May 8, 2017

Meet Justin Bernold of The Breathing Room in Central Square

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Justin Bernold.

So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
When I first started to imagine The Breathing Room, I got pretty much every detail wrong. I knew it was going to be both yoga and massage, but the only real model I had seen for that kind of business was places like Exhale — just these gleaming, luxe places that were really upscale. So, I thought I’d create a super-gigantic version of Exhale. I had this vision of ultra-popular teachers with gigantic yoga classes, and you’d wander out after class all blissed out and there’d be room after room of massage tables, and you’d just naturally land on one, and your credit card would spiral through the air . . . just like Patanjali intended. It was the kind of vision you have when you’re coming out of the corporate world and you’ve gotten stuck on the word “synergy.”

But instead, one day I saw a “for rent” sign for an office upstairs from Life Alive and 1369 in Central Square. It was nowhere near as much space as I wanted, but I thought I had to at least look, because I *loved* Life Alive, and I was pretty much powered by 1369’s coffee. And it was just love at first sight. Don’t get me wrong, it was a fixer-upper. The floors had old, stale carpeting. The walls and closets were full of wires that had been left behind by a dotcom that had gone bankrupt a few months before. But something about the space just felt right — warm and welcoming like your best friend’s living room — and everybody who walked into that space wanted to be a part of it.

Over the next few months, we pulled up the carpets and sanded the old hardwood floors we found below. Friends sent friends to help, and yoga teachers and poets wrote messages for us to tuck under the floors in every room, like secret beams of support for all who come here. Tracy Rodriguez hung photographs of local yoga teachers on the walls, and Liz Kovarsky flew in from San Francisco with more art for the massage rooms. Mohammad Ali from Rikshaw Studios came to help fix a door, and then stopped by a few weeks later with an amazing charcoal print for our reception entrance, inspired by the space. When the Clear Conscience Cafe closed, they gave us their beautiful custom mirrors to hang. Local AcroYoga teacher Sandy Kalik helped us find and hang and return and re-hang all sorts of drapes and blinds — she used to ferry me out to IKEA in exchange for Swedish meatballs. And one day, after searching the internet for a “fluffy rug of joy,” we created a texture garden of wool and hemp and jute and bamboo rugs, so guests can just kick off their shoes and feel sensation on their feet.

But the catch was, even though we were going to be doing both yoga and massage, there was no way we could fit your average yoga class in the space. Think nine or ten students max. So, the entire business model had to transform. Basically, either the yoga teachers could make money or I could, but not both.

So I thought, “Well, everybody I know from my own training started out by moving their couch out of their living room and teaching their friends . . . and this is like a really nice living room, and it doesn’t even have a couch in it. We’re ahead!” And I turned the space into a sort of Airbnb or WorkBar for yoga teachers. You’d come and pay around $60 or $75 a month to be able to have your own baby yoga studio for an hour a week, design your own class, and teach your own way. Teachers would set their own prices and take home whatever their students paid, rent from the teachers would basically cover the overall rent, and then I’d make my own living as a massage therapist with really low overhead, rather than trying to make a profit from the classes. That business model has shifted a bit since (more of a revenue share than a flat rent model), but that initial idea of saying “teach like it’s your own living room, and you’re teaching your own yoga, not somebody else’s brand,” is still deep in our DNA.

I had absolutely no idea what a journey that would become. I figured people would do their teacher training at Prana down the street, and say “I just spent two or three thousand on my teacher training, so of course I’ll spend another $60 a month to have a place to actually practice teaching.” And we got a little of that. But we also got teachers who would say “I did my teacher training in Hong Kong with Ana Forrest, and I had such a powerful experience that I stayed in Hong Kong and started teaching right at that studio. But then I moved back to the U.S., and none of the studios will even talk to me because I didn’t do my teacher training with them.” And I would say “You did your teacher training with Ana Forrest?? Are you free on Friday?” And then there just started to be this cool word of mouth that spread among the teaching community, and teachers would start telling their friends to come teach here. So we’ve had everything from Vinyasa to Pranakriya to Sivananda to Iyengar to AcroYoga to Kalaripayattu to Kripalu to Kundalini to Yin, instead of focusing on just one style like Power or Ashtanga or Bikram (which isn’t to say that single-style studios can’t be great, too). For me, it’s really amazing to watch this swirl of teachers and communities flow in and out all day. And then at some point we just realized that a lot of us had been working together for four or five years now, and it was more like a family than a business.

On the massage front, it started out as just me, and then gradually friends started joining. Here again, there’s a sense of “This is how I personally want to practice,” which makes it very different for us to practice here as opposed to anywhere else. All of us have a base training in the usual relaxation styles and “deep tissue” techniques, but then we’ll fold in elements of Thai or shiatsu or Cherokee bodywork or reiki or craniosacral therapy or yoga or osteopathic or orthopedic massage, and it really just becomes this unique experience for whoever we’re working with. And there are some people who will be like “No, it has to be with Justin. He’s got all the reviews on Yelp,” and then other people will call and say “Is Colleen available? I hear she’s the good one.” And then there are some people who start to rotate through us and figure out who they like most for which issues, or do back-to-back sessions where one of us focuses on deeper stuff and then the other is more relaxation or energy work. But unlike other places where we’ve worked, there’s no sense of competition. It’s just like “Oh, you’re working with so-and-so today. He’s *awesome.*” as opposed to “Grr, you’re working with so-and-so today? He’s *mine.*” It’s really amazing to get to work with all these friends who we can just enjoy sharing everything with.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Ha!

Well, you can probably already get a sense from my last response that the whole business concept was a challenge — the idea of opening a yoga studio in a space this small was just nuts. But we definitely had a few more obstacles.

Within our space, the door to the yoga room was impossible to close when we first moved in. It was an old, steel-wrapped fire door that had warped somehow, and couldn’t close. Nobody knew what to do. Finally, I wrote a really beautiful note about how some doors were meant to stay open . . . and then we got a call from a guy who had heard from a friend of a friend that we needed help fixing the door. He showed up a few minutes later with a sledgehammer and a brick, studied the door like some sort of architecture whisperer, and then pounded it until it closed. Back then, we didn’t have curtains yet, and if you looked out our windows, you’d see the stained glass windows of a church across the street. And it turned out that our door whisperer used to be a deacon at a Baptist church a couple blocks away. So, we’ve got a deacon from a Baptist church performing carpentry on the yoga room door while a stained glass Jesus looks on. His assistant, I kid you not, was a kid named Mohammed. We decided right then and there that we were going to be ok.

Our landlord refused to let us put a sign on the door, because he was afraid everybody else in the building would want one. So, for our first year or so, the only people who knew we existed were staffers at Life Alive. We’d get phone calls like “So, I’m in line downstairs at Life Alive, and the girl behind the counter says that I should get a massage from you.” (God bless you, Marinda from Life Alive. Marinda also introduced us to one of our first yoga teachers, who went on to introduce us to three other teachers.)

Finally, we decided to do a Groupon to promote ourselves, and found a company that basically syndicated deals to all the Groupon-style sites. We told them we’d let them sell 100 coupons for a $39 massage. For a few weeks, nothing happened. And then, on New Year’s Eve, they suddenly went live on Amazon Local and blew past the 100 mark in a hurry. And it was New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, so we couldn’t get anybody to turn it off! Finally, they were able to turn it off on Amazon Local, and then they accidentally launched us on Gilt City a week later. After that, we were on the radar for pretty much every major deal site except for Rue La La, who have mysteriously never wanted to work with us. We don’t do those sorts of deals anymore (take that, Rue!), but they definitely put us on the map.

Because we started the yoga side of our business as a sort of time-share, with teachers paying rent for each time slot, teachers tended to just teach one class a week, which meant that we could easily have more than 40 teachers with completely different classes and different pricing, and it might all change each month. The leading scheduling software in the industry couldn’t keep up — we broke their database in three days. So, instead we use a more massage-focused scheduling software, Schedulicity, to handle all our scheduling, but we had to write our own software to handle payments. And we cobble it all together with a blend of Google spreadsheets, human error, and cursing. Somehow it all works out, and it forces pretty much every transaction to have a human element, which is pretty great. I can’t help but get to know everybody’s names . . . even if I don’t always remember them as consistently as I’d like.

Our scheduling software doesn’t make it very easy to figure out who’s actually on our teaching team. So, the first time we got a meh review on Yelp, it was this student who had taken classes “sporadically” (actually three classes ever, I think), and just hadn’t found a teacher she loved. So, she encouraged people to come try us out, and then meet her at O2. Then she clicked over to O2 and gave this glowing five-star review of her very favorite teacher . . . who had been teaching here for two years. I kind of love that that happened.

Eventually, we decided that we really needed a bigger space. But we couldn’t find one. There was just nowhere in Cambridge or Somerville that felt the way The Breathing Room does. Finally, we found one room in the middle of an office building on Arrow Street, and decided to turn that into a single-room yoga-only studio. It was a really special space, but at the end of the day, we just couldn’t get along with the landlord in that building, and we decided to let another tenant take over the space a couple weeks ago. That was really painful, but ultimately kind of beautiful. You can get a better sense of how that played out at http://www.breathingroomboston.com/one-door-closes.

Moment to moment, I think we’re just a bit frumpled, but I think that’s a good thing. A lot of yoga studios or massage studios fall into a sort of “spa” environment, where everything is gleaming and perfect and that can get a little intimidating. We’re just not that way. We’re in an old building, and things are creaky, and you’re never going to find me wearing Lululemon because there’s no way it’s going to fit. And so you can really just come here and just be as you are, instead of having to be perfect first.

The Breathing Room – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
The Breathing Room is a healing arts studio in the heart of Central Square, just upstairs from Life Alive and the 1369 Coffeehouse. We offer yoga and movement classes, massage and bodywork services, and reiki healing.

Our yoga classes happen in a much smaller room than most studios, so classes here are personal. Think eight or nine students max, instead of sixty. So, most teachers will be able to give you a lot of personal attention. This means that beginners are welcome in pretty much every class — and that more experienced practitioners get to really dive in to their practice.

Classes are personal for the teachers here, too. Teachers are actually teaching their own yoga, so they tend to teach differently here than they teach anywhere else. Sometimes classes here are more experimental, and sometimes they’re more back-to-basics. Some classes are only here for a few weeks, while a teacher is in town, and then we’ll wait for months until they get back from India to teach us some more.

On the massage front, we’re really heavy influenced by the view that massage is a healing art, as opposed to just relaxation. So our style tends to be less “Swedish for $x, deep tissue for $y” and more “what’s going on for you today?” And that tends to make our work more personally tailored.

It’s hard to focus on any one thing that we’re proud of, or that we’re known for, because we don’t really think in those terms. We’re sort of an accidental rebellion against investor-driven business models or even owner-based approaches. At most yoga studios, you have one or two owners with a very solid following, and there’s an expectation that the other teachers there are going to teach in roughly the same way, or at least the same genre. If you go to O2, you’re looking for teachers like Mimi or Eliot, if you’re at Prana, you’re thinking Taylor (or Ray and Amber in Cambridge), and so on. Here, everybody is really doing their own thing, so you’ve got teachers coming out of Prana and O2 or other local trainings mingling with one another, as well as teachers who’ve done their trainings at Kripalu, or in other cities, or in other countries. And sometimes a student will come and just find that one teacher and fall in love and then form this little community together — Pradhuman, Sahaj, Caitlin, Ana, and Krista all have these amazing followings right now, and Chavi had this meditation class where the students formed such a strong bond that one student invited the whole class to her wedding, and had Chavi choreograph the wedding dance. And then you’ll have other students who just take *everything* and you’ll see them in the studio two or three times a day studying with different teachers, and we’ll all be geeking out behind the scenes about how much we love seeing them, and how strong their practice is getting. I’m proud of my teachers’ talent and their own growth over the years, but it’s that sense of community that really lights me up.

On the massage front, I think we have a similar sense of experimentation and community and just real, personal investment. Jen, Colleen, Ken and I all have the same base training in relaxation and deep tissue techniques, but then we layer on all sorts of other styles that we’ve studied, and just geek out over one another. And then Shereen practices Thai, which is like having a yoga teacher take a class with your body so that you don’t have to do any of the work yourself. So there’s much less of a sense of “grr, this is my client and I’m not sharing,” and much more of a sense of “Ok, we’ve worked on x and y today. For your next session, if you can’t catch me, I want you to check out Ken, because he’ll have a totally different approach on z, and it’ll really help.” I once had a regular client for a couple years, and he started to practice yoga, and I said “You know, you should really try a session of Thai with Shereen, because it’ll accelerate your yoga practice,” and he said “No, no, I only want to see you. You’re who I see.” And I persisted until finally, he was like “fine, I’ll try it,” like he was committing to eating his vegetables. A couple days later, I see him coming out of a yoga class and I say “Oh, how was your session with Shereen?” and he says “I just realized that I’ve been smiling for the last 12 hours . . . and it’s been a year since I’ve felt this way.” Now he pretty much only sees Shereen, and I’m really proud of that. I love being in an environment where we get to be invested enough in our students and massage clients that we can step outside the normal constraints of finances (my client, my money) or ego (my own work, my own awesomeness) and just focus on what’s best for everybody.

What is “success” or “successful” for you?
You know, I have no idea how to succinctly define success. I think I used to be much better at finding tangible markers for that — get good grades, win this or that science competition, get into Harvard, get into this or that grad school, get this or that job, own my own home, etc. But none of that stuff was really making me happy. It was like that scene in Eat, Pray, Love where the author has everything in life that’s supposed to mean success, but she’s sobbing on a bathroom floor. (Almost every yoga teacher you’ll ever meet knows that scene from experience.)

So, now I focus more on happiness. As long as I’m making enough financially to be stable, the focus day to day is on whether I feel happy and fulfilled. And for me a lot of that is about finding joy in others. Like, when I think about the people in my life — friends, colleagues, clients — am I excited about what they’re up to? Do I feel connected to other people and businesses around me? Am I satisfied, on any given day, with the impact I’ve had on others? And failing all that, do I have enough chocolate?

Right now, I get to spend my day hanging out with people I love, and actually even get paid to do it. I’m probably not going to be the guy who cures cancer, or the guy who invents the next Google or the next Facebook or even the next Life Alive or Clover, but I’m pretty sure one of my team’s massage clients or yoga students will be. And I get to hold the space that they come to when they need to recharge.

As for milestones or markers, here are a few gratuitous Facebook posts from the studio’s day to day, to give you a sense:

Just two students in class right now. One of them has suffered terrible tragedy, and the other spends her day working with domestic violence. Through the door, I can hear them both laughing.
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Three years ago next Wednesday, we signed the lease for The Breathing Room. Now, one of our students is getting married, and she just asked one of our teachers to choreograph her wedding dance. Sometimes the milestones that matter most are the ones you never imagined.”
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Every few months, there’s a huge shift in the schedule at The Breathing Room as work/life/stuff comes up for all the teachers. During our first year, I freaked out over every change, like the studio would collapse unless all the teachers held onto every time slot forever. But somehow, every time the schedule got shuffled, it wound up getting more and more packed. And every month, when I post the updated calendar, there’s at least one new class I could never have imagined, and usually at least one new teacher I might never have met, and it gets so f’ing exciting. And then teachers I’ve missed for months start coming back, and it just feels so amazing.
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At any given moment, something at a yoga studio will be in a state of disarray. A teacher doesn’t realize she’s subbing, a teacher doesn’t realize she subbed out her class, the studio itself doesn’t realize a teacher needed (or didn’t need) to sub out her class, a teacher drops a class on such short notice that it wreaks havoc on the entire studio’s marketing, a teacher moves to Texas or Thailand on two weeks’ notice, etc., etc., etc. Usually, it’s at *exactly* that moment that a student buys a monthly membership, and says, on her way in to class, “I’ve never been so excited about spending $99 a month before.” The lotus roots in muck, but it’s still a f***ing lotus.
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“And I left a sock in there. I’m going out with one sock missing wearing leather boots.” Sometimes, a yoga teacher just leaves it all out on the field. <3
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Last night, as we were closing the studio, we realized that one of our students was still in the bathroom, sobbing uncontrollably. For the last month or so, teachers had been commenting on what a treasure she was to have in class, but it turned out she was under terrible stress, and felt utterly alone. When she finally came out of the bathroom, embarrassed for “making a scene,” I told her “Pretty much every yoga teacher you’ll ever meet has spent an hour sobbing on a bathroom floor. It’s why we got into this. So, at least now we know what you’ll be doing in a couple years.”

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