1996 1997 / 1998 1999 2000 / 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
1996
It has been over 10 years now since we took the first steps on our journey which began in 1996. At the time we had no idea what we had started when we organised our first yoga workshop with Mira Mehta . Sandi arranged the yoga, and I, Paul Walker, did the catering and we were on the path towards the Yogamatters we know today.
1997 / 1998
During this year I started teaching yoga and discovered it was quite a challenge to find good yoga equipment. To help fellow students and teachers I began selling yoga mats after class, often out of the back of my car, while keeping the excess stock stored under my bed! I bought the first roll of yoga mats from T.L. Elliots (now better known as Yoga Mad ) and a decade later we’re still supplying each other and helping one another out.
I could only manage this part time as I still had a day job running a veggie catering business. But month after month things shifted to being a little more yoga and a little less catering. Eventually I flogged all the catering equipment in a yard sale so that I could focus on the yoga full time. Discovering that there weren’t many yoga events around, we started organising regular events and became part of a vibrant North London yoga scene.
Around this time our friend Emily had a flash of divine inspiration whilst driving home and stopped on the side of the road to phone us with a name - Yogamatters . We awarded Emily unlimited yoga equipment for life, on the spot!
Sandi and I qualified as Iyengar yoga teachers. I took my first trip to Pune in India, and had my eyes opened to the fantastic diversity of the yoga community. Even after 10 years serving the yoga world this still amazes and inspires me.
1999
A big year for Yogamatters as we launched as www.yogamatters.co.uk . To begin with, we only had about 20 products, but every line of web code had been lovingly hand written by our webmaster Packet. Within hours of being published we had received our first order - from Portugal! I still remember dancing around the living room with joy.
Later in the year we traded the yogamatters.com domain name for a roll of yoga mats. Probably the best deal we ever made thanks to Godfrey Devereux being so reasonable.
Abi, our very first employee joined us part time having worked with me in the vegetarian catering business. Happily, Abi is still with us today, keeping the Customer Service team (and all of us, really) in line.
My bedroom was getting too full of stock so we acquired our mate Richard's lock up as a packing and despatch unit – commercial premises at last. Jaspal walked into the lock up and into our life and immediately became indispensable to us. The best mat cutter and roller in the business, kind and gentle and loved by all - we wish you were still here.
We signed up for a contract delivery service with Parcelforce and by the end of 1999 we had hit 200 products on the list
The millennium ended with Yogamatters feeling like a proper grown up business.
2000 / 2001
Picking up contacts established through the yoga scene, we started to order our first large scale imports - bales of blankets and crates of belts arrived from Pune and mat bags from Delhi. The consignments of mats became more frequent and the lock up started to overflow.
Over the years we have developed loyal relationships with many of our suppliers, some of whom have become firm friends of Yogamatters . We came across a really cool brand of American yoga clothing called prAna and immediately fell in love with the style and the distributor, Beyond Hope .
During this period yoga hit the mainstream. In fact you could not open a magazine or watch TV without seeing yogic imagery promoting products and celebrity. Yoga was officially 'The New Big Thing'.
Our shop was getting more and more visitors so we start opening on Saturday. Covering a 6 day week has been hard on the rota ever since, but the opportunity it gives us to meet customers is irreplaceable.
2002
We developed our new website, with some exciting features (we switched to an out-the-box ecommerce system called Actinic which did us proud for the next few years), and yogis really started to take up ecommerce en masse. We transferred our website to the best hosting company in the universe, Futureservers , where John and his team have been looking after us ever since.
As we continued to grow, we needed more space and began the search for the first Yogamatters' warehouse. When the estate agent opened the door to the warehouse for the first time we looked from one end of space to the other and could not imagine ever filling it up. But we didn’t have to imagine for very long as a little later that year - the warehouse was filled!
To keep the ethos of our company alive, we used one corner of the warehouse to create London 's first exclusively yoga emporium and later in the year we reached what felt like a huge milestone of offering our customers 1000 products.
Paul T returned: A stalwart of the festie catering days, it soon felt as if he (and his mighty reggae tunes and cheesy pop hits) had been around Yogamatters all along.
Leter in the year we celebrated as family matters met Yogamatters and Sandi and I tied the knot.
2003
Vee joined us with the most stable pair of hands in the business. As a Thai Yoga Massage practitioner, she has kept us calm on Fridays ever since and always radiates good vibes.
We launched The Big Yoga Read, which proved to be one of our most successful promotions. We asked our customers to tell us about their favourite yoga books and we were totally overwhelmed by the amazing response. It appeared that our customers wanted to talk about yoga matters as much as we did.
A few hours here and there to begin with, Marie-Flore started helping us with our book section. She’s now our acknowledged expert in tracking down that last copy of a rare edition of the Bhagavad Gita.
2004
Early in 2004 I became a father, completing our ‘family matters’. Sal and Di arrived around the same time and when they both got pregnant we realised that there was something in the Yogamatters’ water and started to take our active birth section very seriously.
While we were all having babies, the London Yoga Show launched. Too commercial? Amazing gathering of the tribe? Not enough of interest? Too overwhelming? The event attracted diverse feedback but is now part of the calendar, still going strong and gives us the amazing opportunity to meet many of our customers, face-to-face. That year, most of the staff on our stand were pregnant, so we had less room for stock.
When Ves joined us we started our ongoing love affair with Bulgarians, who now power our despatch team. He introduced us to internet radio in the office and can always be relied upon to dig up a seriously corny video for special occasions. He also heads up the Green Team, who come up with ways for us to reduce our impact on the environment.
A fellow yoga merchant registered a number of variations on our domain names (such as www.yogamaters.com ) and pointed them at their own website. We soon learnt this is known as ‘cyber’ or ‘typo squatting’. We were disappointed as we believed the yoga business would be above this kind of unethical behaviour. It took us three years of argument before they finally handed the names over.
Although we were never driven by a need to be the biggest (in fact we always avoid describing ourselves as the '...est' anything), we surveyed the market worldwide and realised we probably did have the widest range of yoga products - anywhere. Almost half of these products are books: Our bookshop has always got someone browsing the incredible range; yogis travel from far and wide to check it out, and often spend hours here once they’ve arrived.
2005
As Sal and Di left to have their babies we bid Bienvenue to Maryline who came to us courtesy of the French Government on a work placement. We liked each so much she stayed for good, and now Maryline’s overall Purchasing Manager as well as looking after some of our key accounts.
We tried an Amazon price match policy: It only lasted a few weeks because it was such a pain to administer. We realised that for many titles we were actually cheaper than Amazon anyway – and for wholesale orders we always were.
When our neighbours moved out of the warehouse next door we snapped up the extra space. It then took almost a year to get planning permission to knock through from one unit to the other!
An opportunity for outside investment arrived when I got approached by some yoga business people who liked the look of Yogamatters.
2006
Claire harassed me with almost daily phone calls until eventually I got the message and employed her. Within a few days of starting she had become a Customer Service stalwart and reliable source of chocolate in the office. (She stayed for 2 1/2 years and recently left for a new life in Thailand. We’re still waiting for that postcard Claire!).
Ivan arrived - our first non-yogi. But he does have a black belt in Aikido and promised to start yoga right away! He can single-handedly move palettes without a forklift and keeps our premises well organised and safe.
Soon after, Alice arrived with her special brand of positive customer service combined with a passion for perinatal yoga. If you don’t pay your bills you’ll hear from Alice, too, but always really positively.
The outside investment opportunity worked out and I relinquished a chunk of equity for some investment in Yogamatters. I wanted Yogamatters to grow and remain strong, and that needed more cash.
At about the same time the opportunity to align with Yogacampus presented itself. Yogacampus is a not-for-profit training organisation with a really good educational ethos that enjoys great support from throughout the yoga community. We hoped that supporting them with office facilities and infrastructure would help the yoga training thrive. Yogamatters and Yogacampus are good friends, but retain complete independence from one another.
We filled our second warehouse, which must prove some law about stock expanding to fill every available space.
We also opened The Lotus Room, a small but perfectly formed yoga studio in one corner of the warehouse. Fully equipped (well it would be, really) and a fantastic resource for staff, friends and good causes. It comes with under floor heating too.
Another proud moment was when we shipped over 100 orders in a single day. It's funny how numbers begin to take on importance and this felt like a real milestone.
2007
Yogacampus moved into our offices and it was great to have some new energy around the buildings.
Unfortunately we also lost money for the first time. This was particularly disappointing as it seemed like we were working much harder than ever before. The business had grown so much we were losing contact with some of our customers, experiencing stock problems and discovering that laborious manual systems were diverting energy from what we should be doing. This time in our history was really disheartening and everyone felt it.
Internally we had two passionate arguments: The first was over whether it is fair to insist on no meat in the workplace. We'd made the mistake of not telling some new recruits that Yogamatters is a vegetarian workplace. A compromise was reached in allowing those who hadn't been told this before they started to eat whatever they want, but considerately.
Our decision to sell some ‘I Love Yoga’ products, such as mugs and key rings provoked another heated discussion. Some staff considered such flippant products to be pointless and undermining the good reputation we had worked so hard to build, whereas others thought them harmless fun. ( What do you think? )
Christine arrived to look after our email marketing and get us back in touch with our customers and to continue Claire’s legacy in supporting the office chocolate habit.
We provided our website with a quick facelift in the form of a few more features and a change of colour. Doing this only made it more apparent that what we really need to do is replace the whole site with something more flexible and up to date.
At the end of the year Ves asked me why we’re doing what we're doing. It was a bloody good question and we decided to try and work out what Yogamatters really stood for. We met a wonderful company called Green Sky Thinking who helped us do just that by applying their ‘brand yoga’ method to us.
2008
The rate of change this year was staggering. An amazing and committed effort by everyone resulted in us pulling ourselves out of loss and back into profit.
We welcomed Adam to the fold. He’s our first person based overseas – a yoga teacher living in Berlin who keeps from getting bored with a spot of stand up comedy every now and then! A second German speaker, Daniela joined the Customer Services team with the specific brief of keeping our customers in Germany happy. Take a look at Yogamatters' German site.
Our containers became 40’ long rather than 20' long - they stick out into the road and despite being unloaded in record time by our superb team the first one still got a parking ticket!
We introduced a completely new look Yogamatters: New brand, new design (nice one Whitespace Design ), new site, new system. Supported as always by the same set of values, the same excellent service and the same passion for yoga. Lot's of teething problems with the new system, about 6 months to get to where we thought we'd be in as many weeks, and of course it all cost us much more money than we'd thought. What - an IT project behind tima and over budget? Who'd have thought it!
As the year moved on we started to really notice the effects of the recession. The yoga business is probably insulated to a certain extent from economic cycles, but there's no doubt our customers in the UK are being very careful about spending money, so we have had to work even harder to keep the business healthy. We are lucky that we have so many customers in Europe, with the weakening pound we have become much better value for them all. I notice that a third of everything we sell is now exported to Europe.
2009
Was business going to fall off the edge of the cliff as we opened the warehouse for business in the new year? The media was full of dire predictions. We kept practising, breathing and getting on, and so far so good. There are still many people turning to yoga and we are proud to serve their journey.
A sister company Yogawords publishes its first product, a re-issued classic edition of the Ashtanga Primary Series with John Scott, and it instantly becomes our top selling DVD of all time. The Mandarin, Japanese and German soundtracks mean we get interest from literally all over the world. 1000 copies go to Beijing - wow - there's a lot of yoga going on over there!
About four years overdue, we finally recruit someone to look after our finances: Sally joins the team and fits in fantastically, bringing calm steady analysis and clarity to our operation.
Watch this space for updates... and let us know how we’re doing.
Namaste - from Paul and the Yogamatters team
