Despite increases in the number of women-owned businesses in Austin, female and nonbinary entrepreneurs still face many barriers. They often lack the networks, community, funding, and visibility to grow in size and sales, and as a result have difficulty reaching the consumers who would be most inclined to support them. SheWork is a series of zines that aims to archive and highlight WOBs in the Austin community in hopes of bringing more customers to the stores.



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7. Studio Satya

@studio_satya_austin

A Conversation with Mary Richardson of Studio Satya. Studio Satya is a yoga studio in north Austin that focuses on tradional yoga and building an inclusive community. 


How do you balance being a teacher, mom and running the studio?

I think for any new business owner the first year is the hardest, maybe two or three years. It's hard because I do everything. I'm the janitor. I cleaned the toilets, I update the schedule, talk to teachers and have meetings. I feel like I'm starting to get into a rhythm to where things will kind of take care of themselves a little bit and I won't live here anyway anymore. I have two kids at home so that gets to be difficult sometimes where I feel like I'm not really spending time with them. I hope it's going to get easier and then once it is, it'll be worth it that I put all the energy and time into it now so that it'll kind of be self-sustainable later and I can balance a little bit more. There's no balance, you know, but hopefully I'll get there soon.

How did you create a community from the people and teachers who you had already been working with?

As soon as I signed the lease on this place, I made a video and announced it. Everyone, all the teachers shared it to the word out there. And then we would do updates. Basically I just figured if I wanted it to be a community that I had to take down the wall so to speak. I would show my kids here when we're doing construction and you’d see one kid climbing the pile of, of wood flooring, or they'd see all the teachers that I invited to paint. Yoga teachers are not good painters, so that ended up being fun. I invited some of the students that were regulars as well to come in and see the space beforehand. Basically just inviting everyone to be part of the process and then keeping everyone in the loop. The big thing was that when yoga yoga closed, we were all out of the loop. We had no idea what was going on. Even in the process of it switching over to a new studio, it's like we were kind of kept in the dark and so I felt like the biggest thing to build community is like to bring everyone in and allow them to be part of the process.