1996 1997 / 1998 1999 2000 / 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
2010
Watch this space for updates... and let us know how we’re doing. Namaste - from Paul and the Yogamatters team...
August: Eliot joins the admin team bringing the Yogamatters posse up to 15 strong.
July: I love Getting Things Done, one of the few non-yoga titles you'll find on the Yogamatters bookshelves. It's the 'yoga of time management' as far as I am concerned and we've been really lucky to find Vanessa from a wonderful firm called Personal Best to come along and help us implement some of the main ideas in our offices. On a sad note, the government axed the Future Jobs Fund and we say farewell to Mohammad.
May: Yogawords is flourishing and we have new projects in the wings from Christian Pisano and Doug Keller - but we are also learning how difficult it can be to persuade authors to deliver their 'babies'! After a paralysingly long wait for stock to arrive we decant a container into the warehouse much to some of our customers' (and our own) relief.
April: Welcome back Simeon, one of our Saturday boys from years ago! Another recruit under the auspices of the Future Jobs Fund, and a fellow Spurs fan for Sarah to give Paul T and the Gunners a run for their money.
March: A historic day occurs when Yogamatters takes on two new staff on the same day! Grace joins our Customer Service team bringing her passion for Ananda Marga and Sivananda yoga plus German language skills; Sarah, an Iyengar yoga teacher and Spurs fan arrives to take over responsilbility for all matters Purchasing from Maryline to whom we bid farewell after five years with the firm. Within just a couple of weeks we cannot believe our luck, and it feels like both our new recruits have both been here for years already!
February: A Government scheme that really works! We take on Mohammad to work in the warehouse under the Future Jobs Fund which covers his costs of employment for six months. It is a pleasure to have him at Yogamatters.
January: Back after a record breaking festive season, record breaking in terms of the number of seasonal gift orders we shipped. It seems as if giving a gift of yoga is more popular than ever. For various reasons we have to let our highest paid member of staff go. He's a 'hire 'em and fire 'em' tough talking type but he didn't like it when the boot was on the other foot, and it threatened to get a bit ugly, so we were forced to use our hard earned profits to resolve the issue. I had made the classic mistake of employing someone without ensuring all the paperwork was in place, thinking that our shared commitment to yoga would in someway make up for the deficit. Not sure that I should own up to this level of naivety, but there you go, it was a painful part of our journey for a while.
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 as the recession hit harder. We kept practising, breathing and getting on with it, and it seemed that there were still many people turning to yoga and we were proud to serve their journey. Nonetheless, it was a really challenging time to be running a business, and the investment we'd made launching the German website pushes us back into financial loss making territory. Bank lending became very tenuous and we looked into the financial abyss as the bank contemplated cutting our overdraft.
Yogawords published its first product, a re-issued classic edition of the Ashtanga Primary Series with John Scott, and it instantly became 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! Yogawords' proudly published its first book too: A completely revised edition of a classic Dona Holleman book retitled Dancing the Flame of Life. It is a joy to work with teachers of such stature, bringing their teaching to a wider audience.
About four years overdue, we finally recruit someone to look after our finances: Sally T joins the team and fits in fantastically, bringing calm steady analysis and clarity to our operation. The first thing she did? When I went away on holiday for a week she hired an assistant, David. She was absolutely right to do so - and we now have a well managed accounts department (and if we owe you any money don't call me, call David!). The second thing she did? She started giving the bank regular updates on how the business was doing and thereby regained their confidence (overdraft renewed).
Maren joined as our in house native German speaker. After just a few weeks I asked her to organise our effort at this year's London Yoga Show and she did an amazing job running it more smoothly than ever before. And the event itself? It's always wonderful to meet so many yogis, but the event organisers provided a lot of ammunition to those who criticise the event by booking (believe it or not) a pole dancing display!
Sally L spotted us at the Yoga Show and wrote offering her marketing skills. A short conversation later and she was looking after all our online and offline marketing activity. Some things are just meant to be!
Sales picked up through the year and once again we were back on the road of steady growth and modest profits: Phew - everyone's jobs safe having got through the worst of the recession. Meanwhile the politicians argued about the best way to prevent a renewed recession. We think it would be a good start if they practised yoga and meditation before toying with our fate!
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.
Our containers became 40’ long rather than 20' long - they stick out into the road and despite being unloaded in record time by Ivan's 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. Lots of teething problems with the new system - it took 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 time and over budget? Who'd have thought it!
We set up a sister company Yogawords with Martin from Pinter & Martin: The idea being to publish excellent yoga works, with Martin's publishing industry expertise and our knowledge of the yoga market.
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 were being very careful about spending money, so we had to work even harder to keep the business healthy. We were lucky to have so many customers in Europe, for whom the weakening pound made us an even better value yoga supplierl. We noticed that a third of everything we were selling was being exported to Europe.
Realising how many customers we had in Germany - and seeing what a vibrant yoga commnity was developing there, we decided to launch our Yogamatters' German site.
2007
Unfortunately we 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. As staff have moved on we are back to being a 100% meat free premises.
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?)
At the end of the year Ves asked me why we were doing what we were doing. It was a really 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.
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 for two and a half years was a reliable source of chocolate in the office before leaving for a new life in Thailand. Now she's back in town we feel really lucky when she can pop in to cover some shifts (and get the chocolate in).
Ivan arrived - our first non-yogi. But he did come with a black belt in Aikido and promised to start yoga right away. He runs our Fulfillment team and is the Facilities Manager, and he looks after health & safety. He has an incredible can-do attitude at work and radiates a positive attitude.
Soon after, Alice arrived with her special brand of positive customer service combined with a passion for perinatal yoga. If you call us on Mondays or Fridays you may well speak to Alice who is still with us too.
An opportunity for outside investment arrived when I was approached by some yoga business people who liked the look of Yogamatters. 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 we offered office accommodation to Yogacampus, a not-for-profit training organisation, who had outgrown their existing office space. Cohabitting for the next few years Yogamatters and Yogacampus became good friends, but retained independence from one another. Yogacampus have now moved into larger offices shared with The Life Centre in Notting Hill Gate.
We filled our second warehouse, which must prove some business 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 practise and yoga classes, 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. Now 100 orders per day is commonplace.
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 scheme. We liked each so much she stayed for five years before moving on.
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 and wholesale orders we are actually cheaper than Amazon anyway.
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!
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, or an amazing gathering of the tribe? Too boring or too overwhelming? The event attracted diverse feedback but is now part of the annual calendar, and gives us an 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 website and despatch teams. 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 all at his own website. We soon learnt this is known as ‘cyber’ or ‘typo squatting’. We were disappointed as we believed yoga businesses would be above this kind of unethical behaviour. It took us three years of argument before he finally handed the names over.
Although we were never driven by a need to be the biggest (in fact we try to 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.
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.
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 a 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 from my festie catering days, it soon felt as if he (and his mighty reggae tunes and cheesy pop hits) had been at Yogamatters all along.
Later in the year we celebrated as family matters met Yogamatters and Sandi and I tied the knot.
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 with 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' and Yogamatters benefitted from all this interest.
1999
A big year for Yogamatters - 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. The best mat cutter and roller in the business, kind and gentle and loved by all, and still working the odd shift.
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.
1997 / 1998
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 over 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.
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 14 years serving the yoga world this still amazes and inspires me.
1996 - Yogamatters beginnings
We took the first steps on our journey 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 did the catering. Our friend Emily had a flash of divine inspiration whilst driving home - she stopped on the side of the road to 'phone us with a name - Yogamatters! Emily has unlimited yoga equipment for life, and we were on the path towards the Yogamatters we know today.
