How Healthspan Is Exploring Wellness Industry Opportunities Post-Covid

LONDON, United Kingdom — A new virtual event taking place from 10th to 14th May will explore the opportunities that exist for the wellness industry in a post-covid world.

Healthspan Show, which sits at the intersection of two massive trends — longevity and wellness, will bring together investors, industry experts and brand leaders to discuss how wellness and wellbeing can be harnessed to live longer, healthier lives. And what role businesses, healthcare systems and consumers can play in a global transformation towards better health.

By bringing together hundreds of entrepreneurs from startups and challenger brands, as well as investors and FMCG market leaders, the wider goal is to share new ideas and make useful connections that will help to drive the industry forward.

Experts from companies including Unilever, Mars, Les Mills, Johnson & Johnson, Lululemon, Cult Beauty, PepsiCo Ventures, Nestlé Health Science, L’Oreal, Hydrow, Welltodo and more will feature across the five days.

Topics will span, how to grow a consumer wellness business, how COVID-19 has changed consumer priorities, what retailers are looking for, opportunities for brands to deliver population-wide health improvement, the evolution of workplace wellness and so much more. 

And all attendees will have the option to network via digital roundtables and video meetings.

Ahead of the event, we sat down with Angela Tyrrell, Senior Vice President at Longevity Leaders & LSX — the team behind Healthspan Show — to find out more about the event, how it’s tapping into new values and behaviours that have resulted from the pandemic and what the future of wellness and longevity looks like…….

What was the original vision behind the Healthspan Show?

Originally the vision for the show was as a live event bringing hundreds of entrepreneurs from startups and challenger brands together with investors and FMCG market leaders. 

We were keen to explore the convergence of apparently separate consumer sectors like nutrition, fitness or beauty that we were seeing in the rise of subfields like ingestible beauty or lifestyle platforms. Of course, COVID-19 took our original plans off the table, but it’s also thrown the importance of individual health and wellbeing into sharp focus, and actually by turning the event into a virtual one we’re seeing people from all over the world booking, and in much greater numbers than we’d originally planned.

Why does the event focus on longevity and wellness?

My co-founders and I had been working in the field of healthy ageing for a while — particularly looking at therapeutic interventions from biotechs who are tackling ageing as a disease, like Human Longevity or BioAge. But most of the evidence about how to live longer, healthier lives comes back to the basics — things we have at our fingertips like improving nutrition, getting more sleep, maintaining mental wellbeing, personal care, hygiene and exercise. 

At the same time, we saw the rise of the wellness industry delivering lifestyle improvement tools directly to the consumer. So we thought, why not connect the two? Our agenda is all about how to get evidence-based lifestyle improvement tools and services to consumers, to help them take a more proactive role in managing their health and wellbeing.

Who is the event for?

We’re a business-to-business show rather than a consumer show, so our target audience includes entrepreneurs from startups and challenger brands across beauty and personal care, nutrition, lifestyle and fitness, mental health and women’s health. 

Then we bring the ecosystem needed to deliver those products to consumers, including investors for early-stage funding, FMCG commercial leaders who might provide partnerships or exist opportunities, direct-to-consumer services like leisure centres and spas, retailers to get the products on the shelves, media to promote them and of course the services community who are needed to support them.

How will the event tap into new values and behaviours that have resulted from the pandemic?

The pandemic made this event more relevant than we’d ever dreamed it would be, but we have adapted some of the topics to account for changing consumer demands that have resulted from the pandemic. 

Mental wellbeing is a big one — and we’ve seen a shift from focusing on specific conditions to acknowledging that everybody needs help maintaining their mental health, with things like sleep and calming rituals becoming increasingly important. Hygiene has been of massive interest on the personal care side, as has immunity on the nutrition side and connected fitness on the lifestyle side. We’re also seeing a big shift towards “more science” in consumer wellness products as people’s interest in things like epidemiology and vaccines have been naturally piqued. 

We have been able to bring some of our life science and health experts into the show to provide advice.

How are you translating the live event experience into the digital realm?

There are three things that we’ve found really work. The biggest one is our partnering system. When guests sign up we ask a few basic questions about their business needs that go onto their digital profile on the event platform. When the platform goes live, they can use said criteria to search for other guests who might be able to help them — whether those are investors, retailers, commercial leaders or service providers — and use the partnering system to arrange video meetings. Partnering is a huge component of our live events and one that’s translated pretty easily into digital. 

Secondly, we run free-to-view webinars that function in the same way that a panel discussion might at a live event — and actually, we’ve found we see more interaction from the audience than we would do at a live event. 

Finally, we run virtual roundtables — essentially group video calls of about 15-20 people that give attendees the chance to connect informally around a shared interest. 

How do you see the relationship between wellness and longevity evolving over the next decade?

Our knowledge of the biology of ageing has only just scratched the surface. 

Our understanding of longevity interventions will continue to gather steam over the next ten years, and we expect to see our first longevity therapeutics developed in that time. The beauty of the wellness industry is that it brings the consumer along with it, and we expect to see consumers becoming increasingly interested in the science of longevity and how their own biology is influenced by the lifestyle choices that they make in their day-to-day life. 

So we expect to see both of these fields continue to gather steam in their own right, as well as each one supporting and facilitating the growth of the other.

Find out more about the Healthspan Show and register for free here.

For 15% off a paid pass, Welltodo readers can use the code: ‘welltodo’