Most companies discover their values when things get easy. Howard Napper discovered his when they got hard.
In 1999, in the middle of a yoga class, he found himself wondering why yoga mats were made of PVC. Not as a business idea, more as a nagging thought he couldn’t shake. The yoga market was beginning to take off. Madonna was doing yoga. Sting was doing yoga. Companies were springing up all over the place, mostly racing to the same manufacturing floors in China to produce the same mat in a different colour. Howard decided to go the other way.
“I thought: if anybody’s going to do it, I can do it.” — Howard Napper, on the moment in a yoga class in 1999 that started everything
Twenty-five years later, he is still going the other way. Agoy makes yoga products from natural and sustainable materials: natural rubber, cork, recycled materials… things that cost more to source, take more to explain, and return tighter margins than the PVC alternative. In the first episode of Beaver Tales, we sat down with Howard in Hyde Park to find out what that kind of conviction actually looks like over the long run.
The conversation goes into the real commercial realities of building sustainably: the margins, the manufacturing constraints, the distribution challenges, and the moments where the easier path was right there and Howard chose not to take it. He is direct about all of it, which makes it worth listening to.
There is also something else in this episode that is harder to categorise. At some point, the conversation moves from business into something more personal — a health challenge that changed how Howard works, what drives him, and what he is building now beyond Agoy. It does not feel like a detour. By the end, it feels like the point.
That impulse (to turn a difficult experience into something useful for others) is very much of a piece with how he runs his business.
“Trust is like blowing up a balloon. You keep building it up, and it just takes one thing, one pop, and if people lose that trust, that’s it.” — Howard Napper
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About Agoy
Agoy was founded in London in 1999 by Howard Napper. The company makes yoga mats and accessories from natural and sustainable materials, with a focus on design innovation and the yoga practice itself. Its Focus Alignment mat, designed to draw practitioners into the present moment through visual cues, was a first in the industry.
Howard is also a yoga teacher and the author of Healing a Broken Brain, a Substack series on living with Parkinson’s.
Website: agoy.co.uk
Industry: Yoga / Wellness / Sustainable products
Founded: 1999
Based in: London, UK
Substack: Healing a Broken Brain by Howard Napper
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