A class at Blue Yoga Nyla, taken before COVID-19 cases were reported in Arkansas. The North Little Rock yoga studio is making adjustments because of virus.
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of short features on small businesses responding to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
(Update, 5:19 p.m.: Blue Yoga Nyla announced late Monday afternoon that it would close until March 31 but hopes to have online instruction available to members by Tuesday.)
Stacey Reynolds marked the 10th anniversary of her North Little Rock yoga studio, Blue Yoga Nyla, just last month. Now she’s scrambling to offer online services to keep the clients who pay a regular monthly fee engaged during the COVID-19 crisis.
“The last thing we could withstand is for everyone to want to cancel their membership,” Reynolds said Monday morning.
Blue Yoga Nyla, located inside the former Park Hill Elementary School at 3801 JFK Blvd., already served many older clients, Reynolds said, so cleanliness has always been part of the business plan. “One of the things that we have always prided ourselves in is being mindful because we serve a special population anyway,” she said, but she is doubling up on the sanitation protocols.
BYN offers 13 “pay what you can” classes each week because so many of her older clients can’t afford the monthly unlimited package. But most of her other clients choose the flexibility of the unlimited membership, which range from $65 to $99 per month depending on the length of the commitment.
As of Monday, BYN was paring down the number of classes being offered in the studio space, which is large enough to accomodate recommended “social distancing” by limiting the number of participants. Clients are being asked to bring their own mats and props rather than using those that belong to the studio, and they are no longer allowed to check themselves in at the iPad at the front desk.
Since Thursday, Reynolds has been working on populating a new section of the BlueYogaNyla.com website with a library of video instruction. It should be available to members by Tuesday, she said.
“We’re planning on continuing this after this crisis, so we’re doing something that’s more permanent online,” she said. “The silver lining in all this is, because we serve a lot of military, we have people all over the world who practice with us and are very excited that they will have access to what they consider their home studio.”
Reynolds said she was “awake a whole lot more than I’m asleep right now” as she adjusts her business to the demands of a pandemic, which she said is making her services more important than ever: “Right now, with all the stress and the anxiety and the upset, people are having to double down on self-care and taking care of themselves to offset that.”
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