When buzzy lifestyle website Well+Good released its highly anticipated wellness and fitness trends for 2018 last month, savvy followers noticed a theme among the 18 predictions: They were all about the home.
Cofounders Alexia Brue and Melisse Gelula dug deep into tides like “Self-care is essential, not an indulgence,” which extolled the benefits of bath time and knitting. “Bringing the fitness studio home” revealed that group fitness has paved the way for indoor sweat sessions, and “High-tech sleep science arrives in the bedroom” discussed smart mattresses and sleep trackers like S+ by ResMed and Emfit.
But the 2018 trend that perhaps said it all was, “Home decor goes woo woo.” “Wellness has infiltrated everyone’s lives,” Gelula tells Fast Company exclusively from their Union Square offices in Manhattan. “It used to be what’s in your cupboards or what’s in your bathroom, and now it’s come out of the cupboards and into every room of the house.”
“People are looking for permission to unplug, ways to get off technology, chill out more, and so we started noticing that whenever we did things that brought easy access to meditation or yoga studio vibes into the home, people really like that,” explains Gelula, who acknowledges her home category’s humble bath caddy and scented candle beginnings. For launch, they have partnered with mega brand Ikea on a bedroom challenge content series. In addition, the site will roll out at least five features a week on how the home has become a place of empowerment for women, as well as behind-the-scenes healthy tours with fit-fluencers Nicole Berrie and Taryn Toomey. Well+Good has also enlisted such healthy home gurus as Athena Calderone, who will serve as guest editor for the month of January, and detox expert Sophia Ruan Gushée to further their credibility.
The brand’s movement into home speaks to larger cultural trends, too: According to the latest Allied Market Research report, the global home decor market is expected to garner $664 billion dollars by 2020, registering a 4.2% growth rate between 2015 to 2020. This is only fueled by HomeAdvisor’s 2017 True Cost Survey research, which says the average homeowner has spent nearly 60% more on home projects over the past 12 months than in the year prior, many of whom are millennials.
The duo is banking on their wellness expertise, which they have cultivated over the last seven years, to beat out the competition in the home category from a business perspective. “There’s certainly a lot of these places that I’m sure our audience was on, but they didn’t have that wellness lens, and it didn’t go as deep as we see our readers wanting to go, it felt too 101,” says Brue, who rigorously follows the site’s advice. (She currently has a tourmaline crystal by her electronic devices at her Upper West Side home to block harmful EMFs.) Peloton Founder and CEO John Foley, who was first covered by Well+Good in 2013 shortly after his brand’s launch, agrees. “As Marshall McLuhan says, ‘The medium is the message,’ and Well+Good is prescient in their coverage. They have hundreds of thousands of the most influential 25- to 50-year old women in major metropolitan areas reading their site, my wife being one of them.”
It’s all part of Well+Good’s master plan to restore its readers from the inside out. Their Good Home launch engages readers in their most private and sacred spaces, but Brue and Gelula want their readers to experience that knowledge in a 360-degree setting, too, which happens to be quite sticky for their bottom line. “We knew that our readers were curious and smart and wanted to learn more, and they wanted to go way beyond just reading about drinking lemon water or knowing we all know we need to sleep more,” says Brue. “The content is foundational, but we’re also ready to leak out a lot more things.”