On Addressing Value
Northern Life Yoga is a small business in a small town focused on community connection, personal growth, and wellness. We offer services that aren’t otherwise available in the same modalities and with the same intentions anywhere else in our community. Our hope when you walk through our doors is that you feel seen, you feel welcome, you feel surrounded by light and laughter and love, and the positivity of people striving to create goodness both within and outside of our walls. We hope you feel valued.
At Northern Life Yoga, we are still learning how to recognize and respect the value of our services and our community within Sault Ste. Marie. We understand financial struggles and the desire for strategic financial stability. We recognize and respect how you spend your hard-earned wages as our clients, our friends, our family. We are also a business. A small, community-based business that gets to know each and every one of you who walks through our doors. We cannot compete with urban gyms in high-volume attendance and low-cost classes. We cannot compete with free online yoga.
What we can do is recognize you as the individuals that you are, bringing your long days and sore bodies into our sacred space of healing, and offer you some relief from the day-to-day, a place to let go, a place to replenish. We hope we can help you to see the value of our wonderful team of instructors and practitioners who care about you, the accessibility and availability of our year-round classes, and the benefits our presence provides to you on your personal wellness journey as well as to the community at large. You are valued, and we hope you value us, too.
Prices are going up everywhere, and so to maintain a sustainable business, so must ours. If this idea has been a struggle for you to face, just take a moment to think about where else your money might be going, and whether those expenses hold a higher value to you than your health, wellness, and sense of belonging. It’s okay if they do. We are not here to judge anyone’s priorities. But if they don’t, just consider how it may not be so difficult to reallocate small expenses.
It isn’t our business to tell you how to spend your money. But we know how easy it is to take yoga for granted – in a world of globalization and connectivity, it’s easy to be the bargain-hunter, fighting for the lowest prices. But are those low prices always providing you with the best quality services or products? Are you getting what you’re paying for? We hope with us, you can see that you are. We hope that when you commit to valuing Northern Life Yoga, you in turn will feel valued—valuable to our community—and a part of something larger than just another fitness group. We want you to feel like you’re more than some number in a corporate ledger, that you’re more than another anonymous viewer of those online videos.
In the coming years we plan to show you how valued you are. Offering member appreciation events throughout the year is a goal of ours to help you feel seen beyond the mat, to help you feel like your hard-earned money is providing avenues toward connection, community, success in meeting physical and emotional goals, and the praise you deserve for all of your hard work within the walls of our studio. You show up and we see it! We hope you feel like human beings, recognized and appreciated, and always cherished.
Northern Life Yoga has a fantastic team of instructors, managers, and holistic wellness practitioners that deserve fair and adequate compensation for the services they provide to the community. Paying for their hard work is necessary to maintain our diverse offerings. In a studio of our size, offering as many weekly classes as we do, also increases those labor costs. However, we love and want to be able to continue these offerings. We know your schedules are busy and to offer a variety of class times to suit your needs is something we want to be able to do for you. This requires an increase in our prices. It quite honestly comes down to how much you value our services, and what you think our work, our time, and our commitment to you is worth.
—Gabbie Gordon, Member Relations Manager
