Five Points cornerstone business falls victim to COVID-19. Here’s how it’ll live on
If she were to truly live by the yoga principles she’s taught to students in Columbia for the past two decades, Stacey Millner-Collins knew she could only make one choice: To do no harm.
And Millner-Collins will always choose to do no harm.
That’s why after 17 years — 13 of them in Five Points — Millner-Collins has officially closed the doors to her City Yoga studio, as the health and financial crisis of the coronavirus pandemic stretches on and threatens countless small businesses across the country.
Vowing to herself not to go into debt, Millner-Collins has shouldered the financial burden acutely felt by many small business owners in this pandemic economy. After more than five months of paying rent and utilities on her homey downtown studio that has sat empty for the better part of the spring and summer, Millner-Collins’ decision frankly came down to paying her landlord or paying herself a living, she said.
“I’m not going to be the only iconic business in Columbia that’s closing. Columbia’s going to look really different a year from now, and I feel sad for Columbia,” Millner-Collins said. “I think people are pretty aware of the plight that restaurants are in, but I don’t think people are quite as aware of the plight of businesses like mine.”
She is clear, though, that while the physical studio is closed for good, City Yoga is still alive, through online and outdoor classes that will continue indefinitely.
Small businesses like City Yoga are uniquely challenged by the economic fallout of the pandemic, said Joseph Von Nessen, a research economist at the University of South Carolina. More than three-quarters of South Carolina businesses have fewer than 10 employees, Von Nessen said, and most lack the financial backing that gives stability to larger businesses in times of extended uncertainty.
In this extended period of economic uncertainty, it’s likely we haven’t even begun to see the end of South Carolina small business closures, especially those that rely on in-person interactions, Von Nessen said.
“The consequences of the pandemic are certainly not at an end,” he said. “As we move into the fall, we’re going to continue to see the fallout. ... I think we’re a long way from being at a new market equilibrium where most of the businesses that would have closed have already closed. We’re not to that point yet.”
The ‘kula’
City Yoga was one of Columbia’s first true yoga studios, and Millner-Collins one of its first serious yoga teachers. She’s been the “mom” of this mom-and-pop business, run with her husband, Brad Collins, and she is the “grandmother of yoga” in a town that had barely begun to embrace the practice in the early 2000s when City Yoga opened its first physical studio on Devine Street.
“I think the growth of City Yoga is a real tribute to Stacey, both as an instructor and as a business person,” said Sally McKay, who joined Millner-Collins as one of her first additional instructors at Devine Street and followed to the new Five Points location in 2007. “She understands that if your business is not meeting and even exceeding the expectations of your clients and customers ... then it’s not going to last.”
Through the years, yoga grew in popularity in the Columbia area, and more studios opened. City Yoga stayed true to traditional yoga philosophy, emphasizing alignment and deep-rooted principles of the practice, even as modern, divergent yoga trends took hold in the mainstream fitness world.
It’s built and maintained a loyal base of students — many of them becoming teachers themselves — who include college professors and college students, bankers and artists, retirees and lifelong Columbians. Among many regulars, the City Yoga community is known as a “kula,” a Sanskrit word for family or tribe.
“City Yoga has been this sanctuary in the city for (yoga students); they can step outside of their normal, everyday, hectic lives and step into what they saw as a sacred space,” McKay said.
One of City Yoga’s longtime students, Diana Pretz, would attend classes as many as five days a week. She was a regular, with several others, on Sunday mornings; they called it “church,” she said.
“Understanding that yoga is not about the poses, it’s about life off your mat kept me coming back,” Pretz said. “At first there was an intrigue, and then there were really results. There was a calmness.”
Tearfully letting go
In March of this year, as the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic settled in for South Carolinians, City Yoga — like nearly all businesses of its kind — shut its doors and quickly pivoted its service model. Classes with various teachers were recorded and made available online for rent or purchase, and the studio’s teachers soon added live online classes via Zoom.
It was an easier transition for some than others, Millner-Collins acknowledged, but instructors and students settled in. Many former City Yoga students who had moved out of Columbia began to pop in for online classes, she said. Still, there were downsides to practicing beyond the communal walls of the studio.
“Part of what yoga is and the way I was taught and trained is that it is a community practice. You come together in a space intentionally and move together,” Millner-Collins said. “I felt like, if we can’t come together communally for a while, is that really doing yoga the way I would want it to be done?”
Weeks after S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster officially OK’d the reopening of gyms and fitness studios — which, at the time in mid-May, Millner-Collins thought was too soon to be safe — she decided to reopen the City Yoga studio on July 1 with vastly limited class sizes and strict precautions.
But as coronavirus infection numbers continued to rise, and fewer people than expected returned to the studio for in-person classes, City Yoga closed its doors again.
It soon became apparent that keeping up the cost of the 3,000-square-foot physical space, where the monthly electric bill alone could run hundreds of dollars, simply was not sustainable for a business that would run fully online for the indefinite future.
Millner-Collins made a tearful decision to end the lease on the building at the end of August, letting go of the home she built there for herself, her instructors and their many students.
“The studio was always more difficult than raising my own children,” she said. “After 17 years, it kind of makes sense to me — it’s like I’ve raised this child, and now it’s going off to college, and I’m like an empty-nester again. I don’t have to be here and married to the building and married to the expense.”
It’s still home
The closing of the physical space is not an end for City Yoga. The business will live on through online and outdoor classes, just as it has throughout the pandemic.
After working harder in the past six months than she has since she first opened her business, Millner-Collins says she and her husband look forward to the opportunity to roam outside of Columbia next year, perhaps. After all, she can teach online yoga from anywhere.
And in the future, she believes City Yoga certainly will return to a new brick-and-mortar studio, possibly smaller, possibly more in the boutique realm.
In the meantime, the “kula” is sticking together.
“City Yoga is my home, and it’s home to a lot of us,” Pretz said. “There is still going to be City Yoga out there, and that really does help those of us where it is home. I speak for a lot of friends of mine.”
