Jimenez Julien, the person behind ReformerRoster

Why I built booking software for a room full of springs

I did not set out to work in Pilates. I was rebuilding a reservation system for a company that rented specialist equipment by the hour, and the hardest part was never the calendar. It was the fact that no two machines were the same. One had an attachment, one was out for repair, one could only be used by people who had been trained on it. Every general purpose booking tool I looked at flattened that into a seat count, and every operator I met had built a private workaround out of spreadsheets and memory.

A friend of a friend ran a Pilates studio in the Pacific Northwest and asked me to look at her schedule one evening. She had eight reformers, two of them with towers, one chair, and a Cadillac she used for private sessions. Her software let her sell nine spots in a class that could hold eight, and it did it about once a fortnight. Each time, she refunded a client, apologized in person, and told herself she would remember to cap that class manually. That evening turned into a year of watching studios open in the morning, and ReformerRoster came out of it.

What I learned about this trade

The first thing I learned is that studio owners are not disorganized. They are running a room where the constraint is physical and the software has no idea. The second is that the money in a Pilates studio does not leak out through big failures. It leaks out through a spot that opened at 4:50 in the afternoon and never got resold, and through the hour an owner spends every week working down a list of teachers to cover a class. Small holes, opened daily.

The third thing I learned is that the trade has real vocabulary, and using it correctly matters. A jump board is not an accessory to be footnoted. A client cleared for tower work is a clinical judgment the owner made, not a checkbox. When we shipped the clearance flags, we rewrote the interface twice because the first version made an instructor confirm a medical note she had not written. Studio owners told us, plainly, that this was wrong. We changed it.

How I work with studio owners

Every feature in the product started as a conversation with someone running a schedule. I keep a standing hour each week for calls with owners, and I still take the first walkthrough call for most new studios myself. I ask for your worst week, not your easiest one, because the schedule that breaks tells me more than the one that runs. When a studio leaves, I ask why and I write the answer down.

I am accountable for what this software promises. If the roster oversells a class, that is our defect and we treat it as an incident, not a support ticket. If an export is missing a column your accountant needs, tell me and we add it. Pricing is published on the home page and it is the price everyone pays. There is no negotiated rate that a first time owner would never think to ask for.

Experience and expertise

• Fifteen years building scheduling and reservation systems for businesses where equipment, not headcount, sets the limit.
• Founder of MLJ, SASU, the French company that publishes ReformerRoster and a small family of operational tools for independent businesses.
• Direct work with 318 US Pilates studios running from three to twenty two bookable apparatus, across single and dual location operations.
• Hands on experience with studio openings, instructor payroll exports, package accounting and the practical mechanics of a waitlist that has to work in under a minute.

How this product is built and maintained

ReformerRoster ships small changes weekly and holds a public change log inside the app. Nothing goes out on a Friday afternoon, because studios teach on Saturday mornings. Every scheduling change is tested against a library of real studio configurations, including the awkward ones: a shared floor, a reformer with a broken strap, a class taught by two instructors.

On the editorial side, every claim on this site maps to something we can show you in the product or in anonymized platform data. The numbers on the home page come from our own review of studio activity and are restated whenever the underlying data moves. Testimonials are published with the owner's name, role, business and city, with her written permission, and she can withdraw it at any time. We do not publish stock quotes, and we do not pay for reviews.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and it reaches me. If you want to see the product against your own schedule, the fastest route is the request form on the home page, where you can tell me how many apparatus you run and where the schedule hurts. I read every message and reply within one business day.

Find me elsewhere

• jimenezjulien.com
• X, @mljjulien
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Instagram