The hours of 10pm – 1am aren’t the most conducive to getting great customer service when you’re trying to build your own small business. A lot of the time, I found myself resorting to YouTube videos and/or google searches to get my answers. Kinda scary when you think about building your future and relying on the advice of people you don’t actually know. Quickly, “trial and error” had become my good friends and I wasn’t shy about calling in favors to people who could help me along the way from my yoga community. Thank goodness Boulder was not only full of tech savvy individuals, start-up enthusiasts, and also forward-thinking CU students who were smart, eager, supportive, and genuinely excited to see a female yogi thrive.
When I sent out the text to Gregory Sackett requesting help on my website design, I didn’t realize he would turn into a key partner that would help shape its future and co-design one of our best-selling products. Originally, I was just looking for someone to help bring my brand to life with a logo that embodied “alignment”.
Gregory had an engineer foundation and understood materials, an art background from CU-Boulder, a classic mid-century modern feel for clean lines, and was a part of the Boulder on the Hill yoga community. I can remember talking him through my expectations of what I thought I wanted in a logo (he's gotten used to me coming to him with a "vision" putting a creative spin on it, and running with it). I wanted something clean, simple, and applicable to various yoga products. The TVLA YOGA logo you see today went through several transformations: it started out very colorful and had a significant number of lines built into it. Each edit we made was a constant reminder to “simplify” and not over complicate things (something I think we still remind ourselves of today during TVLA product development and brainstorming meetings).
The moment we landed on the final product; we both knew it was a done deal. Neither of us had any more input on it (which was a miracle to be honest) – it was simple, clean, and felt like an intuitive compass or roadmap to personal alignment. I remember sitting on Gregory’s living room floor while he sat in his desk chair – both of us just kind of staring at this glowing screen of Adobe Suite.
We didn’t know it yet, but that was going to be the first of M-A-N-Y co-collaborative projects for us. That’s how TVLA YOGA went from “me” to “we”.