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Yoga: Mad for yoga
Louise Bennett of yoga brand Yoga-Mad, part of the T.L. Elliott & Co group, tells SGB Sports of the market for yoga, and what retailers can do to maximise their returns.
Statistics on the number of people practicing yoga in the UK are notoriously hard to find and generally of questionable accuracy.
This is partly as yoga means different things to different people. Some are lifelong devotees though people do yoga for different reasons.
Many do it as their weekly and sole ‘exercise choice’, some as more of a spiritual or lifestyle choice and some women take it up to make childbirth easier, while others practice it to help recover from injuries or stress or to aid back pain.
In short people are dropping in and out of yoga practice all the time as it fits in with their lifestyle, making the number practicing at any one time irrelevant when looking at the market size for yoga mats or other yoga equipment. Yoga is not a static industry but it is more complex than just being able to say it is rising or declining.
Yoga is also being introduced to different and younger audiences through new channels such as the Wii Fit. On another level the Department of Education is now taking an interest in yoga and encouraging schools to take it up as part of their PE curriculum. Under the philosophy that schools should focus more on health-related activities rather than team-related activities. This is trying to promote life activities that students can continue with once they leave education. The Department of Education states that Yoga is up from 21 per cent to 22 per cent in schools from 2009.
The market for yoga equipment is therefore not to be overlooked and indeed yoga-Mad has seen sales rise year-on-year for the last 10 years.
What is clear is that when choosing what yoga mats to sell one has to know what the customer wants. People choose mats for many different reasons, the most common being: colour, weight (light for carrying) size (small enough to go in a suitcase), comfort (normally determined by thickness), feel and even ecological credentials.
For more, see the January 2011 edition of SGB Sports, p30.
