How Well Is Your Being?

My good wife took a disturbing photo of our fridge yesterday. It graphically shows a takeover of wellness products that clearly signals a change in our lives and our shopping habits.

Lately, I have been doing a lot of research work in the health and wellbeing space and it has revealed some fascinating insights.

Firstly, I should clarify some differences that can be a little confusing. “Health” means our current state of physical and mental well-being. “Wellbeing” is our broader experience of life satisfaction and happiness. And “Wellness” refers to the actions taken to improve our health and wellbeing.

This all adds up to big business. According to The Global Wellness Institute New Zealand ranked 9th in the world wellness index in 2023 with a whopping $7,474 annual spend per capita. Australia is 7th, and Iceland tops the list. The global market has reached USD 6.3 trillion, representing approximately 6% of the global GDP. 

Our health and wellbeing is something we all live with all our lives and so it is little wonder that it is very important, even though there are quite different individual perspectives and behaviours that play out. One size certainly does not fit all when it comes to health and wellbeing.

We are all bombarded by a blizzard of health and wellbeing messages every day. Whether it is our doctor, our better half, the government, food companies, supplement brands, social influencers, gyms, or miracle exercise machines promoted on TV….it seems the whole world is telling us what to do about our health and wellbeing.

This tide of advice is met by a little angel we all have on one shoulder and a little devil we have on the other. The angel gets us out exercising, eating salads and saying no to that big slice of chocolate cake. Whereas the little devil has us staying out late, adding fries to the pizza, surfing the couch, and packing on the kilos.

For most of us, this lifelong negotiation we have with ourselves is a work in progress; full of virtues and sins, wins and losses, highs and lows.

Enter the wellness industry. In recent times there has been a huge surge in wellness products that promise to help us manage our health and wellbeing. They provide a feeling of control that we can consciously feed the angel and keep the devil at bay.

Wellness products are highly attractive because they offer easy solutions to tough problems. Whether it is a magic ingredient like turmeric, or simple 3-step programmes to follow, or successes guaranteed by popular influencers wellness products are here to make life better.

Curious to understand what it takes to succeed in the wellness market, I had a chat with two young entrepreneurs who are making great strides: Ashlee Summers from Sacro, and Kate Gatfield-Jeffries from Moodi. 

Both described a similar motivation to enter the market: identifying a market gap in which consumer needs are not being met in an authentic way.

For Kate this meant finding the elusive balance between genuine health efficacy and great taste with a range of powders, and more recently canned drinks, that support things like stress, energy and gut health. Within no time at all Moodi is an online success and now available in 150 retail stores nationwide. Such is the demand that Moodi sales have been restricted to just one can per shopper.

The key to success for Moodi has been an uncompromising care for the consumer and listening carefully to what they like. As Kate puts it: “We’re not accountable to anyone other than our customers.”

Sacro is at an earlier stage of development, but it too has been designed to fill a gap. Sacro is a highly effective tonic that mitigates the effects of alcohol due to its active ingredient DHM. Very purposeful NPD work started by examining how alcohol affects the body and what ingredients have been proven to reduce harm.

Throughout her journey Ashlee has fought hard to ensure a purity and consistency of product, brand identity and marketing direction. “We kept having different people wanting to turn it into different things. We had to find the right voice for the brand and stay true to it.”

The takeaway is to avoid the compromising crossroads in-between the angel and the devil.

Wellness is the stuff of angels.