In the health and wellness business, January is the biggest and most important month of the year.
It’s that time of year when “New Year, New Me” resolutions flood your social media feeds as people start the new year with a new mindset about health.
But for Laura Henshaw, co-founder and CEO of fitness and wellness app Kic, the messages about dieting and weight loss that so many women receive at this time of year are hard to believe. It is said to be extremely harmful.
“The wellness industry is a billion dollar industry. It’s huge,” Henshaw said. women’s agenda In a recent interview. “And a lot of that money comes from making people feel bad about themselves.”
“People are tired of being told, ‘If you join this program, you’ll lose 10 pounds in two weeks,’ or that you need to rethink your entire life.”
So instead of embracing aesthetic-based New Year’s resolutions, Henshaw and the team at Kic encouraged their community to focus on setting small intentions to boost overall happiness and health. In doing so, Kic helped the community avoid negative weight loss messages that are prevalent in the new year.
“When we surveyed our community, we found that only 7% of people achieve their New Year’s resolutions,” Henshaw explained. “So 93 percent of people don’t do that. January 1st brings the idea of setting fitness-related goals, and often the focus is actually on weight loss.”
“And for us at Kic, that’s not what we’re about. We’re not talking about weight loss or focusing on how our bodies look. It’s about how we feel. That’s the problem.”
Going against trends in the health and wellness industry and instead encouraging members to focus on building sustainable habits initially felt like a risk for Kic, Henshaw said.
However, the ‘Feel Good’ campaign quickly resonated within the Kic community, with a 100 per cent year-on-year revenue increase in Australia and a 140 per cent revenue increase in the UK. App subscribers also increased by 19%.
“When I talk to so many community members, they have managed to maintain the routines that they started. actually It’s sustainable,” Henshaw says.
“It doesn’t completely change their lives, and they don’t feel like they’re in this food culture mindset where their diet and exercise habits dictate their lives. I’m in control, that’s really special.”
Mr Henshaw said it was incredible to see people resonate with Kic’s unique value proposition within the market and gave him the confidence to lean further into the space as a company.
When it comes to risk in business, Henshaw and his co-founder Steph Claire Smith are used to taking leaps and bounds.
In its early days, Kic (then known as Keep It Cleaner) was part of a third party. Henshaw and Smith were considered “human resources” and were not involved in the operations of the business, Henshaw explained.
“The vision we had was that we needed to run a business, and if we couldn’t control where it went, we were limited,” Henshaw says. “So we decided to leave that third-party organization and build our own app.”
Although neither Henshaw nor Smith had a technical background, it took them three months to build their own app. Initially, they partnered with app development companies, but later took app development in-house and built their own technical team. Although it was a difficult time, Henshaw says the pair have never regretted the risk.
“We took the biggest risk we’ve ever taken. We left a third party, built our own team and our own product, and took three months to reshoot all of our content. We lost our entire subscription database, but that was simply due to the nature of the contract.”
“But once we restarted it, we were able to attract far more users than the first program.”
Looking back, Henshaw says there was a certain magic to their naivety.
“I often wonder if we would have taken that risk if it were happening now, because we would have more information about what could potentially go wrong.”
Kic is bootstrapped, which Henshaw says has allowed them to be self-reliant and always find a way to move forward through the challenges the business faces.
“For us, we’re very grateful that we didn’t have the funds before, because it meant we had to make do,” she says. “And it’s actually an incredible thing to do when you have no other choice.”
“Like we had for those three months, we had to launch the app because other programs were shutting down. And if the product they wanted wasn’t available at that time, people would choose something else. And we would lose that customer base. And we had no choice.”
What about her leadership? Henshaw says she is proud to call Kic her life’s work.
“Because the vision and mission are so closely tied to me and my personal values, and I’m so passionate about what we do, it’s the most special thing in the world. “Because I think it’s a huge opportunity to be able to have a real impact,” she said.
“When you’re a founder, you can’t really switch off and it can be difficult, so I had to find a way to balance my mental health around that.
“It’s difficult, but I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
