Lily Baldwin Owner
Hatch NYC floating yoga studio
Fitness instructors aren’t exactly cubicle slaves, but yogi and ballerina Lily Baldwin knows that even artsy jobs can have overcritical bosses, unfair promotions and sketchy health insurance. “I had been teaching in New York for six years, and I was disgruntled,” says Baldwin, now owner of Hatch NYC, the building-less, floating yoga and wellness studio. “I needed to strike a new balance.”
Leaving behind what she calls “the rat race that is the fitness scene in this city,” Baldwin collected a team of instructors who work with individual and corporate clients wherever they are—at the office, in a hotel on a business trip, or at home—and supplies them with eco-friendly equipment. Barely two years old, Hatch allows Baldwin a new degree of, ahem, flexibility, even for a John Friend-trained Anusara instructor who has danced with the Metropolitan Ballet. “Cutting out travel time nips excuses for not getting to the gym and enables us to get creative within the spaces provided,” says Baldwin.
Baldwin initially wanted to improve teachers’ lives with the business, which she has done. But, just as important, she’s added a community service component to her work. Funded by profits from her higher paying clients, Hatch takes wellness to low-income communities and a women’s prison, a population she believes is “too often left out of this burgeoning health conversation,” says Baldwin. “It felt paramount to broaden the audience scope. I’d been disgruntled by generally only providing services to the wealthy elite.”
A passionate dancer since grade school, Baldwin, 28, explains “I could say more in two hours in a room with a black sticky floor than I could in a week of conversations, papers and glances.” And in less than a decade in the Big Apple, Baldwin found her community. “The dance world has always been a home for the queers…You weren’t cool and risqué if you hadn’t at least dabbled on the other side.” –MW
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