Health game changer: Sammy Veall, 24

Photography Julian Kingma

The inspiration for Yoga 213

The start of 2012 wasn’t great for Veall. She was in LA, where she had moved to be an actress, but she was unhappy. When a friend asked if she wanted to try a hip-hop yoga class, her life changed.

“Right after the class I felt happy again. Doing a vinyasa flow sequence to music by artists like The Notorious B.I.G, Kanye West and Mary J Blige really worked for me. Hip-hop has so much soul and I thought ‘I have to come back and keep doing this’.”

Veall signed up for a teacher training at the studio starting the next day and showed up every day, twice a day for the next three months. She quit her acting dream and left LA, signing up for 200 hours of further yoga teaching training in Bali on her way back to Melbourne.

As well as sparking her desire to bring the classes back to Australia, Veall also found that yoga helped her to heal, both physically and emotionally from the scars of an accident at a party she went to when she was 21 that left her with third-degree burns to 35 per cent of her body.

Starting up Yoga213

On her laptop in Bali, Veall wrote up a PowerPoint business plan to open a yoga studio in Melbourne, then sent it to her family. “My sister used to have a fashion label and I wanted to see their reactions, to see if I was mad for doing this or not! But they said, Sammy, this is actually good.”

Taking out a loan from her dad, enlisting the help of her sister to help with setting up, and getting her designer boyfriend to create her logo and website, Veall began scouting for a studio and opened up in South Yarra in March 2013.

“We recently opened up a studio in Bondi, too, and are considering a second one for Melbourne. We initially got the word out through street posters and letterbox drop flyers. Then a month after opening we got into [online city guide] Broadsheet; 50 people turned up and it went from there.”

Lessons in success

• Be active on Instagram. “I feel it has a bigger pull than Facebook right now, but that also has pull too. I post photos of the studio, hip-hop icons, healthy images that make me happy.”

• Don’t think too much. “Trying to be the boss on site when I look like a 12-year-old girl is sometimes difficult but I’ve just got to do it. I don’t think about it as much any more; throw yourself in and the experience will come.”

• Factor in council permits. “If you’re opening a physical place of business, there are a lot of permits needing council approval that can take a long time. Do these first. We lost three months when we were ready to open, just waiting for permits.”

What I wish all women knew…

“Food isn’t your enemy. If you’re trying to be healthy and slip up and eat a block of chocolate, don’t feel guilty about it, just move on. The guilt is worse for you than the chocolate.”