Jade Yoga Brand Guidelines: The Philadelphia Rug-Pad Family That Turned to Natural Rubber Mats

A Philadelphia rug business and a family name.

Jade Yoga grew out of a rug business. The company’s own history says Dean Jerrehian’s grandfather emigrated to the United States in 1904 and started an oriental rug business, Jerrehian Brothers, with the slogan “Rugs of Quality.” The Philadelphia Inquirer, in a July 2010 profile by Diane Mastrull, described the business as founded by Aram Jerrehian on Walnut Street in Philadelphia, offering cleaning, renovation and repair before it began collecting rugs, and dated its Philadelphia origins to 1916. Club Solutions Magazine, in April 2021, gave 1904.

The next generation moved the business into rubber. According to the Inquirer, Dean’s father, Aram Jr., took over in the mid-1960s, renamed the company Jade Industries and moved into natural-rubber rug padding, and by the late 1980s the firm made only padding. The company’s own account says his father founded Jade Industries in 1974 to make pads that cushioned fine rugs and kept them from slipping.

The name itself is a family one. The company says the letters J-A-D-E stand for Jackie, Amy, Dean and Ellen — Dean’s mother, his two sisters and Dean himself — and it still describes JadeYoga as a family business. On its website the brand is written as one word, JadeYoga, and the parent company remains Jade Industries.

Dean Jerrehian joined the company in 1998 after seven years as a lawyer with the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Inquirer reported, and he is named in that article and later trade coverage as president of JadeYoga. The company is based in Conshohocken, a borough on the Schuylkill River just outside Philadelphia.

From rug pad to yoga mat.

The yoga business began with a suggestion. The Inquirer reported in 2010 that the mats started in 2000, after a yoga practitioner told the company that the plastic mats then in use were slippery and the family decided to try its rubber instead. The company sent out about 500 sample mats, mostly to yoga studios, and received around 300 calls in reply — figures that appear both in the 2010 newspaper profile and in the company’s own history. Jade says its first natural-rubber yoga mat was the Harmony, a name still in its range.

The company says its mats are made in the United States. In 2010 the Inquirer described the chain in detail: rubber harvested on plantations in Vietnam and processed into a solid, shipped to a factory in Moosup, Connecticut to be made into sheets, and then sent to Conshohocken, where the sheets were cut into mats and packaged. Jade’s website today says its mats are made in the United States with imported rubber, contain no PVC and are made in compliance with US environmental laws; Club Solutions Magazine reported in 2021 that the products are US-made.

The range has widened from mats into props. The 2010 profile listed organic-cotton yoga blankets and balsa-wood blocks alongside the mats; by 2021, Club Solutions listed blocks, straps, bolsters, towels, blankets and meditation products. The company’s current website adds cork blocks, cotton and grass yoga rugs, meditation cushions and mat bags, and sells mats in a long run of colours and several thicknesses, from thin travel mats to thicker studio mats.

Collaborations bring in other visual worlds. The website lists a Peanuts x JadeYoga collection and a Pride Mat, and Jade announced a collaboration with baseball’s Seattle Mariners for spring training in a 2023 press release.

Lines, rubber, cork and calm.

Yoga equipment is a quiet category to design for. The core product is a long flat sheet, and much of a brand’s identity has to live on that surface: in the colour range it offers, in any graphics printed on the mat, and in the material it is made from. Some brands keep the surface plain and sell their mats as a run of solid colours; others print artwork or guide lines across it, as Liforme does with the centre line, end lines and 45-degree marks it calls AlignForMe.

Material is often the main message. Makers in this guide describe their products in terms of what they are made from — natural rubber, polyurethane top layers, cork — and present those materials as part of the brand. Jade Yoga’s story, for example, begins with natural-rubber rug pads made by the same family business before it sold its first yoga mat. Claims about materials in this guide are the companies’ own unless a dated source is cited.

Props widen the palette. Blocks, bolsters, straps, blankets and meditation cushions bring in other surfaces — cork, wood, cotton and other textiles — and a brand’s colours and prints have to work across foam, fabric and rubber as well as on a website and a box. Liforme and Jade Yoga both sell through their own websites as well as through retailers and studios, so the website is where much of each identity is seen.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. Colours and typefaces shown are unofficial interpretations; no product or logo is reproduced.

A tree for each mat.

Tree planting has been part of the brand for more than fifteen years. The Inquirer reported in 2010 that the company planted a tree through the charity Trees for the Future for every mat it sold. Club Solutions Magazine wrote in 2021 that the partnership began in 2008, and the company says it has since planted more than two million trees. Club Solutions also reported that mat sales have supported charitable causes and prison yoga projects, and the company’s website gathers this work under a “Giving Programs & Causes” page.

The business has stayed in the family. Jade Industries is the parent, the Jerrehians run it, and the company’s history page is written in Dean Jerrehian’s first-person voice, ending on a drawing of his grandfather’s rug store with “Rugs of Quality” on the wall outside. The company says it tries to build JadeYoga on the same quality and service as the rug business.

As a visual identity, Jade Yoga is mostly about the product itself. The company sells its mats in a long run of solid colours and several thicknesses, and its website groups mats, props and rugs rather than lifestyle collections. The company’s story about material is its main message: natural rubber, made in the United States, from a family that worked with rubber rug pads before it made a single yoga mat.

For a design guide, Jade Yoga shows how a company history and a single material can carry a brand when the product is a plain coloured sheet. Compare it with the Manduka brand guidelines, another American mat brand, and the Gaiam brand guidelines, which grew from a Colorado catalogue business. For this guide we use jade green, rug-pad tan and rubber olive with a warm serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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