LITTLE ROCK — Four friends who work at Acxiom in Little Rock have collaborated after hours to create HotFlash Workouts, a DVD series aimed at women of a certain age.
Make that a planned series.
Only the first DVD, Core, is available (for $15.99) through their website, hotflashworkouts.com.
But they’ve already shot footage for three more DVDs, and their producer/videographer/ editor Becky Dockins says those will go on sale as soon as she’s able to polish and render the digital video - which she’s beavering away at after work and on weekends.
They hired Bison Disc, a CD- and DVD-duplicating business in Florida, to burn just 500 copies of Core for their first run, which includes their own professionally designed cardboard-sleeve packaging (because their designer, Maria Walker, is a professional).
“We have to have moderate aspirations because we all really like our day jobs, too, and this is a hobby for us,” says Kris Mougeot, the veteran group-exercise instructor who “stars” on the DVDs. “But we feel it is a good hobby and it will go someplace.”
They’re confident that they understand their target market: women who want a serious, potentially very intense at-home workout, but whose - ahem! - aging joints are, well, aging.
That “certain age” wink wink wink begins at 35, but doesn’t end there.
“Because that’s where we are,”says Nancy Griebel, 50. A senior marketing manager at Acxiom, Griebel is HotFlash’s “GMO” or Guerrilla Marketing Officer.
“Nancy’s almost 51,” says “Chief Exercise Officer” Mougeot, helpfully. She’s already 51.
Dockins, “The Producer,” is 46. And art director Walker is 43.
“Maria’s a baby,” the women say, in near unison, because Walker has a 2-year-old at home.
“We’re like normal people,” says Mougeot, who wears long pants and does not display decolletage on the DVD. “And we feel that our product is for normal people. That’s one of the things that we’re trying to convey. Weall work for a living too. We don’t get to spend eight hours in a gym trying to achieve washboard abs.”
No, but Mougeot has spent a lifetime building and enjoying physical fitness - conditioning more than evident in the serene alto with which she delivers nonstop vocal cues as she and her stepdaughter do crunches and planks and roll back and forth between V-sits and midair “jacks” for the three 20-minute Core workouts, which she devised.
She has been a certified exercise instructor since 1984 in Little Rock (she leads large early morning classes at Little Rock Athletic Club). She also made news in the past decade as an adventure racer whose expeditionary exploits with Team Traveler included winning two U.S. Adventure Racing Association national championships and completing, in 2002, the 620-mile Raid Gauloises through swamps and jungles in Vietnam.
Although she shows absolutely no sign of having sustained any sort of injury, ever, she gave up adventure racing about six years ago after breaking her neck in a mountain biking accident.
Although it sounds traumatic, the surgery (opening the front of her neck, moving her vocal cords aside, installing donor bones and then, she jokes, “they shove a jackhammer in there”) clearly succeeded.
Mougeot also ponied up about $500 for the first imprint of Core.
“I took my earnings from my last year of teaching fitness classes and just tossed it in,” she says, “and that’s what we used as our seed money. Our intent is to pay that back, and then we go from there.”
Her title at Acxiom is innovation executive. And that means?
“I get to work on groundbreaking, transformational stuff for Acxiom,” she says. Turns out, groundbreaking is a sedentary job.
The other founders of Hot-Flash Enterprises LLC also have sedentary jobs.
Besides managing marketing for an international marketing company with 6,500 employees, Griebel has already launched one shoestring start up: She was Betty in Otis and Betty Snack Mix.
“For that we made a $500 budget, and it was in 48 states, that includes packaging and product, in three months,” she says.
“It’s delicious,” Dockins explains. She’s an events manager for Acxiom.
“It’s a very different product from this,” Griebel says. “It’s 1,400 calories in 8 ounces.”
The Core DVD, in contrast, weighs 1.1 ounces, thanks to compact cardboard packaging Walker selected from options that ranged from simpler cardboard sleeves to less environmentally friendly jewel cases and plastic “digipaks.”
Walker is an art director for Acxiom.
“You take the four of us, and we’ve been friends for a long time, but we sort of fell together in terms of a number of skill sets that come together to create a business,” Mougeot says. “We have people that deal with events and marketing, and especially marketing on limited budgets. And we have somebody who’s done a ton of production but never with three cameras and three different voices and all of this stuff going on. And then we have someone who has done beautiful creative but never in this type of venue.
“And I’ve taught probably 10 million fitness classes but never for a camera and never for an audience where the camera is your audience, versus having live people.’”
“That was a hard one to get over,” Dockins says. “I was like, ‘Kris! See the camera?”
“You don’t have that feedback that’s so evident when you have a big class of people,” Mougeot explains.
“So the four of us took those skill sets, and everyone had to just broaden a little bit. So even though it looks simple to put a fitness class on a DVD, it’s not. And it was surprising, some of it.”
SETBACKS
The project began with a New Year’s resolution several years ago.
“I was a New Year’s person,” Dockins says, “and we talked to Kris and she said, ‘OK, I’ll be your personal trainer and we can go for free.’ So we’d meet [in the company fitness room] every Tuesday and Friday at 11 o’clock and Kris would go through a class with us.
“And then, you know, some people couldn’t come. I completely fell out. So we decided, ‘Why don’t we put it on a DVD? Oh yeah, that’s a great idea.’ And we didn’t do it and didn’t do it. ...
“It was about this time last year that we decided, ‘If we’re going to do this, let’s do it.’”
They formed their company Jan. 15.
Griebel says, “It’s funny because we practiced and we thought, ‘Oh yes, we can handle this.’ And once we got into it, it took a little longer than we expected.”
First they practiced at Walker’s house, where Mougeot realized if she made her friends demo the workouts for multiple takes, she wouldn’t have friends anymore.
“We advanced from Maria’s basement,” she says, “Acxiom kindly let us have use of what we call the multimedia megaplex here, which is where we do corporate videos. It turned out to be a little small. Either that or I had to get really short - ”
“That wasn’t going to happen,” Griebel interjects.
“ - The venue was a little small for a video with movement,” Mougeot continues. “Then we happened upon the room over in the River Market building on the top floor,” the Margaret and Bill Clark Room.
Using three (borrowed) Canon digital cameras, they rented the room for a day in “June or July” (they don’t recall) and began learning it’s not easy to handle sound, three cameras, lighting ....
“We had a lot to learn: venue issues, music issues, getting close to the end of a segment and then the trolley goes by,” Mougeot says. Each of the planned 20-minute workout segments had to be shot as a continuous event,without pauses, and outdoor noise ruined several takes.
“There were just things that happened,” Mougeot says.
They rented the room again and did a second daylong shoot, for which Mougeot and her stepdaughter, Jessica Mougeot (also a certified exercise instructor), demonstrated four sets of three 20-minute workouts for the planned series of four DVDs all day, beginning about 6:45 a.m.
And what did they eat after all that exercise?
“Everything,” Mougeot says.
Then Dockins had to learn to make Adobe Premier software edit three camera angles and multiple sound tracks (Griebel’s ex-husband, Andy Griebel, created the music). Dockins put “40 to 60 hours” into the first DVD; the rendering process alone took “hours and hours and hours and hours.”
“She’d never done that before, and so she just sat down and figured it out,” Mougeot says. “And we had to build a website. We’d never done that before.”
Then Dockins began editing the next DVD, titled Supersculpt.
“Supersculpt goes back and forth between upper and lower body so you do a lot of intensity with, say, legs and then you give your legs a rest and do a lot of intensity with arms,” Mougeot says. “You just go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.”
“And then we have the Cardio Kickboxing DVD that will come out, and then what is called The Mix, which is just a charming combination of exercises and a little stretch.”
Their intent is to package the four discs so users can mix and match from any of them to create varied workouts.
“We’re trying to give people as many options as they can possibly have for not too much money,” Mougeot says, “because we know life is expensive, and we want to enable everybody.”
They held a launch party for Core with friends and family Nov. 15 and sold 50 copies. The website has begun taking orders, including two from overseas.
Griebel: “Yes, we’re international at this point.”
Mougeot: “One in Costa Rica and one in London.”
And these are people the women know?
Griebel, laughing: “Of course they are.”
ActiveStyle, Pages 25 on 12/10/2012