June 3, 2019

 

Liz Kinnmark owns an unusual business, is moving it to an unusual location and is using an unusual way, Kickstarter, to raise $25,000 to equip it.

 

The Chicago native is a certified instructor for yoga, flexibility training, Pilates, and aerial hoop. But her specialty is pole fitness and dancing. That’s an upper-body workout that has migrated from strip clubs to clothes-wearing exercisers and dancers in mainstream fitness clubs and dance studios.

 

Doing business as Bendy Beast Fitness, Kinnmark has been teaching yoga at gyms around Memphis, using her own high-ceiling condo Downtown for lessons and teaching pole workouts and dance at some of the relatively few studios offering it. One of the few Memphis-area pole studios closed in October, motivating Kinnmark to establish one of her own.