San Francisco art director Dan Abramson is on a crusade to give yoga a manlier rep. A devoted practitioner for five years, the Presidio resident has been rebranding the ancient discipline since 2013, when he launched Brogamats, a line of yoga mat holsters that look like foil-wrapped burritos or sword sheaths. His new project, Yoga Joes ($25 per set), reshapes the battlefield postures of classic army-green toy soldiers into peaceful asanas, such as Child’s Pose, Downward-Facing Dog, and Cobra—a clever twist on their usual combative stances.Abramson, who has an extensive background in advertising, launched a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to fund Yoga Joes in early September, and he raised $108,000—270 percent of the original $40,000 goal. This exposure gained the entrepreneur an unexpected following. “I got an enormous response from military men and women doing yoga,” says the 30-year-old. Abramson hopes to mass-produce and distribute the basic set of six military yogis (the prototypes were originally 3D-printed) by Christmas. The surplus funds from the Kickstarter campaign will go toward producing more poses, as well as a limited-edition set of irreverent hot-pink soldiers.
This article was published in 7x7's December/January 2014 issue. Click here to subscribe.
