Carolina Vivas and Amanda McCarroll, two 35-year-old San Diego fitness instructors, have launched the Netflix of yoga. It’s called yourBuddhi, a name with ready-made branding because buddhi also means intellect or knowledge in Sanskrit.
Yoga is an ancient practice, and Vivas and McCarroll aim to take it mobile. You can play their clever videos on your computer, stream them through your flat screen, or prop up a tablet anywhere on Earth and follow along as either instructor steps you through flowing Vinyasa poses from a rock above Windansea Beach in La Jolla, with only the surf interrupting your personalized, paid-for session. Monthly membership is $14 for unlimited and ever-varying sessions, with shorter periods costing less. That’s the Netflix-like part. You can tap into beginner, intermediate or advanced sessions, or filter for pregnancy, de-stressing or weight loss.
The market for yoga products like clothing, mats and studio sessions was $5.8 billion in 2008, says
Inc.com, and nearly $11 billion last year, according to a 2012 survey conducted by Yoga Journal. About 20.4 million Americans practice yoga, up from 15.8 million five years ago. The high-end yoga retail chain Lululemon has a market cap of $9.2 billion, and its rise looks like the steep side of Mount Everest, from $2 per share in 2009 to $64.33 on Friday, despite recent troubles.
Americans seem to want what yoga gives them. They are stressed out, depressed and under-exercised. Countless studies show that the structured exercises calm people down, trim them up and actually make folks feel happier. It costs $20 a session at many San Diego studios. It can be difficult to find a studio in some parts of the United States, although there is no shortage in San Diego.
However, Yoga Journal reports that many men and women who feel less than comfortable at 6:30 in the morning prefer to exercise at home. So do moms and people with only 20 or 30 minutes to tone up and chill down.
Sounds like an obvious market for a scaled-up business, but none of the estimated 70,000 instructors in the nation have figured out how to do it exactly right until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Vivas, a Colombian-born financial analyst for Smith Barney in midtown Manhattan, spent three hellish days trapped in the city.
To de-stress big time, she increased her workouts with several famous yoga teachers, including Dharma Mittra and Bryan Kest. Her “aha moment” came, literally, in a moment of meditation. She had the financial skills to structure the enterprise, she realized, and she really didn’t want to spend more of her life trapped in New York. She had also majored in computer science in college.
The key was to create yoga for the rest of us, and put it online in a paying fashion.
Vivas and McCarroll met while teaching at different San Diego studios seven years ago. Both then moved to the La Jolla Yoga Center when it opened in 2010, the same year that Vivas and McCarroll launched their website, audio only, for $600. The response, says McCarroll, was so strong that they invested $15,000 of their own money and relaunched yourBuddhi in 2012 with video and interactive features. They still teach at the La Jolla center, though their site is already profitable.
“We started the website initially because we noticed everybody teaching yoga was preaching this whole extreme lifestyle,” explains McCarroll over a dry salad at the La Valencia. “You can’t do this. You can’t do that. And they used big words and an elaborate philosophy that turned many people off, especially …”
“Beginners,” Vivas finishes McCarroll’s thought, which they tend to do a lot together, “We wanted to be true to the philosophy behind yoga, but make it applicable to today …”
“Talking in a normal voice, so that a pregnant mom or traveling student can follow along,” finishes McCarroll, who is pregnant with her second child.
It doesn’t hurt that Vivas and McCarroll wear fetching fashions (a line of yourBuddhi clothing is in the works) and film in some of the more relaxing natural beauty spots in Southern California. This all travels well in Slovenia, China, Bahrain and the U.K., but most of their subscribers are American women.
Members choose yourBuddhi over the miscellany available on YouTube, believes McCarroll, because yourBuddhi offers “high-quality videos shot professionally, outside, on an easily navigable site that provides filters to cater to users’ needs. YouTube videos are usually under 10 minutes,” she adds, “while our videos are 20, 40 and 60 minutes long.”
To verify the authenticity of all this, I decide to take it live and sit in on McCarroll’s wake-up class at the La Jolla Yoga Center, an elegantly understated 6,000–square-foot neo-Zen palace with flat-screen TVs showing nature videos of ice melting in rivers and clear blue desert hot springs just pooling. I haven’t done yoga since never, I’m the only guy in the room, and so I start out feeling a little like Kevin James, the chubby comedian. But the directions are simple, the mood can-do. An hour later, I end up as limber as a puppy, or at least as frisky as an old dog, and I didn’t even fall over during tree pose (one-legged, other foot pressed against inner thigh). It felt as if I’d had a massage, but without the masseuse.
“You did just fine for a beginner,” McCarroll says in her reassuring video voice.
For the record, it was an intermediate class.
But I’m still checking out yourBuddhi on the Web next time. In case I fall.
Cy Bates, of the Jacobs School of Engineering, helped with research for this article. Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. He can be reached at intellectual capitalchapple@gmail.com
Yoga is an ancient practice, and Vivas and McCarroll aim to take it mobile. You can play their clever videos on your computer, stream them through your flat screen, or prop up a tablet anywhere on Earth and follow along as either instructor steps you through flowing Vinyasa poses from a rock above Windansea Beach in La Jolla, with only the surf interrupting your personalized, paid-for session. Monthly membership is $14 for unlimited and ever-varying sessions, with shorter periods costing less. That’s the Netflix-like part. You can tap into beginner, intermediate or advanced sessions, or filter for pregnancy, de-stressing or weight loss.
The market for yoga products like clothing, mats and studio sessions was $5.8 billion in 2008, says
Inc.com, and nearly $11 billion last year, according to a 2012 survey conducted by Yoga Journal. About 20.4 million Americans practice yoga, up from 15.8 million five years ago. The high-end yoga retail chain Lululemon has a market cap of $9.2 billion, and its rise looks like the steep side of Mount Everest, from $2 per share in 2009 to $64.33 on Friday, despite recent troubles.
Americans seem to want what yoga gives them. They are stressed out, depressed and under-exercised. Countless studies show that the structured exercises calm people down, trim them up and actually make folks feel happier. It costs $20 a session at many San Diego studios. It can be difficult to find a studio in some parts of the United States, although there is no shortage in San Diego.
However, Yoga Journal reports that many men and women who feel less than comfortable at 6:30 in the morning prefer to exercise at home. So do moms and people with only 20 or 30 minutes to tone up and chill down.
Sounds like an obvious market for a scaled-up business, but none of the estimated 70,000 instructors in the nation have figured out how to do it exactly right until the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Vivas, a Colombian-born financial analyst for Smith Barney in midtown Manhattan, spent three hellish days trapped in the city.
To de-stress big time, she increased her workouts with several famous yoga teachers, including Dharma Mittra and Bryan Kest. Her “aha moment” came, literally, in a moment of meditation. She had the financial skills to structure the enterprise, she realized, and she really didn’t want to spend more of her life trapped in New York. She had also majored in computer science in college.
The key was to create yoga for the rest of us, and put it online in a paying fashion.
Vivas and McCarroll met while teaching at different San Diego studios seven years ago. Both then moved to the La Jolla Yoga Center when it opened in 2010, the same year that Vivas and McCarroll launched their website, audio only, for $600. The response, says McCarroll, was so strong that they invested $15,000 of their own money and relaunched yourBuddhi in 2012 with video and interactive features. They still teach at the La Jolla center, though their site is already profitable.
“We started the website initially because we noticed everybody teaching yoga was preaching this whole extreme lifestyle,” explains McCarroll over a dry salad at the La Valencia. “You can’t do this. You can’t do that. And they used big words and an elaborate philosophy that turned many people off, especially …”
“Beginners,” Vivas finishes McCarroll’s thought, which they tend to do a lot together, “We wanted to be true to the philosophy behind yoga, but make it applicable to today …”
“Talking in a normal voice, so that a pregnant mom or traveling student can follow along,” finishes McCarroll, who is pregnant with her second child.
It doesn’t hurt that Vivas and McCarroll wear fetching fashions (a line of yourBuddhi clothing is in the works) and film in some of the more relaxing natural beauty spots in Southern California. This all travels well in Slovenia, China, Bahrain and the U.K., but most of their subscribers are American women.
Members choose yourBuddhi over the miscellany available on YouTube, believes McCarroll, because yourBuddhi offers “high-quality videos shot professionally, outside, on an easily navigable site that provides filters to cater to users’ needs. YouTube videos are usually under 10 minutes,” she adds, “while our videos are 20, 40 and 60 minutes long.”
To verify the authenticity of all this, I decide to take it live and sit in on McCarroll’s wake-up class at the La Jolla Yoga Center, an elegantly understated 6,000–square-foot neo-Zen palace with flat-screen TVs showing nature videos of ice melting in rivers and clear blue desert hot springs just pooling. I haven’t done yoga since never, I’m the only guy in the room, and so I start out feeling a little like Kevin James, the chubby comedian. But the directions are simple, the mood can-do. An hour later, I end up as limber as a puppy, or at least as frisky as an old dog, and I didn’t even fall over during tree pose (one-legged, other foot pressed against inner thigh). It felt as if I’d had a massage, but without the masseuse.
“You did just fine for a beginner,” McCarroll says in her reassuring video voice.
For the record, it was an intermediate class.
But I’m still checking out yourBuddhi on the Web next time. In case I fall.
Cy Bates, of the Jacobs School of Engineering, helped with research for this article. Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. He can be reached at intellectual capitalchapple@gmail.com
