She quit her job and found her purpose: to help others find theirs
Most of the time, Jennifer Jones acts like a kid.
She loves to move and dance and play. She’s contagiously happy, says what’s on her mind, and has an optimistic, wide-eyed view of what the future holds.
Jones believes acting like a child at play is actually our natural state of being as humans, and it has the power to unlock the untold potential within us, but society systematically dampens that verve. It was with that belief that Jones left a promising career in advertising to help people rediscover that playfulness and find their purpose.
Jones, 30, is the owner and sole proprietor of New Love City, a yoga studio in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y. In a city where yoga studios are common, New Love City is anything but.
By day, the studio is a co-working space, serving the neighborhood’s many freelancers, artists, musicians, writers, and others who don’t work in the countless office buildings that pierce the sky above Manhattan. During evenings and weekends, the studio serves as a multi-purpose space, hosting everything from cocktail parties to photo shoots.
These additional revenue streams allow Jones to pay her yoga teachers well (yoga instructors are notoriously underpaid) and make the classes something special for students. The classes are high-energy, fun, and even playful.
Playful, youthful state
The playful, fun-loving atmosphere Jones works hard to create is inspired by her beliefs about how movement is socialized out of all of us. “Children move around all day long. They say out loud what they want,” she said. “They make things happen because they have not yet been told not to.”
Gradually, Jones says, as children progress through school, the natural drive to move is discouraged, preparing them for the nose-to-the-grindstone demands of adulthood. “This natural state of wanting to move is socialized out of us for the purpose of getting things done,” she hypothesized. “There is value to that, but there is also value to understanding what your body wants and needs.”
So at New Love City, Jones and her instructors encourage, simply, exploration via movement. NLC teachers are trained in ashtanga-based vinyasa yoga from a variety of training programs and are incorporating their own experiences into the styles they teach — specifically, she looked for teachers with strong opinions. While classes are challenging, they don’t harp on “achievement” of ultra-flexibility or advanced yoga poses, which can be intimidating to and exclusive of some students. “It doesn’t matter what poses look like. Everybody’s body is different,” she said. “We’re looking for that playful, youthful state that is natural to the human body.”
New Love City also makes yoga more accessible to students, eschewing the dogmatic approach many studios take, which strikes Jones as exclusive and off-putting. “I have amazing teachers,” Jones said. “We’re bringing yoga to them where it’s most relevant, in the music we play and the way it feels good to move your body after sitting at a desk all day.”
“Children move around all day long. They say out loud what they want. They make things happen because they have not yet been told not to.”
An amazing thing happens when the body starts moving, Jones continues, that gets to the heart of her mission and why her students keep coming back. “You can see people become empowered,” she said, adding that it’s common in classes for students to talk about their intentions and what they want to do in work and in life. “They are in control of their bodies and their thoughts and what they want. They are driving their own lives.”
Switcheroo
Jones’ passion for empowering students to find their own paths and get what they want out of life reflects her journey of self-rediscovery.
Since graduating from Marquette University, she was dutifully working her way up the ranks in the advertising business. In 2010, her career took the Grand Rapids, Mich., native to New York, the city around which the entire advertising universe spins.
As the digital director at a trendy, cutting-edge agency, Jones was in a position that many young professionals only dream about, but she started feeling bogged down. “I was getting more fed up with the minutiae,” she said, recalling stressing over click-through rates increasing or decreasing by increments of 0.02 percent.
At the same time, she took up yoga, first going to classes, then taking the required 200 hours of training to become an instructor.
That experience changed her life. “You get all these years of socialization and crap out of your body and giving yourself permission to move around and be yourself. You feel awesome,” she said. “I started to have a better grasp on what I wanted out of life.”
Her interest in yoga grew, and she moved from being a part-time instructor to quitting her advertising job to teach full-time and manage a small studio in SoHo. “It was an enormous financial switcheroo, but it made me really happy,” she said of her career change.
She found that she not only liked it, but also she was pretty good at it. The classes grew from just a few people to being full.
Still, managing the studio wasn’t enough, because it wasn’t hers. She began to develop a vision of her own studio and how she would run it, envisioning a studio in a Brooklyn warehouse, serving the borough’s unique residents with classes that were approachable, fun and empowering.
Then, in the course of a few days in the summer of 2015, her vision took on a life of its own. She was researching warehouse spaces to develop a presentation for potential investors when by chance she found a space she could afford on her own. She went to see the space on a Monday, signed the lease on a Tuesday, and by the weekend she got the keys.
Exactly one month later, New Love City was open for business. While Jones was finally doing what she felt she was meant to do — empowering students through yoga — she still relied on her experience in advertising to build the business.
From the start, Jones wanted New Love City to be different from the rest of the yoga studios, and her working knowledge of branding, design, demographics and business allowed her to accomplish that.
“Our brand is a work in progress, but it’s not the Papyrus font and purple lotus flowers you see at every other studio,” she said, amused. Jones looked to technology and apparel brands for inspiration. “It’s very different and students really feel it. It makes the whole place really special.”
Winning Philosophy
So far, in its first year of operation, New Love City is growing slowly and steadily. “So far it’s going unbelievably well,” Jones said with her trademark optimism, citing the studio’s month-over-month growth. “I’m just waiting for the thing to pick up more speed.”
Regardless of the current success of the studio, Jones feels she is part of a new approach to work. “What I’ve done is pay really close attention to what I care about and what I’m good at,” she said. “Being adaptable within the scope of what you’re passionate about, to me that’s such a winning philosophy.”
That philosophy has led Jones to where she is, and having a clear sense of purpose. New Love City is all about empowering people through movement. “Movement makes you feel empowered. Recreation makes you feel happy,” she said.
Jones believes her students, and perhaps society in general, are starved for that feeling of empowerment. “It’s the opposite of what we normally feel, which is self-belittling in terms of what you can’t do, what you look like and what you’ll never be,” she concluded. “This is a fuck-that-shit sort of place. I truly believe anyone can tap into that and be whatever you want.”
