At Morgan Stanley's fixed-income group, Lauren Imparato wore power suits and sold currencies to hedge funds in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Now she spends her days in form-fitting Lululemon pants, teaching yoga to former Wall Street colleagues.
After seven years in finance, with a stint in London and a recent promotion, Imparato quit her job in April to start a yoga-centric lifestyle brand, I.AM.YOU.
"I want everyone to see that you can drink wine and eat fine food and come to yoga the next day and you'll be totally fine," said the lithe, 5-foot-11-inch brunette at her Manhattan loft. "You don't have to become a vegetarian to practice yoga."
Imparato, 28, is tapping into yoga's growing appeal among result-oriented financial brokers and dealers who want to de-stress and work out at the same time. Hedge funds, including Karsch Capital Management LP and Blue Ridge Capital LLC, offer onsite yoga classes to their employees. Pimco's Bill Gross has said that he gets some of his best investment ideas while standing on his head.
"More and more finance professionals are attracted to yoga," said Michael Wald, cofounder of Namaste New York, which has yoga instructors at more than 20 banks and hedge funds. "They work in a very stressful environment. The purpose of yoga is to calm the mind and relax the nervous system."
Imparato's two weekly classes have attracted traders and analysts from Merrill Lynch & Co., Barclays Capital Inc., Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. There are also hedge-fund managers and traders, venture capitalists, jewelry designers, and actors, she said.
Imparato takes a cosmopolitan approach to the ancient practice, teaching athletic yoga to a music mix that may include salsa, the Notorious B.I.G., Frank Sinatra, and Aerosmith.
The yoga studio is in the middle of her sprawling loft, above a bustling stretch of Manhattan's Little Italy neighborhood. Students are greeted by rows of black mats, burning incense, modernist furniture, and brick walls covered with contemporary artworks. Imparato can accommodate as many as 25 people, each paying $20 per session.
Martin Ruiz picked I.AM.YOU, which is 30 minutes from his Upper West Side apartment, over two yoga studios a block from his home.
"The fact that she had worked at Morgan Stanley lent some credibility right away," said Ruiz, president of Carter Bain Wealth Management, based in Arizona and New Mexico.
Ruiz, 33, who used to hike and run on dirt roads to relieve work-related stress, said he never thought of practicing yoga until he moved to New York in February.
"It's not a macho enough workout for most guys," he said. "I was very hesitant of telling people I was doing it."
Five years ago, Imparato was not a big fan of yoga either, she said. Working 14-hour days and running 60 miles a week, she didn't think yoga was a vigorous enough exercise. One morning, fortified with a double espresso, she gave it a shot and had to leave the class early because it was too hard, she said.
She returned the following week, espresso-free. Soon, she stopped running and was practicing yoga seven days a week.
Last autumn, following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., her instructor suggested she sign up for a teacher training course.
"I figured it would be a good distraction from the market," Imparato said. "I thought maybe 10 years from now I'd teach yoga as a side activity while running a company."
Within a few months, she realized that her hobby had business potential. Her classes filled up through word of mouth. She had enough savings to live comfortably for a while. In April, she said goodbye to her well-paid job to teach yoga and run her own company.
Born in California, Imparato moved to the East Coast to attend Princeton University. After studying Spanish and Italian and writing a thesis about the wine industry in Tuscany, Italy, and Rioja, Spain, she got a job with Morgan Stanley in New York.
I.AM.YOU has grown faster than she expected. Her classes are often sold out, according to participants. She gives private lessons. In June, Morgan Stanley hired her to host a morale-boosting session for a group of its employees, and she is in talks with other corporate clients, she said. This month she has added Saturday classes at Sole East resort in Montauk, N.Y.
"I want to say, 'I am you and you can be anyone you want to be,' " she said. "Let's try to find who you really are. And maybe it's a little bit of everything."
Ruiz said he finds yoga more effective than running in managing stress. Away from his classes because of an extended business trip, he said he has been missing the sticky mat and noting the difference in his stress level.
"I yell at people a lot more," he said.