October 2025 Amber Grant Awarded to Yoga Bands

Video Transcript

Jama: Hi everyone. My name is Jama with Women’s Net and we’re excited today to talk to our October winners. We have a fascinating, wonderful, creative, and awesome team of women this month and we’re excited to introduce them to you. We’re going to go ahead and get started. We have with us our Amber Grant winner, Emily, and she is with Yoga Bands. Thank you so much for taking the time to connect with us to tell us a little bit about your business. To begin, Emily, will you please tell us a little bit about yoga bands and also what or who inspired your business?

Emily: We started about five years ago, and I’ve always had a love for watches and I thought that it would be a good idea to try to design my own watch band. I had worn watch bands before and they would get my wrist irritated- the plastic ones or there were other issues with leather or the metal ones. And so I was trying to find something that I could do with fabric, and I came up with this design and we, we have a patent pending on it. We call them Yoga Bands because the fabric is kind of a yoga type fabric. Anyway, it’s been an amazing journey for the last five years as we’ve been working on this company and promoting it and trying to build it. 

It’s not just been a straight line from point A to point B. It’s very much been a curvy road to try to find where we’re at. It’s been extremely a positive experience and a good one for me and for my whole family. But the who inspired us mostly was a college roommate that shortly after she graduated from college started to design (she really loved to work out) a belly band that supported her pregnant belly while she was running. And I watched her as she created that and went through the whole process. It was really inspiring, and it made me feel like I could accomplish whatever I wanted. So I dove down the watch band route, and I am really happy with where we’re at right now.

Jama: Congratulations, what a great experience to have a roommate like that! Can you please tell us what makes your business or approach that you’re providing with your bands different or unique than some of the other watch bands that are out there?

Emily: Well, obviously the Fabric makes it very unique because I don’t know that there’s any other watchbands that are made out of a similar type of fabric. But, you know, one of the things that we’ve learned along the way too is how to sublimate. So we’ve been able to make our own designs. That also makes our watch bands unique- because we have so many different designs on our watch bands. Those are the two things that make us unique. 

Jama: For sure. I even like the way your watch bands has different layers, so it’s not just this one thick band that feels like it’s suffocating your wrist. It actually looks pretty pleasant around the wrist. 

Emily: Yes, It spreads out the tightness and stretch, so yeah!

Jama: Wonderful. You spoke a little bit about maybe seeing your roommate do some things, and so I’m sure that sparked a whole lot of learning on how to work with other people to get your product to life from idea to life. So can you speak a little bit about your partners and col collaborations that you have and that you maybe plan to have in the future?

Emily: Yes, like you say, I think hearing her story. I know that she traveled to China to talk to manufacturers there, and I know she talked to manufacturers in the United States, so that really opened my eyes- like all the places that you have to go and look for partners for supplies. And so yeah we’ve gotten a lot of supplies through Alibaba, and also we’ve sourced our fabric from places here in the United States. So there’s a lot of things that we’ve learned along the way. As far as collaborations go too, one of the things that we do is work with other influencers and it’s brought our awareness to a lot of women based businesses in our area because we’re here locally.

We’ve reached out to a woman in a town nearby that has also started making leather earrings in her home and now she’s grown her business where she has her own manufacturing company and storefronts, and she’s even selling her earrings in Nordstrom. So just working with her, learning from her has been really inspirational. I hope to follow along her path- she’s been great to watch. And we’ve also had to learn how to open up our own website and had a shop on Etsy. We’ve learned how to get our product out on Amazon. Those are the types of people that we’ve worked with and companies that we’ve worked with.

Jama: Awesome. And how important that is, right? We can only juggle so much and nobody ever talks about all the behind the scenes stuff that needs to happen in order for the delivery of the product or the service to happen. And so how important that is. Thank you for being with us today and taking the time out to chat with us. We really appreciate it and congratulations again.