Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Iana Velez. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Iana, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

I began this journey in 2015 creating a local print magazine, celebrating the New York wellness community, since nothing like this existed. I was excited to combine my love for art and design with my love for my hometown of NYC, and yoga all in one place! As a Latina, I was also excited to amplify the teachers and voices in my community since I didn’t see it happening in any other wellness magazines.

When the pandemic hit in 2020 and so many local yoga studios closed down, I was faced with a tough decision of either shutting down my local publication, or figuring out a way to pivot. Online classes that gained popularity during the pandemic, offered everyone opportunities to now experience teachers and classes all over the country, so I took a chance of reaching even further and expanding our community and distribution reach nationally.

Now five years later Yoga Love Magazine is the only nationally distributed annual print yoga and wellness publication that is distributed for free at yoga studios and festivals all across the country. We are created by the community, for the community by our all volunteer collective.

I’ve always loved print magazines, especially since we spend so much time on our digital devices, and our nervous systems are bombarded with news, social media and digital noise. My hope was that a print magazine would offer our community a few moments to unplug and reset while holding a thoughtfully curated and beautifully designed publication.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

The thing I am most proud of is our all volunteer team. I started this magazine with no investors, savings or any kind of money and still an important part of my mission was for this magazine to be available for free. Yoga and wellness had gotten astronomically expensive, and I wanted something that was accessible to all.

Quite honestly, I naively thought I could, and would, create every print issue all by myself. As I started sharing the idea with my friends and community, people started coming forward and offering help. I was so moved, and it is truly incredible the love and generosity that the wellness community has. Our all volunteer team has grown from 1 to now 9 people, from Hawaii to NYC!

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I wouldn’t describe my business journey as one of resilience to be honest. When I started, I had no idea what was actually required to run your own business, and had I known how challenging the journey was going to be, I might have never even tried!

I will say that I had great love for what I was doing, and I guess you could say that was what fueled my resilience. Creating a print magazine was the perfect intersection of all the things I loved most, yoga, design and creativity, creating community and amplifying voices. It was what kept me going on days when I didn’t think I could keep going. This is why it is now called Yoga Love Magazine.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

We started as a local print magazine that pivoted to a national one in 2021. Our distribution model was based on partnerships with local yoga studios and festivals, and during the pandemic so many shutdown and those that did remain open were barely holding on. It was heartbreaking to hear day after day people who had devoted their lives to wellness and healing, now having to close their businesses they had given their heart and souls to.

With no way to distribute the magazine in NYC I was at a crossroads with how, and even if I could continue. We tried doing a few digital issues, but my heart wasn’t in it. One day it occurred to me that with the surge in popularity of online yoga during the shutdown, I was now enjoying and learning about teachers all over the country. We were no longer geographically restricted to what classes and teachers we could take and it was really exciting.

I decided to give it a try and start reaching out to studios across the country and we were able to triple the amount of partners we had. It was around this time that the only other remaining national print yoga magazine stopped printing, and people were excited to learn about us and be a part of what we were growing. To this day we are the only nationally distributed annual print publication created by an all volunteer team thanks to their generous support, and that of our yoga studio partners, advertisers and community!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://yogalovemagazine.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yogalove_magazine/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yogaplusmag
• Twitter: @yogalovemagazine
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP85NBDfuIfu_yLBb2So4SA

Image Credits

Paul Undersinger (photo of me only)