This week we’re highlighting two designs by our second guest artist, Lisa Martin of Paint the Mountain. Lisa is a super-amazing Colorado-based painter and muralist. (We’ll have more on her tomorrow when we post our next Yogi Highlight!)
Lisa first reached out to us in August in response to a small Google ad we ran regarding our ability to create custom yoga mats. Unlike our friends at places like Lululemon and Jade and Manduka, we have the flexibility to create mats in small, affordable batches with quick turnaround times. As I’ve discussed in the past, most yoga mats are made and printed in China, require a turnaround time of 3+ months and minimum orders of 500 or more (not to mention the endless, mind-numbing paperwork and red tape that goes along with importing from overseas). We, however, print our yoga mats right here in Minneapolis and we print to order. We don’t maintain warehouses full of pre-printed yoga mats; we maintain stacks of blank mats ready to be printed just for you. All we need is the artwork. Whether it’s your artwork or our artwork, it doesn’t matter to our production process. (And, as an added bonus, the machine-washable microfiber suede yoga mats we make are SO much nicer than the mass-produced PVC and foamy waffle-weave mats that don't stand up.)
Lisa first contacted us on August 20 and had her brand-new yoga mats in-hand 3 weeks later. This included the time needed to prepare print-ready artwork, print the test mats, box them, and ship them from Minneapolis to Denver. She loved the result and wanted others to be able to purchase her amazing artwork on our amazing canvases, so we worked with her to offer her artwork on our site alongside that of Pete Taboada. This allows Lisa to offer HER artwork without carrying any inventory. There’s no up-front investment on her part (aside from the tremendous amount of time needed to create her artwork in the first place.)
One of my favorite things about our artist collaborations is that together we’re creating artwork that people can actually USE! Artwork that hangs on a wall is great, but even better is an object of beauty that you can use every single day. We take our tagline “Yoga Mats Pretty Enough to Hang on a Wall” seriously because they are tough enough to put on the floor. (Actually, I liked that phrase enough to just add it to our front page a moment ago. That’s part of the beauty of running my own business — if I have an idea, I can add it to our site; if I no longer like something, I can get rid of it just as easily!)
Anyway… enough about me. Let’s talk about this week’s Design Highlights. (Sorry ― I just get excited about my business!)
Lisa’s first design is Capitol Peak. Incredibly, this design is also an 18'×15' mural painted on a wall inside 14er Brewing at 3120 Blake Street in Denver. For those of you/us who don’t fit into the intersection of the Venn diagram for Coloradoan + Mountain Climber, a “14er” refers to any of Colorado’s 53(!) peaks over 14,000’. (There are 96 14ers total in the United States; Colorado has 53 of them, and Alaska is a very distant second with a mere 29. Though to be fair, Alaska’s are higher, so it’s probably kind of a wash when it comes to bragging rights…) This design is based on a painting she did of the view from Colorado’s Capitol Peak, which requires a round-trip hike of 17 miles WITH her easel and paints and palette and then working in the cold, dry air all day long until she had captured the view. But wait! There’s more! Between 2014 and 2016, Lisa climbed ALL of Colorado’s 14ers and painted views from the summits of each — this is just ONE of them!
Her second design is Kindness, which is her tribute to the amazing capacity of elephants for empathy toward members of their own species and those of other species. It also serves as a daily reminder, every time you unroll your yoga mat, to be kind to others. As she says, “Out of everything that you can be, be kind.”
Lisa will be our Yogi Highlight this week, and in honor of her amazing achievement, use the promo code 14ER for $10 OFF either of Lisa’s designs until midnight this coming Sunday!
