On one of the first truly warm Sunday evenings of the year, Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward park began to see an influx of hundreds of mat-carrying yogis. As seven o’clock neared, they lined up the colorful rectangles in neat parallel lines on the ground, waiting in eager anticipation for a teacher to begin instructing the choreographed sequence of stretches through a loudspeaker so even those all the way in the back could hear.

This is King of Pops yoga, and it has become an Atlanta warm weather tradition — the weekly hour-long outdoor yoga class is easily accessible by walkers, cyclists, and drivers, and basic enough to allow those who don’t know their asanas from their savasanas to participate.

The night is fun. It’s incredibly popular — drone shots taken overhead show as many as 800 people simultaneously twisting into tree pose. Thanks to frozen treat company King of Pops, it’s free.

And, undeniably, it has absolutely nothing to do with popsicles.

“I just see it as this public good that we want to provide,” explains Steven Carse, King of Pops co-founder. “The point of this is not to stroke our ego but to create something we can provide for the community.”

Some yogis do cool off by purchasing popsicles after the event, providing KOP with a built-in weekly event to sell that wouldn’t have otherwise existed. But just as many walk away empty-handed but happy, and the CEO is just fine with that.

“It associates endorphins with our brand. We just want to give people activities they enjoy from our brand,” he says.

King of Pops is, in it of itself, an enjoyable brand. Carse started the business after being let go from his corporate job in 2009. His inspiration came from the yearly trip he took with his brothers to South America where they looked forward to feasting on paletas: ice pops made from fresh or overripe fruit sold off a pushcart.

“We fell in love with the product and talked about it for years and years. So after I got laid off, the time was right, and I decided to try this whole popsicle thing out with very, very few expectations,” says Carse.

With $7,000 in the bank and a self-imposed deadline of April 1, Carse went in search of the ingredients he needed to build the business. He found a space in a shared kitchen and a pushcart that looked like the ones that paleta vendors used.

Most of his money he saved for the pop-making machine, which cost about $6,000. He found a middleman in Miami on the web who said he had the machine he needed. Carse wired him the money and waited, but the machine didn't come.

“Apparently, his wife was sick, and he actually spent the money on hospital bills. That was a bummer, obviously, but I didn’t realize that until a few months before I was going to start,” says Carse. “I felt really bad for him, but I had to go and say, ‘I’m really sorry, but this is all I have for myself right now.’ Once I explained that he helped me purchase a used machine for less money, I went out there and got it, and six months later he gave me back the money.”

Pop crisis averted, Carse began producing frozen treats. By now he had a name, chosen from a long list that included “Fria” and “Frozen Man”.

And that iconic rainbow umbrella that adorns pushcarts around the city of Atlanta and now, across the south? It was bright, it was eye-catching — and it was the cheapest on the shelf.

“It was there that day, and we stuck with it,” says Carse. “Now, it has a very far reach in ways that we never could have imagined, both in how people see us, and how rainbows have a lot of associations we never expected. At least in Atlanta, now popsicles are lumped in together with all of those positive things.”

Their first day selling was at a festival at Serenbe, the iconic ‘wellness community’ outside of Atlanta. Carse says they sold out in three hours and were having a celebratory lunch and beer when they got a call from his brother Nick, who was working full-time as an attorney while he helped out with the popsicle business.

“My brother called from a street corner in the city he had set up at and told us he was out of pops. And I go, ‘That’s awesome!’ Well, it wasn’t that awesome — apparently, people came from Conyers, from far away, just for the pops. They were kind of upset.”

“So I didn’t finish my beer, got up, drove home, got back to work in the kitchen to turn out more pops. That story really epitomizes our first year — we were literally constantly making or selling pops.”