|
Beauty is not just for women. Health is not just for young people. Wellness is for everyone.
This is why Salim Mitha and I founded Wahanda in Spring 2008. Wahanda is a marketplace and community for the wellness industry – a place where spas, salons, health centers, therapists, and consumers come together. Our goal is to revolutionize the way consumers find information, share advice and transact in this area. For the industry, we want to become their most efficient online marketing partner.
I have been in the Internet industry since 1994 but this is the most exciting thing I have ever been a part of. We have fabulous backers, a great team - and whole lot of passion and determination.
Salim Mitha and I met in 2004 in London through a mutual friend who had gone to Business School in California with Salim. At the time I was at lastminute.com running the lifestyle business (which included Spas) and Salim was at Yahoo where he ran their search and community products in Europe. We hit it off right away and almost immediately started brainstorming businesses to start together. It took us a few years to find the right thing. But we found that we were personally both consumers of spa and wellness and had been involved in the industry in different ways and we were intrigued.
Spa and wellness is a $60 billion industry worldwide — larger than both the music and the film industry combined — and yet there was no site that captured the scale of the industry. We kept asking ourselves the same questions: How does a consumer find the right spa? How do you know if your therapist is good? How do you learn about all these alternative treatments? How do book you a treatment online? If you are a spa, how do you market yourself? When we couldn’t find good answers to these questions, we knew we had to build it ourselves.
As the vision for the business came together, we began to speak to potential investors and were overwhelmed by the response we received. The investors behind such internet successes such as Skype, lastminute.com and last.fm as well as leading hospitality figures such as Wolf Hengst, former President/COO of Four Seasons Hotels
|
and Resorts and Tony Cohen of Global Edge Investments all shared our vision and enthusiasm for the idea and agreed to back us.
Why, we wondered, hasn’t this been done before? Well, one of the most dominant factors in the wellness industry is that it is highly fragmented. Although no-one has counted exactly, it is thought there are 71,000 spas worldwide and hundreds of thousands more salons and health centers. and practitioners around the world, each with a different focus and specialty.
And, with virtually no major brands in the world of wellness there isn’t a natural site that captures the breadth and scope of the industry. It’s going to take a new site, like Wahanda, with the right team and technology to make it happen.
Wahanda spots its trends via its community. Users can write reviews and comments on the site and we monitor that carefully. For instance, a few months back we started seeing a huge increase in queries for Bikram's Yoga. We did some investigation and realized that it came off the back of Scottish tennis star Andy Murray’s success at Wimbledon where he credited Bikram's Yoga for his conditioning. Bikram's has since received a lot of press but we picked up the trend before anyone else (and I am absolutely thrilled to hear that Nikki Scarborough, Regional Director, The Americas for Kiwi Collection Inc, is an accredited Bikram's Yoga teacher).
THE AUTHOR Lopo Champalimaud (left - shown with his business partner Salim Mitha), who is Portuguese, was brought up in the USA. He lives and works in London, and he is married to the Belgian interior designer Sandrine Champalimaud. His mother is the iconic designer Alexandra Champalimaud. www.wahanda.com
Sign up for Confidential Newsletter
Send this article to a friend
View other Insider Articles
|
BACK
