Today Warrior One spans three studios, Brighton, Mordialloc and Mornington, with around forty teachers running some 140 classes a week. It's a lot of yoga for what co-founder Nova Rosaia affectionately calls "a big little business." But ask her what actually holds it together, and she doesn't reach for the numbers, she reaches for the people who teach. That conviction shapes how Warrior One hires: a deliberately thorough selection process, and a mentoring pathway for newer teachers, often graduates of the studio's own training, until they can "hold a room really well."
From sixteen mats
Nova's own path in began at twenty-five, in the sweat-soaked heat of Hot Box in Prahran, back when hot yoga was the thing. "I went to my first class and I was obsessed," she remembers, five years of near-daily practice before a love of yoga met a love of business, and she decided to merge the two.
The first Warrior One was humble: sixteen mats in a New Street, Brighton studio, on a plot that, remarkably, has been a yoga studio for over a hundred years. Building it meant building a community one class at a time. Mordialloc followed in year three, chosen for its two rooms, to allow teacher training and regular classes to run simultaneously. Then, as Brighton burst its sixteen-mat seams, the current, larger Brighton studio was leased. The space was going to be leased as an apartment until the owner downstairs thought he'd rather have yoga in the building.
