The Yoga Studio is Using Crowd-funding Website Lucky Ant to Help Revitalize Pioneer Square
Investors to Receive Free Classes, Yoga Mats, and Unlimited Yoga for Life!
Salt Room Yoga from Lucky Ant on Vimeo.
For the past several years, Rhonda Hobgood has been hearing about the struggles and revitalization efforts for Seattle’s oldest neighborhood, Pioneer Square. Filled with picturesque buildings and rare pieces of America’s historical culture, and with a booming tech and start-up business community, Pioneer Square’s street-level retail community has been struggling to fill vacancies for the past two decades.
When location scouting for her new studio Salt Room Yoga, Rhonda decided to open her in Pioneer Square to fill a street-level vacancy and help revitalize the Pioneer Square neighborhood and foster community. “The way to build up a neighborhood, a city, or even a person is to start a business and create work. It’s one of the most powerful tools we have in our society. Starting a business is difficult though, especially if you come from a middle class background, work a middle-class job, and you’re not a trust-fund baby like me. Banks won’t loan me money even though my credit rating is very healthy and I have a low debt ratio,” Rhonda explained.
The problem? “While the studio doors are now open, I struggled to open the doors and it took all my resources. I don’t have enough start-up capital to create my full vision,” Rhonda said. Salt Room Yoga needs funds to build out the space in order to fully establish a presence in Pioneer Square. The two projects currently stalled are installing a Himalayan salt brick wall, and installing a spiral staircase to access the office space which is currently inaccessible. “I want to create a very special environment, so people feel they walk into a one-of-a-kind sanctuary when they take classes at Salt Room,” Rhonda said.
The solution? Crowd-funding. More specifically crowd-funding with the New York based website Lucky Ant, which specializes in structuring and hosting crowdfunding campaigns for small businesses looking to grow. “We’ve developed a crowdfunding platform specifically for the small business community,” says Lucky Ant co-founder and COO Nate Echeverria. “Crowd-funding is a growing industry. Right now there are crowd-funding websites for artists and creative types, non-profits, medical research, you name it. Lucky Ant is crowd-funding for small businesses, mom and pops, those types of places. That’s our focus, using crowd-funding to help local small businesses grow and improve.”
Hence the natural fit between Lucky Ant and Salt Room Yoga. The studio is raising $8,000 on the site to build out the space. To do this they are offering supporters exclusive rewards and discounts. For example, if you pledge $7 you receive a free class, which would normally cost you $16 to drop in. Other rewards include one month of yoga, yoga mats, and Himalayan rock salt lamps. And for you yoga fanatics? $4,000 gets you Free Yoga for Life. Salt Room Yoga will be the first small business crowd funding project on the west coast.
At the end of the day it’s a win-win. Salt Room Yoga gets the money it needs to grow, and their supporters get a great deal on yoga while supporting the Pioneer Square community as a whole. To learn more about the campaign, head to www.luckyant.com
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Yoga is a commonly known generic term for physical, mental, and spiritual disciplines.