The Seattle based company, Yoga Panda, that launched a yoga class finder app last year has announced on Monday that they will be retiring the App which was available on iOS, on Android and on the web. Yoga Panda made it easy for people interested in yoga classes to easily find and book yoga classes on a pay-as-you-go model at almost 50 different yoga studios all over the Greater Seattle area with savings that are up to 50% off standard drop in rates based on how busy classes are. The company, which did not raise any external capital from investors, failed to get enough traction to be able to continue its growth and expand beyond yoga to fitness and to other cities.
Othmane Rahmouni, the CEO of Yoga Panda, made the following announcement on the company website:
[su_quote]When we started Yoga Panda early last year our vision was to provide the yoga community in the Seattle area with a great search experience on their mobile device to be able to easily find, book and pay for yoga classes near them on demand on a pay as you go model with the potential for up to 50% in savings when attending classes that are less busy. We also wanted to create a new marketing tool for yoga studios that helped attract new students and fill unused spots in yoga classes at local studios. We embarked in this journey with a lot of optimism and we truly believed in our dream of creating a platform that provided a win-win proposition for both consumers and studio owners. We worked hard and over the course of the last year, we were able to onboard almost 50 different yoga studios in the Seattle area and thousands of you have installed the Yoga Panda App. Yet, this was not enough, we needed many more people to install, start using the app and book yoga classes regularly on the Yoga Panda platform. Had we succeeded in reaching our growth objectives with Yoga Panda in the Seattle area, our goal was to launch the platform in other cities all over the US and add other fitness classes and wellness services into the platform.[/su_quote]
Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of multiple technology startups making classes at local fitness centers accessible directly from an app on a mobile phone. One of the big players in this space is the New York based company Classpass which has raised 84 Million dollars since their launch in 2012 and they have scaled their platform to about 40 cities both in the US and internationally. Classpass sells a monthly membership in the Seattle area for $89 which allows its users to attend fitness classes at a variety of locations around town but with the restriction of only being able to attend a certain location up to 3 times. They have also introduced earlier this year the option to buy a 5 class pass for $50 with the restriction of only using it at one studio twice.
There are other companies with similar apps to Yoga Panda that are focused on selling classes on-demand but include fitness classes beyond just yoga, these include Zenrez, Lymber and Open Sweat. Zenrez launched in the Seattle area a few weeks ago. Lymber plans to do so in the near future.
Yoga Panda was a Seattle Yoga News partner and a regular at many of the local yoga events hosted in the Seattle area, they were famous for their panda head which event attendees often used to snap photos of themselves showcasing their favorite yoga pose.
We wish the Yoga Panda team the best luck in their future endeavors. For more details about Yoga Panda, you can review the official announcement and read this 17-page essay published by Othmane Rahmouni on his personal blog describing the journey from start to finish.
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