Sept. 1, 2026

Kat and Brooke Wyman on Scaling SoulFire Collective's Boutique Yoga Model

Kat and Brooke Wyman on Scaling SoulFire Collective's Boutique Yoga Model

SoulFire Collective started with the two founders biking dirty towels to and from a beach studio basket because they could not yet afford a laundry service. Ten years and three studios later, Kat and Brooke Wyman are in the process of raising a couple million dollars to add three to four more locations, in a boutique fitness category that has watched F45, several early yoga roll-ups, and a handful of exponential cycling and barre concepts fail to make it through the last several years intact.

Pete Moore, founder and managing partner of Integrity Square, sat down to talk about how a Lululemon store manager and a restaurant industry veteran built a yoga brand profitable enough to attract growth capital, and what markets they are targeting next.

From a Beach Studio to a Regional Brand

SoulFire's first studio opened in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, conceived as a small, seasonal, vacation-spot business. Kat and Brooke named it SoulFire after a quote that inspired them: "Be fearless in pursuit of what sets your soul on fire." Within the first year, requests started coming in from members who wanted the same practice outside of a small beach town, which led to a second studio in Bethesda, Maryland, and later a third in Arlington, Virginia. Kat described the regional logic in blunt real estate terms: DC residents will drive out to Bethesda, but Bethesda residents will not drive into DC, because, in her words, their "SUVs cannot park there."

What started as a part-time project run alongside other jobs quickly became a full-time operation. As Kat put it, any entrepreneur listening knows there is no such thing as a part-time entrepreneur once a business starts working.

Two Operators, Not Just Two Yogis

Kat and Brooke are married, and before founding SoulFire, Kat managed a Lululemon retail store in Rehoboth, and Brooke worked in the restaurant industry, which she described as the real backbone of any beach town's local economy.

Neither of them came up through a traditional yoga-teacher path. Kat is a former college basketball player and ultra-endurance athlete; Brooke has an ultra-running and marathon background. On the show, Kat argued that coming to yoga as outsiders, rather than through a traditional studio and teacher-training lineage, is part of what made the brand more mainstream and more scalable.

That outsider-athlete framing carries into how they split responsibilities. Kat described herself as the "blue sky" partner who leads brand, marketing, and the current capital raise. Brooke handles logistics, scheduling, people, and building repeatable training systems. Kat also described a lighter version of a financial check-and-balance: Brooke is, in Kat's words, "the one who likes to spend money," and Kat is the one keeping that in check.

The "Human Readiness" Differentiator

Kat framed SoulFire's positioning around what she called human readiness: the idea that stress from work and home life cannot be eliminated, so the goal is to build people's capacity to handle it.

 SoulFire delivers that through a signature power yoga class, an "activating breathwork" class, and a 45-minute, higher-intensity mat strength class. Kat was explicit that the studio does not want to strip yoga down into a "watered-down corporate" workout. The brand keeps a spiritual and reflective component intentionally in the room.

Kat pointed to yoga specifically as a gap in the current boutique fitness landscape, positioning SoulFire alongside category leaders like SoulCycle and [solidcore] rather than against other yoga studios like CorePower.

Building a Teacher Pipeline Without the 200-Hour Model

One of the more operator-relevant details in the conversation is how SoulFire trains instructors. The standard path in the yoga industry is a 200-hour training program accredited by Yoga Alliance, a body Kat said was started in the late 1990s. Kat argued that model is built for the yoga school's own revenue, not for a studio's growth, and specifically said most of CorePower Yoga's revenue comes from its own teacher training business.

SoulFire instead built an in-house, shortened, immersive training program: the studio actively recruits and interviews people to teach, does not charge them for training. She noted SoulCycle and [solidcore] use a similar internally trained instructor model.

Picking the Next Markets: Following [solidcore]'s Real Estate Signals

Kat described Bethesda as SoulFire's prototype market: an average member age around 45, meaningful disposable income, and members who already hold multiple fitness memberships at brands like Solidcore and Equinox. The pattern she is targeting for new locations is a market that sits on the edge of a major metro area rather than inside its core, which gets SoulFire better rent and lease terms.

She named Falls Church, Virginia, as a near-term target, and suburban Philadelphia's Main Line as a longer-range one, both selected for a similar dual-income, 45-ish, family-oriented demographic.

To pressure-test those choices, SoulFire has started working with a real estate broker who has handled a number of Barry's Bootcamp expansions, aiming for a five-to-ten-year site strategy rather than a next-two-locations plan. Kat also said the team is watching where [solidcore] opens and does not open, treating their own site-selection research as a signal, since the two businesses share a meaningful amount of member overlap and neither chases high rents.

Raising Capital and the Investor Profile They Want

SoulFire is currently raising "a couple million dollars" to fund three to four additional locations. Pete mentioned he has reviewed SoulFire's financials and finds the three existing studios "very, very strong and profitable," and framed the business as fitting a category he sees consolidating around a small number of surviving boutique brands post-COVID.

Kat described two investor profiles SoulFire is looking for: community members who are already emotionally invested in the studios, and outside investors with genuine fitness or yoga industry expertise who can offer more than capital.

Moore closed the episode noting that Integrity Square is not selling securities and encouraged listeners to do their own due diligence and involve an attorney before considering any investment.

Key Takeaways for Operators, Franchisors, and Investors

1. A division of labor reads as a governance strength to an acquirer or investor. Kat owns brand and capital-raising, Brooke owns operations and training systems, a split Pete compared directly to a CEO/COO structure investors look for before backing a growth round. (08:44)

2. In-house teacher training can be a scaling lever, not just a cost line. By replacing the traditional 200-hour, Yoga Alliance-accredited path with an unpaid, shortened, internally-run program, SoulFire says it can get new instructors staffed faster without the revenue-driven incentives Kat attributes to programs like CorePower's. (23:02)

3. Site selection is being outsourced to a broker with category-specific pattern recognition, not run purely on demographic modeling. SoulFire is working with a broker experienced in Barry's Bootcamp's real estate expansions to build a longer-horizon site strategy. (20:08)

A Few Quotes Worth Sitting With

"If you know DC, the DC people will drive to Bethesda, but the Bethesda people will not drive to DC because their big SUVs can't park in DC." - Kat Wyman

"We don't want it to just become this watered-down corporate whatever. We still want people to have something to think about, to talk about when they walk out the front door." - Kat Wyman

Chapter Timestamps

  • 00:00:46 - Origin of the SoulFire name and the first Rehoboth Beach studio
  • 00:03:26 - What Kat and Brooke were doing for work before founding SoulFire
  • 00:05:42 - Why yoga, and why neither founder is a "traditional yogi"
  • 00:08:44 - How Kat and Brooke split brand/capital-raising versus operations/systems
  • 00:13:07 - The "human readiness" philosophy and SoulFire's class lineup
  • 00:17:25 - The Bethesda prototype and target demographics for new markets
  • 00:20:08 - Working with a broker and watching Solidcore's real estate choices
  • 00:23:02 - Building an in-house teacher training model instead of the 200-hour path
  • 00:26:53 - The two investor profiles SoulFire is targeting in its raise

About Kat and Brooke Wyman

Kat and Brooke Wyman are the married co-founders of SoulFire Collective, a boutique yoga studio brand with locations in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware; Bethesda, Maryland; and Arlington, Virginia. Before founding SoulFire, Kat managed a Lululemon retail store and Brooke worked in the restaurant industry in Rehoboth Beach; both had earlier worked together at Lululemon. Kat is a former college basketball player and ultra-endurance athlete and Brooke has a background in ultra-running and marathon racing.

Resources

Related HALO Talks Episodes

Want help evaluating a capital raise or growth strategy for your boutique fitness brand? Visit integritysq.com to set up a free consultation with Integrity Square.

Multi-Unit Operators Boutique Fitness

Carrie Bacon on Contrast Therapy, Acupuncture, and Building 180 Degree Bathhouse (Episode 612)

There is no dedicated community thermal wellness space within 700 square miles of Kansas City. That is the gap Carrie Bacon, a classically trained acupuncturist turned bathhouse operator, is building into with 180 Degree Bathhouse, a micro-format co…

Dr. Munir Ghesani on Theranostics, Outpatient Access, and Scaling to 50 Clinics a State

United Theranostics has a stated goal of opening 50 clinics in every state within the next seven years, and it plans to get there almost entirely through recruiting, not acquisition. On this episode of HALO Talks, Dr. Munir Ghesani, Chief Medical Di…