Some people advise against starting a business with partners. Some advise against starting a business with friends.
Well, Wolo Yoga goes against both pieces of advice.
Jenn Ku was an accountant-turned-yoga teacher. After a stint as a chef and barista, Dean Yeong worked as a writer and head of content at a US tech/ecommerce company. Brandom Han was—and still is—an accountant and an avid yoga practitioner.
Jenn and Brandom have been childhood friends since secondary school, born and bred in Johor. Meanwhile, Perak-born Dean and Jenn are married.
And yet, the three have been able to establish and grow Wolo Yoga for the past four years, showing how going into business with loved ones might just work.
Starting as an experiment
While Wolo Yoga officially began in 2021, its story started before that.
After starting to practise yoga in 2018, Jenn noticed that it was difficult to find a reliable yoga mat. It was always an after-class conversation among yogis, but the consensus was that there wasn’t a prominent brand offering just that in Malaysia.
But during the MCO, things were starting to change. There was a rise in demand of reliable yoga mats with more people practising yoga at home. Noticing this demand, Jenn started exploring the market.
Before long, she got Dean, who was in the digital marketing space, onboard to set up an ecommerce store.
Initially, Dean was only helping out with the website setup and early-stage marketing, but a promising outlook on the business convinced him to join as a partner.
From there, Brandom, who had been practising yoga for years and had part-time experience at Lululemon, decided to join the team too to help with accounting and finances.
Even though all three seemed excited about the business’ prospects, they were still prudent about the venture. In fact, they saw Wolo Yoga as an experiment in the beginning.
“We didn’t quit our jobs when we started Wolo Yoga,” Dean explained. “And we used the pre-order business model to secure customers before investing in inventory.”
The project started in October 2020, where the team went through multiple iterations, testing out various materials.
“We know we don’t want the average PVC and TPE yoga mats due to health and environmental concerns, so we were considering rubber, fabric, and cork,” Dean shared with Vulcan Post. “We also went back and forth with more than 10 manufacturers from China, India, and Vietnam.”
For every sampling, they managed to get friends who practise yoga to test them out and give feedback.
Before placing an order, though, the Wolo team launched their website with a deep pre-order discount.
“We got 70+ sales before placing an order from our manufacturer. That was our first flagship product—Mastery Mat,” they said. “We ran some ads and got some strangers to buy from us. But a lot of the initial customers are our friends and family. The key takeaway here is to ask.”
After six months of trial and error, Wolo Yoga officially debuted in April 2021.
Taking it seriously
Yet, after the relatively successful initial pre-order launch, the trio didn’t do much to grow the business for almost 1.5 years.
They would get some sales coming in organically, but it wasn’t substantial—nor was it sustainable.
By 2023, they made a change—they decided to take Wolo Yoga seriously.
“The biggest change was that we started running Meta ads,” Dean said. “We started from spending RM20 per day, slowly we scale our ad spend to over RM15,000 a month at its peak.”
Taking the business seriously also meant taking their community seriously. To do that, they began offering an instructor programme for yoga teachers, working with them to promote their products.
“The feedback we got from teachers and customers also helped us to develop our second flagship product, Away Travel Mat,” Dean said. “It’s lightweight and foldable—which is what lots of our customers ask for.”
Today, they continue to put focus on the community by running offline events. There are plans to run a yoga retreat very soon, too.
Behind the mat
But what makes Wolo Yoga’s mat unique? There are so many options in the market at various price points, mainly from global brands such as Lululemon, Adidas, and Decathlon.
Wolo Yoga’s mats are quite an investment, too, with a price of RM390 for the Mastery Mat, which is more expensive than even Lululemon’s The Mat (RM318).
Well, the team believes that beyond community, it comes down to the product.
Wolo Yoga’s mats are made with vegan leather for the top layer to enhance grippiness, while the bottom is made with 100% natural rubber, which is dense and has anti-slip properties. The natural rubber used is SGS-certified to be non-toxic.
“Our yoga mats are suitable for everyday practitioners,” Dean said. “Yes, lots of our customers are instructors and serious yoga practitioners. However, people always get surprised after trying our yoga mats. It helps to level-up their practices so much.”
That might be why when it comes to Malaysian brands, Wolo Yoga is one of few.
A sustainable practice
Growing Wolo Yoga has been a slow and steady journey for the team of three. They took on a cautious approach, operating the business in a lean and careful manner.
Dean reiterated, “In the first few years, we didn’t quit our jobs, and we didn’t get a salary out of Wolo Yoga.”
Starting out, the trio invested less than RM1,000 to set up their website and run ads. Their first inventory order was placed using the revenue from the pre-order launch.
It was some time later when they decided to take the business seriously that they invested another RM25,000 of their own savings.
But the business has since become profitable. To date since their launch, they have raked in RM450,000 in revenue, with the last 12 months accounting for RM230,000.
However, the only full-time employee currently is Jenn. “We will need to scale it even further to grow our operation,” Dean said.
Growing the business entails running more offline events and expanding the product line into more yoga accessories and possibly even Pilates products.
Beyond being sustainable financially, though, the business is sustainable environmentally. As such, they aim to become a certified B-Corp business.
“It’s a global standard that keeps businesses with strict sustainability measures in terms of environmental and social impact,” Dean explained. “We’ve been planting a tree for every mat sold and paying carbon projects to offset customer deliveries since the beginning. However, we want to explore what more we can do.”
Four years in, Wolo Yoga isn’t just coasting—it has plenty more it wants to achieve. However, the team understands that things won’t be perfect. In fact, Dean believes you can’t plan for things to be perfect.
“Lots of what we do are experiments. We create a hypothesis and test it. Things don’t always turn out perfectly so we don’t fantasise about the best case scenarios,” he pointed out.
Thankfully, it seems like Wolo Yoga has been an experiment that has worked out positively for the trio.
Featured Image Credit: Wolo Yoga
