GLAMOUR/Samantha Leach: The 75-Year-Old Behind Jazzercise Keeps Dancing on Her Own

GLAMOUR

Doing The Work

The 75-Year-Old Behind Jazzercise Keeps Dancing on Her Own

Judi Sheppard Missett started the dance program in a small classroom outside Chicago in 1969. Fifty years later, there are 8,500 studios.

By Samantha Leach
June 21, 2019

Judi Sheppard Missett instructing a Jazzercise class in front of a large crowd
Jazzercise, Inc.

Like a lot of people, Judi Sheppard Missett loves a little at-home dance fest. The septuagenarian queues up some Taylor Swift or Shawn Mendes music and lets loose. Unlike most people, Missett doesn't just revel in her private dance parties. She built a career off them. She is the founder of Jazzercise, and her personal studio is spectacular. All wooden floors and large mirrors and good vibes. "It's the place that I guess I could say I feel free," Missett tells Glamour. "I turn on the music, and then I give myself a class, and I just dance. That's when I feel liberated, powerful, strong, and it motivates me to keep going. I come out feeling great and all sweaty, then I go upstairs, take a shower, and I'm off running."

Missett was born pigeon-toed, with her feet and ankles turned inward. When her mother asked the doctor for a method to correct her stance, he suggested she go to dance class. She took her first lesson at age three and has spent her life on the dance floor ever since. After she graduated from Northwestern University, she danced with a professional troupe and taught jazz classes out of their studio in suburban Chicago. While she loved it, her clients didn't seem to feel the same. Her retention rate was low, which stung. When she asked people why they weren't returning to her class, she got a life-changing piece of advice. "You're teaching like we're going to go on to become professional dancers, but really we just want to look like professional dancers," she recalls them saying. So she decided to try something different. She turned everyone away from the mirror, simplified the routines, used new music, and gave her clients positive encouragement. It was 1969, and Jazzercise was born.

Judi Sheppard Missett teaching one of her signature Jazzercise classes
Jazzeercise, Inc.

Two years later Missett and her husband, Jack, decided to relocate their family to San Diego. In the land of exercise and health-consciousness, Jazzercise was a massive hit. It was the height of second-wave feminism, and classes became a gathering space for women to wear leggings, sweat, meet new friends, and gain confidence. (A proto SoulCycle, Jazzercise inspired countless women to pursue higher education or even leave their husbands.) At first Missett ran the program on her own and, for a period of time, led 35 classes a week. "Today I know that one must learn how to say no, but I didn't really know that back then. I was young and it was fun for me," Missett says. "[My daughter] was about four or five at that point, and I would put her in my little yellow Honda and bring babysitting toys, because I knew that people need childcare to come to class. My sister-in-law would come with me and be the babysitter, and she'd find an empty room wherever we happened to be and she would play with the kids while I'd go and teach class."
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Teaching several dozen classes each week was grueling. At this point there weren't microphones for workout classes, so Missett would have to scream over the music, all while keeping the beat. The punishing routine took its toll. "I lost my voice," she recounts. "The doctor saidm 'You have nodules on your vocal cords, and you have to do something different or you'll probably lose your voice [permanently].'" Missett enlisted instructors to take over some of her classes, cutting back to 12 or so a week. (Now Jazzercise recommends instructors teach three or four classes per week.)

"The philosophy of Jazzercise is that it should be a place where people go and not feel judged or feel competitive," says Missett.
Jazzeercise, Inc.
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As the program continued to grow, Missett decided to seek a new line of credit at a bank. She didn't really need it—the business was booming. But she thought it would be smart to have, just in case. Their local bank referred the couple to its main location in Los Angeles. In L.A., she says, "We laid out our story, facts, and figures, and [the banker] looked at us and said, 'Well, I just don't think this would be a good investment for us. Yes, you're growing quickly, but that's going to be a fad. It's great that you're having fun and dancing around, but I just don't see it as something that will grow.' I said to my friend, 'He thinks of me as the little exercise girl, [without] any respect for the knowledge we have to do this and the lives we're transforming.' [Ultimately] we never, ever had to get a loan. That bank went out of business maybe five or six years later, and we're still thriving."

Missett credits her rapid, pre-social-media expansion to army wives and military women. San Diego was and is a military town, and a lot of her first clients were only temporarily deployed in the area. When those women would get transferred to other parts of the country, they'd want to bring Jazzercise with them. "I think the first military wife moved to Texas, and started a whole revelation in the state," Missett says. "Video recorders had also come out on the market, and that made it easier to learn the choreography because they could do it through videotape. That really helped us grow on a national level."

By 1982 there were more than 1,000 certified instructors teaching Jazzercise in almost all 50 states, plus some other countries. Missett's lawyers advised her that it was time to franchise the company, a decision she was at first unsure of but now counts as one of her best bets. Financially, it paid off fast. For a time Jazzercise was the number-two most profitable franchise in the nation, right behind Domino's Pizza. But the model also elped other women like Missett build their own businesses—women, Massett says, "who never thought they would do that, but discovered they had a talent for it." According to Missett, in 1983 a successful Jazzercise franchise could sustain for its owner a net annual income of $75,000, the equivalent of $187,496 in 2019.

"The music is the thing that’s inspiring. I recently did a beautiful song by India.Arie, and I let my body go and I just had a routine by the end of the song," Missett says.
Jazzercise, Inc.

Jazzercise is now in its fifth decade and helped give rise to the boutique fitness revolution, one of the fastest-growing segments of the exercise industry today. There are 8,500 Jazzercise franchises, across 25 countries. Together they hold approximately 32,000 classes per week, worldwide. Their global cumulative sales top $2 billion, according to the company. And their C-suite is made up of all women. Missett's daughter, Shanna—who grew up in the studio with her mother—is its president. Yet Missett is as involved as ever. She still teaches three classes a week, and still shapes the moves. But as dances have changed to incorporate more hip-hop, techno, and modern influences, how does Missett keep up? "I have two granddaughters who dance, and they're really good dancers. I get a lot of ideas from watching them, and I go to their competitions, so that's very inspiring. I also watch a lot of videos, not that I steal movements, but it [helps me] see what's going on now," she says. Recent songs she's used to choreograph routines include "We Need Love" by John Legend and "Steady Love" by India.Arie.

"I saw friendships growing and people getting together after class to go to coffee," Missett says. "I thought it was awesome, because as women we need to share our stories and to know there’s somebody there for you."
Jazzeercise, Inc.
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Missett, the Jazzercise matriarch, has hired three generations of women to work for her. In addition to her daughter's role, her nieces have also joined the team. Her sister-in-law, who started off as the childcare volunteer, has retired, but Missett has a succession plan. "We were in Japan for their 30th anniversary of Jazzercise," she says, "and we put on a children's class for about 1,000 kids, and my granddaughters were going to teach part of it. They were just about to go out on the stage, and my husband said to them, 'Girls, are you nervous?' And they said, 'Oh no, Papa. We're not nervous. This is what we do.'"

Samantha Leach is an assistant editor at Glamour. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @_sleach.
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