“I started off as a student, then I became an instructor, then I became an owner,” says Jenn Tuttle, the owner of Fredericton’s The Nest Yoga studio.
The studio is set to expand the Nest family when it opens a brand-new location in Saint John this spring. It will feature hot yoga and a retail store and be located at 22 King Street, right in the heart of Saint John.
Work is currently underway to get the location ready.
The new location will take up two floors of the building at the corner of King and Canterbury; one floor will be the yoga studio while the other will be a large retail store featuring lululemon, prAna, and Saks brands, as well as many others.
There will also be some new health and lifestyle additions to the retail space, including bee products from local Saint John beekeeper Lincoln Bell.
“We’ll also have a wellness section and some treatment rooms,” Tuttle says. “So the first floor will be a mixture of retail and wellness. We’re just really excited to be getting into the wellness space…it’s going to be really great.”
Tuttle says the decision to expand to Saint John became clear during the pandemic.
“There used to be a hot yoga studio in the Uptown area, and other yoga studios. Unfortunately with COVID they ended up closing,” she says. “We were starting to get a lot of people that were coming to Fredericton and saying: would you ever think about coming to Saint John? We would love to have a studio in Saint John.”
After a bit of investigating it was clear the market was there.
“The Uptown has really grown and expanded. It’s got a really great community feel. There’s a lot of support for new businesses,” she says.
Fredericton memberships will be honoured at the Saint John location and vice versa, creating a true cohesion between the two studio spaces.
“Community is a big part of who we are,” Tuttle says. “I spend my days with our staff and with our students, so it’s like every day I feel like I’m hanging out with friends.”
The Nest Yoga has an energy exchange program that will also be carried over to the Saint John location. Tuttle says it’s about creating a safe space for practitioners.
“Safety can mean physical, it can be visual, it can be mental,” she says, noting that cleaning and cleanliness of the space is highly important. “In our energy exchange program is where someone will come in and work at the studio three hours per week, it might be cleaning or doing laundry, and they get a free membership [to the studio].”
The new location, The Nest Yoga Saint John, will also feature showers, change rooms, and other amenities found in the Fredericton location.
As with all construction-related projects over the past two years, there have been supply chain and other logistical issues slowing progress down and pushing opening dates back. But Tuttle has taken a pragmatic approach to the delays.
“Practicing yoga and meditation has been hugely helpful in that things are going to happen and be complete in their own time,” she says. “You just kind of have to let it go and trust that it’s going to happen when it’s supposed to happen. That has been hugely freeing for me.”
Alex Graham is a reporter with Huddle, an Acadia Broadcasting content partner.
