As yoga expands its mass appeal in the US, the market for everything yoga is expanding faster than we can exhale.
There is no record of Patanjali prescribing the use of ‘moisture-wicking four-way stretch’ tank tops or ‘non-slip latex-free’ mats for the practice of yogasanas. Yet, as yoga expands its mass appeal in the United States of America, the market for everything yoga is expanding rapidly.
Over the last decade, yoga has become commonplace enough. The annual Mind over Madness yoga festival celebrated its eighth anniversary on June 21, with hundreds of attendees descending on New York’s Times Square to practice yoga. A day later, around 10,000 yoga enthusiasts, including celebrities such as fashion designer Donna Karan, showed up at Manhattan’s Central Park for what was billed as the world record for the largest yoga class. Both events attracted high-profile corporate sponsors.
Critical mass
The glossy Yoga Journal, published from California, has chronicled the growth of yoga in the US for the past 35 years. Since 2000, the magazine, which brings out nine regular and two special issues a year, has tripled its circulation to 350,000 copies. Its 2008 ‘Yoga in America’ survey showed that nearly 16 million Americans practice yoga regularly, up from 13 million in 2004, and as many as 108 million have at least some interest in yoga. Yoga is a $5.7 billion market in the US, with a practitioner spending on average about $360 on yoga every year.
The expansion kicked in at the turn of this century, notes Bill Harper, V P Group Publisher, Yoga Journal. “People are becoming more conscious about ecology and the environment, what they put on and into their bodies, and yoga had a lot of information in that regard,” says Harper. Entrepreneurs have taken note, and yoga has spawned businesses ranging from apparel and yoga mats to studios and even software.
Studio hits
On a weekday afternoon in Manhattan’s trendy SoHo district, members filed in and out of a YogaWorks studio. Actress Jessica Biel wasn’t among them, but she has been known to drop by, and Hollywood star Robert Downey, Jr, has been spotted at their Los Angeles location.
Each member would typically pay between $90 and $130 a month, supporting a business model devised to move away from the more common system of drop-in classes for $15-20 each or packages of five to 10 classes. “It was tough to predict the revenue stream in a package program,” explains Phil Swain, president of YogaWorks, which claims to be the largest company-owned and operated yoga chain in the country. The original YogaWorks studio in Santa Monica, California was bought by an entrepreneur duo in 2002, and since then their company has attracted venture funding to build a network of two dozen studios in New York and California with more in the pipeline. This year YogaWorks expects to earn “north of $30 million” in revenues, a three-fold jump in the past five years.
Yoga studios are a $1.7 billion industry, but for now they are hugely outnumbered in the US health and fitness industry by health clubs and gyms. Swain, who came to YogaWorks from the health club industry, believes yoga scores over gyms by offering personalised attention from teachers as well as community feeling. He points out that while a gym workout is typically an individual routine and a personal trainer involves an extra fee, yoga is usually performed in a class with an instructor.
While the yoga market in the US is still dominated by individual studios or smaller, local chains, the fitness industry seems poised to move in. Equinox, one of the leading fitness club brands, has partnered with Pure Yoga to open locations in New York.
With yoga studios proliferating across the US in recent years, Rick Stollmeyer sensed a business opportunity in servicing the studios. He set up MindBody Software 10 years ago, to help yoga studios manage their staff and payroll. There are an estimated 6,500 yoga studios in the US, and MindBody counts a third of them as its clients.
The $10 million company based in San Luis Obispo, California, was recently named one of the 100 most innovative technology companies in North America by global media company Red Herring, and is on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing companies in the US. According to Meg McCall, director of marketing at MindBody Software, demand for her company’s services is increasingly coming from consumers. In order to reach out directly to them, MindBody developed a yoga app for iPhones a year ago, and recently put together a comprehensive database of yoga studios to help users search for and schedule classes online.
Dressing the part
When Americans go to a yoga class, it seems they like to dress for the occasion, buying over a billion dollars’ worth of yoga apparel every year. The leader in this segment, a Canadian company called Lululemon Athletica, which sponsors free yoga classes twice a week during the summer at Bryant Park, New York, has a market capitalisation of nearly $2 billion.
Yoga Journal’s Harper has noticed the sharp spike in the number of yoga apparel advertisers in his magazine in recent years.
But it’s not just about trying to look good in class, the practice of yoga needs specialised clothing, insists Jamie Hanna, founder and CEO of Zobha, a two-year-old start-up based in Mill Valley, California offering yoga and other fitness apparel. A business graduate from Harvard and a trained yoga teacher herself, Hanna points out that many asanas involve bending, stretching, twisting and being upside down. “You don’t want to be worrying about your top being too revealing or your underwear showing through if you’re sweating,” she says. And given that 80 per cent of Americans practicing yoga are women in the 25-54 age group, these concerns are especially relevant. Zobha’s Hanna sees this statistic as a plus for her business: “Women shop a lot more than men.” No wonder, many of these companies offer yoga clothing only for women.
That’s why brands such as Zobha or Lululemon Athletica make so much of the fabrics used in their clothes — the former touts its “a unique preshrunk blend of Supplex and Lycra” that provides “unsurpassed moisture-wicking, quick dry, breathability and shape retention”, while Lululemon touts its Luxtreme and Luon, as well as features like gussets in shorts and pants to prevent them from riding up, and removable cups in tanks and bras for additional coverage and support. For such attributes, customers are willing to pay top dollar — Zobha’s yoga tops typically retail for $56-58 and bottoms for $64-80. Most of Lululemon’s yoga pants cost $98.
Yoga apparel has now become popular outdoor wear, so much so that regular clothing brands are angling for a share of the market. Mass-market brands like Gap and Old Navy offer yoga lines; in the more upmarket segment, J Crew recently introduced yoga clothes; even an urban brand like American Apparel has yoga apparel. Hollywood stars are regularly photographed in yoga clothes; Hanna says Renee Zellweger and Halle Berry have requested Zobha products.
On the mat
Then there’s the $860 million market for yoga props and equipment. Ten years ago, Peter Sterios, an architect-turned-yogi in California, noticed that yoga mats in use at the time were merely sheets cut off from PVC rolls. They would often not stay in place, bunch up mid-asana and deteriorate quickly. Sterios sent around a yoga mat with a firm grip and support to his yoga teacher friends, and with the positive feedback, Manduka was born. Today the El Segundo, California-based company is the market leader, and offers a range of yoga mats to satisfy varied requirements, from durability to eco-friendliness and portability. Manduka currently earns under $20 million in revenues annually, but business has been doubling year-on-year for the past five years.
Yoga mat manufacturers focus on design and technology as much as the apparel companies. Manduka’s CEO Sky Meltzer says their top-of-the-line product, the BlackMat Pro, is engineered in Germany for durability and the protection of joints; it retails for $100. Like Manduka, other well-known brands like Gaiam, which was a sponsor of the Central Park world record yoga class, also offer mats in eco-friendly and biodegradable materials.
Many of the segments making up the US yoga market have been growing steadily, even through the economic turmoil since 2008. Asked about the impact of the ongoing slump on Yoga Journal, Harper replied “Absolutely nothing.” Sales of apparel, equipment and yoga DVDs at YogaWorks studios have taken a 25-30 per cent hit in the past couple of years, according to Swain, but demand for classes has held firm. Manduka’s Meltzer calls the yoga market “countercyclical to the economy”.
At a time when the markets are down and jobs are fewer, Americans have more time on their hands to invest in their health and see yoga as a panacea for stress and worry. If there’s any irony in seeking escape from stress and materialism with $100 mats and $80 pants, it has escaped the American yoga market.
| MADE IN INDIA
Americans’ fascination with yoga goes back to the early 20th century, but it was only in the 1950s and 1960s that yoga started to become really popular in the US. Among the first Indian yoga gurus in the US was Swami Vishnu Devananda. Starting 1957, he travelled all through North America, setting up Sivananda Vendanta Yoga Centres. Indira Devi, born Russian but who learnt yoga in India from the legendary T Krishnamacharya, is another important figure in the dissemination of yoga in the US. Her Yoga for Americans was published in 1948 and she also set up a yoga studio in Hollywood where she taught celebrities including Gloria Swanson and Olivia de Havilland. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s spiritual mentoring of the Beatles is well known, but it was Swami Satchidananda who had a greater effect on the American psyche when he opened the 1969 Woodstock music festival in New York. Yehudi Menuhin’s championship of B K S Iyengar got him a ready audience in the US. |
K Pattabhi Jois was another hugely popular yoga guru, with celebrities such as Madonna, Sting and Gwyneth Paltrow among students of his Ashtanga Yoga. Among the current lot of gurus, Bikram Choudhury is very popular for his ‘hot yoga’ — a variation conducted in a heated, humid room. ‘Kathak yoga’, developed by San Fracisco-based dancer Chitresh Das, is the other variation that is now on offer.
- Gargi Gupta
