A Philadelphia couple's online innovation,
PHLyoga, is an idea so brilliantly simple -- so forehead-slappingly obvious -- that the biggest surprise might be that something similar doesn't already exist.
The brainchild of Kate Bogart and her husband Matt Joyce, PHLyoga offers one service and one product to the downward dog crowd. The first is an event-listings calendar, updated every weekend, cataloging the latest class schedules of nearly two-dozen local yoga studios.
Then there is the startup's
Master Pass -- it offers either five or 10 drop-in yoga classes at five different studios for the very reasonable price of $70 or $130, respectively. That's not a bad deal considering that drop-in classes at each of PHLyoga's partner studios are $15 to $20 per visit.
According to Bogart, it was her recent relocation to Philly -- she earned a master's degree in International Relations at
Columbia University last May -- that led to the idea.
"It occurred to me that it would be great to jump around and get a sense of which studio I'd [ultimately] like to go to," she says. "But it's expensive to take drop-in classes every time."
What Bogart really wanted, she says, was a drop-in pass that multiple studios would accept.
"We're really excited to have [the Master Pass] be something that people new to the city can use to get [acquainted] with yoga [here]," she explains. She also thinks the pass is an ideal solution "for people who'd love to make [yoga] a habit, and who would like to try different styles, and figure out what works for them."
As PHLyoga grows, the couple hopes to partner with more studios for its Master Pass clients. According to Joyce, who built the website's first iteration in a mere two weeks, a mobile app may prove to be the young company's next logical step.
Writer: Dan Eldridge
Source: Kate Bogart and Matt Joyce, PHL Yoga