'll never regret betting on yourself, and you'll never regret showing your kids what purpose driven work looks like. I would've benefited from allowing more support, in both my work and my home, at that time. But I don't regret anything else.
WundaLove,
Amy