Beyond Yoga CEO Nancy Green has a straightforward response when asked why the popular athleisure brand chose a temporary rather than permanent location for its latest retail footprint in New York City.
"Oh, we will," Green said of the pop-up location, which officially opened its doors in September and is scheduled to remain open through January. "It’s a great way to explore and to learn and sort of test out the area. But yes, eventually we will have a permanent home."
While the company has opted not to disclose specific financial metrics regarding the performance of its temporary New York retail space, Green noted that she is thoroughly "pleased" with the results thus far. Furthermore, the brand has been met with an overwhelmingly positive wave of feedback from local consumers who have visited the storefront.
Situated in the heart of New York City’s bustling Flatiron District, the current store takes heavy design cues from Beyond Yoga’s previous 2024 pop-up, which was also established in a nearby location. While that initial foray into the New York market leaned heavily into community-building and experiential events, this year’s iteration delivers a much more fully realized, built-out shopping environment. It also incorporates a dedicated studio space designed specifically to host fitness classes and other interactive brand activations.
These community-focused events have already begun drawing significant attention. Last Saturday, the pop-up hosted an "Open Air" event that combined a communal neighborhood run with a special live musical performance by pop singer Natasha Bedingfield. For Green, moments like this encapsulate the core philosophy of the brand—one centered around what she describes as "owning joy" and "celebrating progress over perfection."
"A lot of people and players in this space are emphasizing performance and high performance," Green said, reflecting on the broader athleisure and activewear landscape. "We’re not about that. We’re about actually enjoying the experience. … I think that joy is very, very important and needed right now in the world."
While such statements might initially sound like standard corporate messaging or marketing positioning, the ethos translates directly into the company’s physical retail strategy as well.
It was all yellow
Beyond Yoga currently operates a growing fleet of 20 stores across the country, including the temporary New York City pop-up shop. Visually, these locations share a distinct and unifying characteristic: they are, by and large, splashed in yellow. Depending on the specific site, this bright hue might adorn the exterior facade, wash over the interior walls, or wrap around both spaces entirely.
"We activate through color, and we have a very unique point of view on color, and that is part of the joy," Green explained, elaborating on the deliberate design choice. "Yellow is a joyful color."
Beyond serving as welcoming, visually striking environments to browse and purchase merchandise, the brand’s brick-and-mortar stores are designed to integrate deeply into the local communities they inhabit. This community integration involves strategic partnerships with neighborhood fitness groups and instructors. Such collaborations not only lend authentic credibility to Beyond Yoga’s product line but also feed seamlessly into the brand’s overarching purpose: supporting and uplifting the everyday active lifestyles of its shoppers.
"We create a really important experience, I think, that is very human and inclusive and fun and joyful," Green said. "The brand is very much about joy, so you can feel that in the store."
First and foremost, however, the brand’s physical storefronts serve a critical functional purpose for a digitally native audience—providing online shoppers with a tangible method to interact with Beyond Yoga in person. Because New York stands as one of Beyond Yoga’s largest and most lucrative e-commerce markets, setting up a physical footprint in the city was a natural progression. Moreover, the product assortment inside the Flatiron District store has been carefully curated and tailored specifically to the tastes and lifestyle demands of New York consumers.
"We know we need a permanent home in New York, probably more than one," Green said, noting that the overwhelming demand for the brand has been abundantly clear ever since the debut of their 2024 pop-up installation in the city.
This data-informed approach to physical expansion mirrors how Beyond Yoga has historically chosen its permanent store locations. The retailer originally launched its physical retail presence in Santa Monica, California, before gradually expanding across the broader Southern California region and up the West Coast. As a Los Angeles-based brand, those early real estate decisions placed brick-and-mortar shops in close proximity to the highest concentrations of their existing core consumer base.
Since those initial localized rollouts, Beyond Yoga has continued to select store locations largely through a sophisticated, data-driven strategy that prioritizes the markets with the highest density of e-commerce buyers. This strategy directly informed the company’s expansion to the East Coast approximately a year ago—a move that Green reports has been remarkably successful. Like many modern omnichannel retailers, Beyond Yoga has observed a measurable lift in online e-commerce sales within specific geographic markets immediately following the opening of a physical store in those areas.
"You’re creating an ecosystem, a customer ecosystem, and many of these markets, we also have wholesale — whether it’s through studios or some of our larger accounts — and so they all support each other," Green said.
Within this interconnected ecosystem, wholesale partnerships continue to function as a vital discovery channel for new customers, occasionally introducing the brand to regions where Beyond Yoga may never establish a dedicated corporate storefront. When it comes to the brand’s own brick-and-mortar retail locations, however, the primary objective remains focused on serving existing e-commerce loyalists by delivering a high-quality, immersive in-person brand experience.
"This brand can have many stores. It’s a premium brand, needs to be in the top markets where the customer is shopping," Green concluded. "Every year we’re growing, and so the markets that today might not be right for a store, three years from now they might be right as the brand grows and as we build awareness."