Female Founders: Alyza Brevard-Rodriguez of SW3AT On The Five Things You Need To Thrive and Succeed as a Woman Founder

As a part of our series about “Why We Need More Women Founders”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alyza Brevard-Rodriguez.

She is a service member, a business owner, and a mom. Her business SW3AT Sauna Studio is an infrared sauna studio in Jersey City & Hoboken, NJ. Her facility specialized in heat therapy supporting benefits such as muscle recovery, weight loss, skin purification, and detoxification.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?

Thanks for sharing your platform with me! My name is Alyza and myself and my wife own an infrared sauna studio named SW3AT. We have 2 locations in Northern New Jersey but have recently developed it into a franchise and are seeking out prospects for nationwide territories. I have served almost 10 years in the U.S. Navy as a military police officer, doing similar work in the civilian sector. After being newly married my wife and I started our entrepreneurial journey with a fitness apparel company and developed it into a brick and mortar in 2018. Although I have extensive schooling, none of it was in business so I took an SBA course called “Boots to Business.” After my crash course in business, I was ready to dive in (or so I thought lol). I attempted to get a traditional loan to develop the business and I ended up running into a tremendous number of obstacles. This led to me self-funding the business with money I had saved from a deployment the year prior. I completely wiped out my savings because I couldn’t find any options for capital. Fast forward to a few years operational and another deployment under my belt, we opened our second location and completed the franchising process.

I have always had an entrepreneurship spirit since I was a child. I sold candy bars at school, went door to door in the projects and I even had a paper route. Unfortunately, coming from an underserved population, I never knew what an entrepreneur was. I never knew any business owners or had any mentors or people to guide me…. which is probably what led me to the military. I…