Female-owned businesses to visit around Gainesville

Female-owned businesses to visit around Gainesville

Three female business owners reflect on opening their businesses

In Gainesville’s ever-changing business environment, it can be hard to thrive as a female small-business owner. Some struggle to be taken seriously as they navigate business ownership or find their vulnerability exploited. 

During Women’s History Month, three female business owners discussed how they started and maintained their businesses in lieu of these struggles. As they have learned over the years, being a female business owner can have its advantages and disadvantages. 

Happy Kiss Pole Dance

Before she opened Happy Kiss Pole Dance studio at 501 NW 23 Ave., 39-year-old Johanna Monserratte taught classes out of a 250-square-foot room in her house. Nervous people would think they had the wrong address, but Monserratte sat by her window to welcome her students. With only two poles set up in the house, she could teach only three or four students at a time. 

As time went on, Monserratte started to expand her customer base, and when she opened her studio in March of 2014, her students helped her tear down walls and install poles.

“It was this really vibrant, full-of-energy time and lots of excitement,” she said. “It was definitely a community endeavor — definitely not just me making all that happen.”

Because the studio operates on a subscription model, Monserratte often gets to know her customers. As the owner, she has taken on more administrative duties, but her favorite part of her job has always been teaching. 

She loves seeing a student’s “light bulb moment” when they finally get a new move or trick, but she said she especially enjoys seeing how those she teaches learn they are stronger than they know. 

While Monserratte is quick to drop a “corny joke” as a teacher, she often feels it’s hard for her to be taken seriously as a business owner. It’s easy for people to take advantage of the “softness and vulnerability” people attribute to her because she is a woman, she said.

When she’s overwhelmed, she finds she can turn to a community of women for support. In the past, she was part of a coaching group for other pole dance studio owners. With her group, she discussed how to set and meet goals and attract clients to her business. While she said she feels grateful for the ability to run her own business, she still thinks it’s important to “commiserate” with fellow female business owners. 

“It's nice to have a circle of people that you can say ‘This sh*t just sucks sometimes,’” she said.

Wildflowers: A Yoga + Healing Collective

From her first-ever yoga class at the YMCA at age 16, Brandi Sadler was hooked. Throughout her early 20s, she continued to practice yoga and finally completed a 200 hour training to become an instructor in 2009. 

Now, at 39 years old, she is the owner of Wildflowers: A Yoga + Healing Collective, her very own yoga studio located at 205 NW 10th Ave. After opening the studio in August 2019, Sadler was able to operate for only a few months before moving to a virtual format due to COVID-19. During the pandemic, she used GoFundMe to keep the studio running and found the community of students she built were willing to support her. 

Her biggest goal in opening the studio was increasing the accessibility of yoga. She feels Western yoga studios place too much emphasis on the asanas, or physical postures of yoga, rather than the life practices, she said. 

“The postures have become such a mainstream aspect where people are like, ‘I’m bad at yoga, because I can’t touch my toes,’” Sadler said. “But actually, the postures are such a small piece of it. It’s actually the philosophy and the mentality around it all.”

Wildflowers emphasizes the 8 Limbs of Yoga, a specific method that pays attention to eight facets of yoga, including external principles, or yamas, and internal standards, or niyamas, as well as postures and breathwork. Sadler said she finds this approach to yoga challenges the way many people think about it, and she enjoys watching as her students learn about the different components that go into the practice of yoga. 

Part of teaching the 8 Limbs of Yoga means her students implement practices into their own lives. During philosophy talks, members can ask questions about how to apply and better understand these practices, creating an environment of accountability. She feels this accountability reflects her values as a female business owner, she said. 

“That’s something that feels like a very motherly thing — this softer but stern energy of the feminine that’s very at play here,” she said. “People feel supported and held but want to be held accountable at the same time.”

Last year, she added “Healing Collective” to the studio’s title to emphasize its range of offerings, including ceremonies and sound baths. The studio offers beginners three weeks of unlimited yoga for $30. They also host donation classes, where proceeds go to other organizations, including charities in Gainesville. 

Black C Art

Ani Collier has been an artist her entire life, studying ballet in Sofia, Bulgaria, before moving to the US in 1990. After growing up with American media like movies and magazines, she still experienced a culture shock when she arrived. 

“I never thought that the world would change so drastically and that I would ever go to America,” she said. “In my lifetime, it was almost as impossible as going to the moon.”

She continued her art career in the United States and Europe as a dance photographer, choreographer and filmmaker. She is also the owner of Black C Art Gallery, which Collier described as both a studio and a gallery. Located at 201 SE 2nd Place, the name is a reference to the Black Sea, which borders Bulgaria. 

In Bulgaria, Collier owns Etud Gallery, which she opened to meet the needs of independent artists in Sofia, a city she described as constantly changing. 

“Back then, you could do a lot with a little, and independent artists [needed] space and a little bit of freedom,” she said about the space. 

Her work with artists in Bulgaria inspired her love for site-specific art, which she finds unpredictable and fluid. At Black C, she hosted “Antarctica …The Experience,” which was inspired by her own trip to Antarctica. What started as a display of Antarctica's natural beauty became an exploration of pollution and environmental degradation. 

Collier invited the community to bring in their used plastic water bottles, and approximately 8,000 were placed around the gallery and made to look like ice. She said the focus eventually shifted to how plastic invades the human body. 

Collier said she values the freedom to change and evolve through her creation, and she tries to give the same opportunity to artists who serve residences at Black C. Artists are able to create pieces and later display them through Black C., and Collier often works with female artists.

Like her art, Collier tries not to give her gallery a strict definition. 

“When you have a kid, what do you envision for your kid?” she asked. “I think what I’ve discovered is to watch where the interests are … talk a lot, discuss a lot, laugh a lot and see what comes out.” 

Contact Juliana DeFilippo at jdefillipo@alligator.org. Follow her on X @JulianaDeF58101

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