“Columbus fits our demographics,” said Amy Opielowski of yoga-industry-giant CorePower Yoga, during her recent visit to Columbus from her home base in San Diego. “It’s a growing city we want to be in.”
CorePower Yoga will open an Easton location late in fall and a second location is in the works. In the meantime, there will be many opportunities to experience the Core Power style for free per Easton CorePower manager, DeDee Cai. Cai moved to Columbus recently after managing several Washington DC studios for CorePower.
“I am super excited to start up a CorePower community in Columbus,” she says.
Sundays at 11 AM in September, CorePower Yoga will hold free classes at the Athleta in Easton. CorePower will be the Studio of the Month at Easton’s Lululemon in November and hold classes there then. The management is also working on community classes in the Whole Foods at Easton when it opens in September. CorePower studios are known for their intense, hot, hour-long workouts. While classes in the athletic-wear stores will be representative of the CorePower moves, they obviously won’t be heated. The CorePower Easton studio has an opening date of this fall.
CorePower Yoga is sometimes called “the Starbucks of yoga” as its founder, Trevor Tice, has not only created a consistent customer experience, but also has aggressively expanded the brand. Tice began to practice yoga after he had a rock-climbing accident that shattered both ankles. As an IT executive who traveled a lot, he went to hot yoga classes all over the country and saw room for improvements.
“I was very underwhelmed by the facilities, the delivery, the consistency,” he [said in an Inc. interview], “It was lacking anything a good customer experience would have.”
Tice created a plan and sold his IT company to build out high-end yoga venues in promising markets.
“We synthesized the three main types of yoga – Bikram, Ashtanga, and Vinyasa – into a one-hour, not 90 minute, class. This appeals to a broader demographic.”
CorePower Yoga also mostly eschews yoga traditions such as meditation and Sanskrit. Their studios provide amenities a customer wants from a hot yoga studio such as showers, toiletries, and very clean locker rooms.
CorePower Yoga has mushroomed since beginning in 2002. There are now 26 branches in Chicago alone! The company goal is to have 150 locations nation-wide by the end of 2015; besides Columbus, new locations are opening in Atlanta and Pasadena this fall. Corporate headquarters for CorePower are in Denver, Colorado where they can take advantage of the scenery there for events such as a large gatherings at the famous Red Rocks amphitheater.
The CorePower approach is not without critics as Tice noted in an interview, “Some existing yoga businesses and practitioners perceived us from a very purist perspective as ‘corporate.’ People are certainly entitled to their opinions. But we think the more people practice yoga, in whatever form, the better.”
When I shared some information about CorePower with a long-time Ashtanga yoga practitioner, she said that, “It doesn’t sound much like yoga.”
I queried co-owner of Yoga on High, Michelle Vinbury, about corporate yoga and the CorePower model. She remarked, that Yoga on High would “continue to offer wide variety of yoga: vinyasa, ashtanga, hatha … not to mention aerial, acro, yoga hikes and weekly workshops with guests [such as Rodney Yee] from around the country and the world … our wish for the Columbus community is that each person find their yoga home and the style that suits their needs; many paths, same destination.”
CorePower Yoga will certainly be an interesting part of the Columbus yoga scene.
For more information, visit Corepoweryoga.com.