but as a percentage of their total numbers, this generation has started far fewer businesses than Gen-X-ers or Baby Boomers. This may change in the decade ahead, but so far the classic Millennial would much rather spend discretionary income on low-budget travel and regular boutique wellness experiences than take on debt to buy a home or launch a business.
Millennials also have a strong affinity for globalism, environmental causes, and social justice. Millennials are deeply concerned about climate change and economic inequality. This is the generation that fueled Senator Bernie Sanders's presidential bids, propelled the legalization of gay marriage, and expanded the movement to recognize broad-based LGBTQ+ rights.
Millennials love variety and authenticity. They have an affinity for local and authentic crafts, foods, and experiences. In short, more Millennials align with the principles and ethos of the wellness movement than Baby Boomers and Gen-X-ers combined.
In the 2010s the wellness industry began to morph to meet Millennial tastes. The decade saw the emergence of whole new categories of boutique wellness classes and services, including BootCamp-style workouts and High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), along with a resurgence of indoor cycling, led by Soul Cycle, FlyWheel, Rush Cycle, Cyclebar, and others. The three largest boutique fitness brands—Crossfit®, Orangetheory Fitness, and F45 Training—took off in the 2010s, fueled largely by Millennial passion for the tribe-like atmosphere they provide.
Meanwhile, whole new categories of wellness businesses emerged, offering specialized services such as salt room therapies, meditation classes, cryotherapy, intravenous hydration therapy, and boutique beauty and grooming. We can thank Millennials for the cool new hipster barbershops that specialized in classic men's coifs, straight razor shaves, and epic beards, as well as for the proliferation of blow dry bars, nail salons, and lash bars.
All of this differentiation and growth was enabled by iPhones and Android smartphones, unlimited data plans, and the emergence of cloud-enabled technologies.
Yelp went public in 2009 and rapidly expanded the inventory of wellness business reviews in the 2010s. ClassPass and the Mindbody app were both released in 2013, enabling aggregate searching and booking of wellness classes and appointments, and Google released Reserve with Google in 2016, enabling seamless search, discovery, and booking of wellness classes and appointments. In 2017, both Mindbody and ClassPass released dynamic pricing to the wellness businesses they serve, enabling pricing to discount or surge according to local supply and demand.
At the same time, the ability to connect heart rate monitors and exercise machine outputs enabled boutique fitness studios to offer a new form of immersive experience. Innovators such as Fitmetrix, which was founded in 2013 and acquired by Mindbody in 2018, leveraged cloud technologies to greatly reduce the cost of deploying these capabilities in studios. At the same time, innovators such as Peloton®, founded in 2012, and Mirror®, founded in 2016, leveraged the same equipment and cloud technologies to bring connected fitness and group exercise into people's homes.
Collectively, these technological advancements helped to further expand, globalize, and democratize the Third Wave of wellness. By the end of the decade, one could just as easily find a boutique wellness studio in Prague, Bangalore, and Shanghai as they could in Los Angeles, New York, London, or Sydney. And, when someone walked into that studio, they would most likely encounter clientele representing all three postwar generations. Wellness had indeed gone mainstream and global, and was worth more than $4.5 trillion in 2019.
And then COVID-19 hit.
4 The Future of Wellness in a Post-COVID World
COVID-19 interrupted the Third Wave of wellness. Without a global disaster of this magnitude, the Third Wave would have continued deep into the 2020s, fueled by ever greater numbers of Millennials entering their peak spending years and the continued strong engagement of Gen-Xers and aging Baby Boomers.
Virtual wellness offerings would have expanded and improved gradually throughout the decade with superior accessibility and affordability. Larger and better on-demand and live-streaming content combined with ever-improving and less expensive connected devices would have further expanded and democratized the overall wellness market. This would have siphoned only a portion of the growth that might otherwise have gone to face-to-face experiences at the brick-and-mortar studios.
As late as January 2020, Mindbody's research found that most early adopters of home-based virtual wellness—including those who favored the sophisticated connected offerings from Peloton® and Mirror®—were adopting those tools to supplement their workouts in the brick-and-mortar studios, not replace them. Meanwhile, the proliferating appointment-based wellness businesses, from therapeutic massage to boutique beauty and grooming, were well on their way to booking their best quarter ever, providing services that could not be delivered through a screen.
As we moved further into the decade of the 2020s these forces, combined with the emergence of leading-edge Gen-Zers, would have given the Third Wave of wellness a final push of growth before teeing up a graceful transition to an even more exciting Fourth Wave to follow.
But that story is transpiring in some parallel universe we don't live in.
In our reality, COVID-19 hit our industry in March 2020 like a thunderbolt, and the transition to the next wave will be sooner and more jarring. The pandemic instantly and prematurely ended the Third Wave of wellness before the Fourth Wave had a chance to fully develop and set up. This idled millions of wellness practitioners and caused tens of thousands of wellness businesses to fail during the long months of shelter at home and excruciatingly slow reopening. In the recovery that followed, only a portion of the wellness practitioners who had been fully employed prior to COVID-19 would return to work for the same businesses, and tens of thousands of brick-and-mortar wellness businesses would fail.
The unexpected shock of the COVID-19 pandemic also kicked off a rapid acceleration of industry innovation. Within days of the first shelter-at-home orders, thousands of wellness businesses were offering virtual experiences to their clients via off-the-shelf tools like Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Within a month, Mindbody had accelerated the release of our long-awaited integrated Virtual Wellness Platform, enabling wellness business owners to build scalable virtual businesses in conjunction with their brick-and-mortar offerings. In the months that followed, multiple other business management solutions followed suit. Necessity had indeed proven to be the mother of invention.
So, what does the future hold? First, we must acknowledge that you and I are engaging through a time machine. You are reading or listening to these words several months or even years after I have written them. Therefore, you already know things that I cannot possibly have known when I wrote this.
For example:
1 Who will take the oath of office in January 2021 as president of the United States?
2 When will COVID-19 prophylactic and therapeutic drugs be developed and widely distributed?
3 When will we have a safe and effective vaccine?
4 How deep will the COVID-19 recession be and how long will it last?
5 Which regions of the world will be more economically impacted?
Fortunately, these temporal factors are largely irrelevant to the long-term future of the wellness industry. Instead, certain longer-term truths are far more likely to determine the future of wellness, and armed with those truths we can make some observations.
Here are seven post-COVID societal truths that transcend political leaders, the economy, and the pandemic response
