Unexpected turn in career path leads to Flow Yoga

In early 2009, Jill McLane Baker began to ponder a new job. She was a photojournalist for the Kalamazoo Gazette and envisioned big potholes ahead on what appeared to becoming becoming an uncertain career path.

"Things were stagnating, things were changing. I left college with so much hope and optimism; I never thought that newspapers would just go away," she says.

But McLane Baker found a back-up plan in her passion for yoga. She got her teaching certificate, and, along with co-owner Betsy Vermeulen Young, opened Flow Yoga in a Plainwell studio January 2010. It was time to leave photojournalism behind.

Flow Yoga turned a profit the first year. What began as the two women teaching a couple of classes weekly has rapidly evolved to a lineup of courses taking place six--and sometimes seven--days a week.

There are now five instructors (including the proprietors) who teach the 25 to 50 students coming in each week. One new instructor came on board in January and another in the fall of 2011. Each one, according to McLane Baker, teaches his or her own style of Hatha yoga.

"I started doing yoga in 2005, to get back into shape after my twin boys were born," McLane Baker says. "It was just me and a DVD in my basement, but I loved the way it made me feel."

The leap from cashing a full-time steady paycheck to starting a brand new business was a daunting one.

"It was scary. Plainwell is a bedroom community and we weren’t sure how big a studio it could support," she says.

It is the only yoga studio, in town, however, and as it turned out, most of Flow Yoga’s clientele come from Plainwell, Otsego and Allegan.

"This is an awesome community," says McLane Baker, who lives in Kalamazoo. "We’re growing all the time and adding people--this has really exceeded my expectations."


Writer: Kelle Barr, Second Wave
Source: Jill McLane Baker

Photos by Jill McLane Baker

Flow Yoga  co-owners Betsy Vermeulen Young and Jill McLane Baker.

Flow Yoga students, from left, Sara Robbins, Diane Robbins, Jill Dunham, and Darcy Pavlack stand in Warrior I.

Instructor Renzo Tormen adjusts student Diane Robbins in Balancing Half Moon pose. Diane Robbins' daughter Sara Robbins is at right.