There’s a good reason the logo for Bünda Fitness resembles a bikinied butt, but the company is about so much more.
It’s been seven years since husband and wife trainers Kevin and Katie Lilly founded Bünda, their science-backed group fitness program, the first of its kind merging StairMaster workouts with strength training. In that time, the company has grown from initial locations in their hometown of Los Angeles to studios across Florida, Texas and Illinois, with nine more on the horizon.
The lower body-focused training that Bünda offers has gained popularity with celebrities like Mindy Kaling, Addison Rae, Noah Beck, Olivia Culpo, Jada Pinkett-Smith — and the list goes on. As for what led them first to the unique concept, “It was the greatest light bulb that ever went off in my head,” Kevin tells PEOPLE during an exclusive interview.
The licensed trainer says he had a bit of a “eureka moment” years ago when he realized that the letter B resembles a butt, as depicted in the company’s cheeky logo design. But that long came after the couple’s love story and Bünda journey had begun.
In 2007, Kevin got his first job out of college at a gym in Philadelphia. As his boss was giving him a tour of the facility, he spotted a young woman on the StairMaster. “I was intrigued by this girl that was standing tall, walking on the StairMaster hat down low with AirPods in, saying, ‘Don’t talk to me,’” he says of the woman, who turned out to be Katie.
He asked his boss who she was and was told to stand down as Katie, in fact, had a boyfriend. Then he recalls his boss asking him, “’Am I going to have to worry about you?’ I said, ‘Sir, you’re not going to have to worry about me. I’m going to marry that girl’.”
Over time, he and Katie became “very good gym friends,” says Kevin. “I decided to move to LA; three weeks later she called me and said, ‘My boyfriend and I broke up.’”
The two dated long-distance. In the meantime, while working at Crunch gym, Kevin became friends with a Brazilian couple. On Katie’s next visit to LA, he planned a joint workout to introduce her to his new friends. Little did he know the double date would spark the idea of a lifetime.
During the workout, while Katie was doing squats, the Brazilian girlfriend told Kevin that Katie, “has [a] great bünda’. It means the perfect ass,” explains of the Brazilian Portuguese slang word. “That’s the single greatest name I’d ever heard for a gym in my life.”
They packed the idea away, Katie moved west and the two got engaged while pursuing fitness careers. But while taking business classes at UCLA, Katie had a gut instinct that the group fitness industry was “about to explode.” She identified an area that most popular gyms weren’t addressing: lower-body strength in a group setting. Enter Bünda.
Katie left her job to pursue building their Bünda business full-time while Kevin continued working with an impressive list of celebrity clients he’d amassed at his own gym. Soon they were able to convince a commercial real estate landlord “that we were the next big thing in fitness. I used every dollar I had ever made to build this space and bet on it,” Kevin says of the passion and sacrifice it took to move his wife’s dream forward.
Before taking the leap, “I said to Katie, ‘Look, we can either buy a condo or we can do Bünda.’ And she was like, ‘I want Bünda’,’’ he says of their talk before opening the first location. “I knew she was in, but that to me was so like,‘Oh, she’s ready.’” Adds Katie, “I felt like there was a need to fill the gap [in group fitness] with proper programming.”
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Bünda was born in April 2018, and Katie’s initial instinct was proven correct as the company has grown to 14 studios with over 2,000 students nationwide.
“I meet new instructors or new employees, and it’s just like, ‘Oh, cool. Katie’s vision and dream was big enough to where people are now buying in, and not just because we’re telling them, but because they’re seeing and feeling the actual results,’” Kevin says.
The program emphasizes lower body training, but to be clear, “It’s not a butt studio,” says Katie, while acknowledging the brand and logo her physique helped inspire. “We’re much more than that. It’s just a catchy name that really emphasizes lower body training.”
The program focuses on the lower body four days a week. “But each day is drastically different,” Kevin says. As for the upper body, “it’s just as important,” adds Katie. “However, results are more easily spotted in the lower body where body fat is dropped, lean muscle is gained and toning happens.”
As the couple prepares to welcome their second child, they’re relishing the fact that betting on themselves and, well, putting their butts on the line, was the right thing to do — not only for their family, but for millions in their growing Bünda community.
“Katie and I just happen to follow our passions in life, and we know what we’re doing is helping people,” says Kevin. Outside of physical transformations, “I think that there’s something to be said about mental health and being a part of a community. Sometimes it just feels good to throw somebody, a stranger, some knuckles at the gym. Anybody that we can help, we’re in.”
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