He recently sat down on the post-dispatch to discuss the yoga business. Here is an edited transcript of that interview.
Tell me how Yoga Six came about.
We had a summer home in San Diego. So we looked for yoga studios nearby. We really liked a studio concept called Haute Yoga. There was a married couple who ran it. It was really funny that the guy (Dino Flacco) I met in St. Louis 20 years ago. He ran three taco places called Flaco’s Tacos in St. Louis. Then he pulled his back and went back to the coast and went to India to study yoga. What he’s really tried is a more accessible, user-friendly model than Bikram (a style of hot yoga). He found that Bikram was too militaristic for lack of a better word. So he hit upon the idea of making it work on different levels, from beginner levels fueled to more rigorous classes.
So I thought, ‘Hey, that’s kind of cool. If you ever want to open another one I would love to partner with you as a side business. ‘… We started working on a plan to open a second studio. (But Flacco died of cancer last year, so Koman decided to expand under the name Yoga Six.)
What attracted you to the yoga business?
There are 23,000 to 24,000 yoga and Pilates studios across the country and there is no real chain operating them. The only real model is the Bikram franchise model, and that in 300 to 400 locations. So it’s a really fragmented industry. We also thought that you were starting out from the West Coast and that you were in a very productive, dense yoga population. This has allowed us to keep up with the coast’s trends and practices and bring them to other areas of the country.
