Owning a Yoga Studio 101: Engaging Events

With more than 20.4 million people who practice yoga in the United States, there are plenty of studios to accommodate. In 2013, it seems like a yoga studio can be found on every other block. And running a business is hard enough, but running a business in a competitive industry is even harder.

Staying competitive in the yoga studio industry requires a multitude of factors, including: location of studio, competitive pricing, quality of classes and teachers, a clean studio etc. Many studios meet these standards, but can still sometimes struggle to be noticed among the sea of studios in its town.  A solution? Engaging events.

Set yourself apart from other studios. Design fun and interactive yoga classes that are unique to your studio and create a brand for yourself.

Some easy steps to get you started:

Brainstorm!: The yoga community is inclusive, welcoming and sharing. Get together with your staff, talk to your students after class and ask what classes they would like to see from your studio. Get creative and flex your brain muscles.

Research: Check out what the other studios in your area doing. You might have a great idea, but if a studio nearby is already doing it, it most likely won’t take off as well as you had hoped.

Think outside the studio: A lot of towns have a “yoga in the park” program put on by a local studio. If your town doesn’t, implementing a program is a great way to become a leader in your yoga community. If so, look to other areas in your town that have yoga potential (see Red Rocks example below).

To get the ideas flowing, here are some awesome examples of engaging events:

At Tula Yoga Studio in Logan Square, Chicago (our founder’s wife’s studio, shameless plug) you can rave-on on certain Friday nights by taking a GLOWGA class. Students practice under the glow of black lights while listening to trance music and are encouraged to wear white or neon clothing to help them radiate. The studio also provides black light body paint and bracelets for added fun.

At the Your Body Center in Houston, take a Hot Vibes class that brings Happy Hour into the studio. The class is set to high-energy dance music and provides Jell-O shots, fresh fruit and Vitamin Water at the end.

Put on by CorePower Yoga, Yoga on the Rocks takes place a few Saturday mornings throughout the summer at Colorado’s natural amphitheater, Red Rocks. Students pick their favorite spot in the venue and downward dog among some of the most beautiful scenery in the country. The class is a $10 drop-in and $1 from every student goes to the Whole Planet Foundation.

Feeling inspired yet? Get out there, make your own event and be seen. 

On yoga and losing weight

My wife Maile on Tula Yoga Studio's Facebook page.

I am often asked, will yoga help me lose weight? The answer is maybe, but more importantly yoga helps you lose stress, self-doubt, weakness, fear and worry. Through yoga postures we create space where the stress and fear can release. We challenge ourselves and our physical body and find out that we are more capable, strong and perfect just the way we are than we ever imagined. 

Feature Release: Accept payments online with Tula!

I'm thrilled to announce we just released the most important new feature for Tula since we first introduced Payment Center. Starting today, all our customers can now sell their passes and accept payments on their own websites using Tula Software's new online store!

What's great about this new feature though isn't just that you can accept payments online - it's HOW you can accept payments online.

The 'usual' way companies enable this kind of feature is that they make your customers sign up for an account on their software platform. Then, once they have an account, they can purchase something from you. But we think that's the wrong way to do it.

That method adds friction for someone who just wants to buy something quickly by making them sign up for a software product just because their favorite yoga studio happens to use that software.

And on top of the desire not to require people to create user accounts with us, we also didn't want to take students away from our customers websites. These students are OUR CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMERS, not our customers.

So we took an approach that was far more difficult to engineer, but provides a much better experience for the students of our customers.

We now enable everyone that uses Tula to create an online payment form that they can embed on any website. This form is a direct connection to Tula Software, and is 128 bit SSL encrypted so it's secure. And even better, students only need to fill out their name, credit card info, and their zip code.

When someone fills out this form to make a purchase, on the back end we do a lookup on the name and email of the person that submitted the form and make a recommended 'match' suggestion inside Tula.

Once you match the payment, the credit card is processed and credits are assigned.

The result is that your students can buy something directly from you, without having to create an account with us.

And of course, when they do, we'll send you an email and text notification.

We think you'll love this new feature, and as with everything we build, Maile uses it for her own studio. Want to see the payment form in action on a real website? Check out Tula Yoga Studio's payment page right  here.

Oh, and if you don't use the best software ever created in the history of the world for independent yoga studios, you can check us out at www.tulasoftware.com