Upswell owner Heather Holland stands beside two cold plunge pools at the Central Park location. Front Porch photo by Linda Kotsaftis

Heather Holland talks about Upswell Studios in Central Park with pride. It’s her business and her commitment to the wellness community. There weren’t any customers on the day Holland took Front Porch on a tour of the space. She had recently made the difficult decision to take a break and close, only to reopen on a limited basis soon after.

In mid-November, Holland sent an email to members announcing the closure of Upswell, a business that offers fitness and recovery programs. Twelve hours later, she received what she called a “wave of people,” urging her to figure out how to reopen the doors. She started making calls, asking, “If we could open for a few days [a week], could you come back?”

A week later, she reopened on a limited basis, three days a week. Now she’s setting her sights on the first week of the new year to bring more services back to the community that has supported her. The aim, she said, is long-term stability, consistency, and a meaningful presence in the neighborhood for years to come.

“It has been hard but also very inspiring,” she said. Her biggest fear, after announcing that she’d have to take a pause, was that people would either decide to move on or would be angry. “The overwhelming response,” she said, was “how can we help?”

In Colorado, there’s a small business failure rate of 23.8% within the first year of opening and 50.1% within five years, according to a LendingTree report.

Holland owns all three locations of Upswell, located in the Central Park, South Broadway, and RiNo neighborhoods. The former chief operating officer of CorePower Yoga and mother of two made a pandemic-inspired decision to be part of a community looking for wellness.

“It was really just getting the community back together and the spirit of wellness. We started out in City Park,” she said.  She got a permit to hold sessions there, and everyone brought their own mats. One thing led to another, and she opened her first location on South Broadway, where she tested ideas about what people needed for wellness.

Her success on South Broadway led to the opening of the Central Park studio in an area below the Hayes Apartment building at 2271 Clinton St., Aurora. The space is filled with compression therapy gear, cold plunge pools, saunas, and a fitness studio.

“When we built this space, we knew that people love to move, they love to recover, and they love to connect, and so that’s the ethos of the space,” she said. “We are self-funded and have a small budget, and we said, that’s OK. We can be simple and not opulent but create a really nice, clean space for the community to enjoy.”

But 16 months after opening, Holland said the structure of the business wasn’t being supported by the revenue model. About 80% of business happened during just 40% of the schedule, she said, but during the quieter times, labor, utilities, and operational expenses were still needed.

She also said the planned retail corridor around the Central Park location—once anticipated to drive visibility—remains vacant and the surrounding apartments have been slower to fill than projected.

She said she knew if she didn’t take a pause to recalibrate, she might have ended up closing for good. So, she made some “tough operational choices,” including eliminating salaried staff positions. “I wanted to create really stable jobs for great people in this industry,” she said. “I was holding on to that up until I couldn’t hold on to it any longer.”

She did a gut check and decided she had to be OK with a pause and to make sure she had enough resources to move forward.

With a new plan in place, Holland said she wants to stay at the Central Park location. “I’m putting absolutely every bit of effort into doing that. I know it’s a very anxious economy, and having to close was the most devastating professional thing I’ve ever had to do.”

In an update this week Holland said she’ll be able to open more fully in January. https://upswellstudio.com/