We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Gabriela Nassar. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Gabriela below.
Gabriela, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Hipline Dance and Fitness studio was founded on the need for a community movement space that offered women (fast forward we now serve non-binary, trans and gender-expansive bodies) something more than just a dance floor and typical boutique studio experience. It’s a brave space, a place for freedom and belonging. Movement is our medium because we believe that creativity, self-expression, and well-being begin with our bodies. Our classes welcome any dance/fitness level. Our choreographers come from various dance, movement, and fitness backgrounds, leading with their unique styles, spirits, techniques, and playlists. We are a community of women and marginalized genders, backgrounds, races, and abilities —our classes and programs center on non-judgment, empathy, and joy.
Hipline was born from the desire to connect, learn, and grow; in addition to our classes, we offer various programs and community events available to Hipliners focused on self-acceptance, pleasure, and social justice. We’re committed to honoring, respecting, and being aware of everyone’s autonomy and differences. Through co-creating this brave space, Hipline is where you can lose your breath, catch your breath, embody your power, witness your capabilities, and let yourself run free. Please note we have zero tolerance for disrespecting boundaries.
We are celebrating 16 years this September. Sometimes it feels like we opened just yesterday. Every day there are obstacles to understand, a new client interaction that calls us in to deepen our diversity and inclusive practices, or a fail that we pull through being better for it on the other side. We’ve overcome alot! including COVID, but also nuanced obstacles, like being a BIPOC women owned space with an approach of constantly challenging and disrupting the status quo. I think this can often put off people because many fitness spaces have been designed to make experiences really comfortable for a majority of white cis women (there’s alot of research and article on this to learn more :). And if you’re a business in Oakland, CA you just can’t approach your community with that mindset.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I co-founded Hipline with my sister in 2008, and I’ve been running it on my own since 2021.
Born in the Bay to Lebanese and Peruvian immigrants, I wanted to create a space that provided a sense of belonging for people like me, a bi-racial, white-passing, cis-woman, and people who were nothing like me.
I had no “formal” dance training. I had a background in biology and Holistic Health, and I worked in food science. But dance had always been present in my life. From rocking out at home to Arabic music, Spanish music, Edith Piaf, or The Rolling Stones, to the many nights spent dancing in cages at the Sound Factory in SF or Oakland’s very own Home Base, the dance floor was always a happy place. Even when it wasn’t. It’s where folks could gather and release joy, anger, pain…Where barriers were broken down, albeit temporarily.
I wanted to create a space where you could access that feeling anytime.
And so, Hipline was born (it started off as a belly dancing school, but that’s another story).
I started off working my corporate job (food science) while building Hipline. Both were doable at the young age of 30. I’m 46 now. It was always my hope to step away from the corporate world as there were many aspects of that hustle that no longer aligned with my needs and values. In 2011 I was able to move full time into Hipline and continue to build it from there and expand our company’s purpose to include more bodies and more diversity.
What I want people to feel when they interact with our brand is to see themself in our business. I actually want people to feel a sense of agency stewarding this space with us. I want to do away with the hierarchy of business to customer thinking and everyone participates equitably in this. I’ll pay the bills so long as you show up and further our mission! Which is by the way Shimmy. Connect. Love. When you walk out our doors I want you to know that you already have it within you to spark joy in your day and power your purpose. I’m not selling classes to help you attain unhealthy burn calories, get ready for that summer body vibe. I’m creating a space for our bodies to come into proximity, feel our own potential and love ourselves and others.
Any advice for managing a team?
Advice I have is exploring your leadership style and moving towards partner-centered work across all the relationships you have as a leader in your organization/business from stakeholder colleagues to the hard working people that service your business when you’re closed. This was the one shift I made that had exponential positive effects. I would describe my leadership skills in my early days as steeped in patriarchal style of leadership. A style of leadership that’s rooted in traditional gender roles, hierarchical power dynamics, and societal norms. The focus was on power, expansion and making decisions for people as opposed to partner-centered relations, quality over quantity and making decisions with others. how I got there was over the course of three years. I heavily entrenched myself in books focusing on liberation struggles and making the connections all the way back to how we all interact as a community. I was seeing alot of need for growth and maturity from myself, the staff and the clients community. You wouldn’t believe the amount of knowledge you get from reading books like Freedom is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis and Raising Free People by Akliah Richards that you can apply to managing a team and maintaining high morale!
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Everyday is an opportunity to build resilience! I can’t say there is one moment that instilled this process in me. It definitely was handed down to me, witnessing my parents who immigrated here in the early 70’s and built a successful beautiful life here from nothing. Everyday being a BIPOC woman you face adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. “Bouncing back” is the only option to survive and I found profound personal growth from it all.
It’s like building a muscle, increasing your resilience takes time and intentionality. Bearing witness to resilience is also contagious. I know a lot of brave people in my life personally and in my Hipline community that have lived through adversity. I slow down intentionally to hear people’s stories and connect their experiences to my world so that I can move through my life with them in mind and with more meaning. I prioritize building authentic relationships and foster caring for myself and others. Resilience is the present and the future in one, which is why it can feel daunting and hard.
Running a small business is challenging at the best of times. I’ve experienced cash flow issues, personal debt from bankrolling their business, and the stress of carrying all the risk and working long hours with sometimes little reward. And at the same time small businesses are also innovative, more agile and more creative than large corporations and adding to the heart and soul of neighborhoods and so resilience is baked into my blood. It’s a muscle that I’ve been working on for 16 years!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.myhipline.com
- Instagram: @hiplineoakland
- Yelp: Running a small business is challenging at the best of times. Owners often experience cashflow issues, personal debt from bankrolling their business, and the stress of carrying all the risk and working long hours with sometimes little reward.
Image Credits
Rainbow Road Studios