We started 2009 with the goal to:"Help you who help others!"
How it all started…
My wife opened up here yoga classes 15 years ago and later on she also got her own yoga studio.
At that time I was a sales man traveling around selling food products to wholesalers and key accounts in Sweden.
I realized that the way my wife purchased yoga products was a difficult, time consuming and expensive way to do it. Not mentioning the narrow range of colors and products.
So I asked other yoga studios how they did it.
The answer was: – The same way!
Then we decided to “Help you who help others!” ?
A brief summary of this blog post
Google, Investors & Social Media have hijacked the word yoga from the yoga community. They take a bigger chunk out of the cake for every day that goes and we want to change that by giving that piece of the cake back to our yoga teachers & yoga studios instead. And of course: Also to you as a customer!
Then we started OurYogaShopTo support yoga teachers!
OurYogaShop - Yours & Mine
Join the crowd - The path to become dependent of fame and glory...
Join the crowd…
During the path since the start in 2009 – so many things have happened – good stuff & bad stuff. (see the matrix in the bottom of the page)
The good things are that we have met a bounce of totally awesome & wonderful yoga teachers and yoga studios on the way and we now support each others in many ways! We have become a big family! 🙂
The not so great stuff ? are that we joined the crowd and spent to many hours trying to fit into Google, Facebook, Instagram and other social medias framework to get visitors and finally more customers. To many hours. For what? Just to realize that we are prisoners in their system and forced to pay more and more every day to sell thrue their channels. Secondly they play on our ego. And we as many else didn´t wanted to be forgotten in their “fame & glory”.
Itś so much “NOT YOGA” – and we finally understand what is going on.
Different leagues - It takes a fool to remain sane...
Then and Now… – 2 different leagues
When we started in 2009 it was just a fun thing to “help you who help others!” – It was a walk in the park.???✨
What we´ve seen since then is investors flooding? into the “yoga business”. Analysts that found out that the words yoga & yoga mat was worth investing in. Not because of the benefit of yoga, but the words had become a market of their own. Everything with the word “yoga” was an opportunity to make money for them. – That is one of the reasons you nowadays can find a “yoga mat”, that only could do the job as a seat pad in the woods. These kind of yoga mats will never work for you in your yoga practice. Because an analyst does not care about yoga, neither does he understand it.
Next… – unequal market due to government
So Analyst & Investors – you can´t blame them – the market is free. Their job is to find the market and money for investors.
Then in late 2020 Amazon enters Sweden thanks to our own government that offer them tax reliefs and a place to build server halls and logistic centers. Well done government – if your goal is to exterminate self-employed people…
Itś so much “NOT YOGA”
We want to be different - by acting different!
...no more money to investors, analysts, Google, Facebook, Instagram or Amazon.
Back to Basic!
We stop feeding thoose big companies NOW!
We paused for a moment. Thinking “- Should we sell OurYogaShop and move on? In fact: we are just yoga teachers and not web marketing persons”
We are still here. ☀☀☀
And from now on we have to turn the wheels of fortune for the whole yoga community.
Yoga teachers should not be slaves under the big investment companies! ?♀️?♂️?♀️?♀️?♀️
We are the ones holding up the yoga and everything sourrunding it – and therefore we will keep the energy strong for all those yoga teachers and yoga studios that are “helping you every god damn day with your yoga practice”. ?
From now on we will give Yoga Teachers, Yoga Studios and YOU as a customer the money we used to pay to Google, Facebook and Instagram.
We call it Customer Love! ❤
Now Yoga Teachers will get all the benfit!
...and you will get 10% discount - read more about!
Matrix
How easy it is to become a slave under the bigger companies:
First we had pen and paper and recieved orders thrue telephone – Good!
Then we wanted to be more available to our customers and started a webshop – OurYogaShop – Good!
Then also private persons joined and started to order – Good!
After a while not so nice persons started to use our friendliness and ordered products with no plan to pay the bills – Bad!
So we added better payment options – Good!
We started Customer Love – 10% discount to our private persons shopping – Good!
To reach more customers we started using Google Adwords, sales increased in the same speed as we added money to the ads at Google. To be able to sell 1 yoga mat we paid 3 Euro – Good!
OurYogaShop started to consume more time from us – Medium!
So we decided to envolve 3PL (third part logistic) – Medium!
We also added a book keeping system accessible on the internet – Medium!
We listened to “specialists” telling us we needed to change platform for our webshop – Bad!
The book keeping systems and the new platform did not deliver as expected but only created a lot of problems – Bad!
We had no time to find new customers or even take good care of the ones we had – we increased ads on Google and Facebook – Medium!
Investors and analytic companies entered our market and invested in words like “yoga mat” and “yoga” – Bad!
Google needed more money to “help us” sell and now they needed 25 Euro per mat – Bad!
The Swedish government opened up their arms to Amazon and created a spot for them to enter the Swedish market – Bad!
So many things have happended since 2009 and we can just note that what we had something good going on, but it got lost in the same time we tried to “step up” and play the game Google, Facebook and Instagram wanted us to play.
Hang on in there- Next blog post we will explain Customer Love...
...and you will get 10% discount - read more about!
