The Boston Red Sox Aren’t In The Yoga Business, But They Offer It. Why? [Opinion]

Today, I saw a video of a couple hundred people doing yoga on the warning track at Fenway Park. The Boston Red Sox offered the second annual FenwaYoga on June 8, a fundraiser that benefited its Red Sox Foundation. Each participant paid a $250 minimum to practice downward dog and lotus positions on the field.

The Boston Red Sox are not in the yoga business, but you can speculate why the team would hold this kind of event. As reported by the Statista statistics portal, just 26 percent of women say they follow Major League Baseball. That’s a huge portion of the population that Major League baseball wants to get in front of and market to. And Yoga Journal reports that 82 percent of yoga practitioners are women. It’s a marriage made in cross-marketing heaven.

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When you’re a manufacturer, retailer or service provider, trying something new with an open mind is almost mandatory these days, whether that be a new product, event or marketing. And new is even better when people who don’t know your brand find out about it and like it.

If you ask the editors of Greenhouse Grower what the theme of the July issue of the magazine is, they’ll tell you edibles, crop protection, marketing and cooling. But the real theme of this issue (and this industry) is new.

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Take a look around. This month’s is our first issue at the newly renamed Cultivate’14. The new AmericanHort brings together the grower and retail sides of the business, which I think it absolutely critical for the survival of the industry.

And we are featuring Gotham Greens, a vegetable producer growing in rooftop greenhouses, on the cover of the magazine in July. Greenhouse Grower isn’t the only publication that noticed what’s happening on New York City’s rooftops. Gotham Greens has been featured in the New York Post, Huffington Post, Business Week, NPR, Fast Company and Wired. Many of these publications reach a demographic that our industry is trying to get interested in gardening — young people and techie non-gardeners.

Gotham Greens and AmericanHort are the organizations that, not without trepidation, I’m sure, stepped out and decided to do something different. Not stepping off the edge of a cliff, but more like stepping onto a tightrope.

And if you get back to your business after Cultivate’14 and find yourself saying, “We don’t do that because we never have before,” think about the Red Sox. If you’re willing to try something new, even if it isn’t what you “do,” you’re working from a new-school mentality. It’s an exciting time to be in horticulture. It’s exciting because growers are looking outside the greenhouse to pick up on global consumer trends and tap into new demographics.

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