Читать книгу Building a Wellness Business That Lasts - Rick Stollmeyer - Страница 15

Baby Boomers largely grew up during a period marked by rapidly rising living standards, stable households, and unprecedented prosperity. Boomers were therefore the first generation in human history to easily move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Classically idealistic, judgmental, and energetic, no prior generation has left such a deep impact on our culture and economy, because none had included so many people raised in the absence of poverty or hunger.

The Boomers are at once polarized and polarizing. We've all heard the stories of their idealism and narcissism in the 1960s and 1970s—the civil rights movement, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, and anti–Vietnam War protests. Less known but equally valid are stories of heroism and valor—soldiers, sailors, and marines who bravely fought in the Vietnam War. With the eldest of this generation now approaching their eighth decade of life, Boomers still dominate both the Right and Left of the political debate. It is no surprise that they have held the office of president or prime minister of nearly every developed country on earth for more than 30 years. Classically contentious throughout their lives, Baby Boomers did largely agree in the 1980s on two objectives: healthy living and making money. Those two focus areas would ignite an explosion of health and fitness, which we now call the First Wave of the wellness movement.

The First Wave is when the health food industry took off, when Self and Men's Health magazines began, when racquet sports reached their peak popularity, and when long-distance running, cycling, and triathlons became all the rage. These were also the years when Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons, and a few others made fortunes selling workout videos, leveraging a new technology of videotape to introduce millions to group exercise.

In the 1970s the fitness industry had consisted mostly of small sweaty gyms designed for body builders, as well as YMCAs and JCCs focused mainly on youth sports. In the 1980s, the industry innovated to meet rising Boomer demand, catering to both men and women; they incorporated group exercise classes, swimming, and racket sports, and leveraged the leading technology of the day—personal computing—to scale like never before.

The International Health and Racquet Sports Association (IHRSA) was established in 1981, and the first health club software providers emerged a few years later to help automate the nascent industry of full-service clubs. The earliest software solutions were PC applications focused on automating the authorization and settlement of large numbers of recurring credit card and direct debit transactions. Automated member management enabled health clubs to scale, and within a few years thousands of new large full-service clubs opened their doors.

In the early 1980s, Mark Mastrov founded 24 Hour Fitness, Donohue Wildman founded Bally's Health Club, Louis Welch founded LA Fitness, and David Lloyd opened his first eponymous gym in Hertfordshire, England. A few years later, Doug Levine founded Crunch Fitness and Vito Errico founded Equinox. The First Wave of wellness also fueled an explosion of innovative workout equipment, including Precor, Stairmaster, Cybex, and Nautilus. It also planted the seeds of the boutique fitness movement that would dominate the Second and Third Waves to come, central among these being the emergence in the early 1990s of three distinctive types of independent group exercises: Pilates, yoga, and Spinning^®.

Joseph Pilates began teaching his method in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Designed initially to help professional dancers avoid and recover from injury, Pilates did not expand into the general population until innovative entrepreneurs began to expand the practice in the early 1990s. One of those early innovators was Mari Winsor, who opened her first Beverly Hills studio in 1990 and soon became known as “The Pilates Teacher to the Stars.” In the years that followed, Mari would introduce Pilates to millions of Americans through her TV infomercials and DVDs. Mari's innovative spirit and indomitable energy would later inspire thousands of future studio owners and hundreds of thousands of teachers who would change the lives of millions of people in the decades to come.

Similarly, the practice of yoga had been imported from India to the West decades prior. The teachings of this ancient practice were largely restricted to institutes, ashrams, and retreat centers. Yoga did not become accessible to the general public until a new wave of innovative neighborhood yoga studios opened their doors and began to accept drop-in students. Early yoga business innovators included Sharon Gannon and David Life, who founded Jivamukti Yoga in 1984; Maty Ezraty and Chuck Miller, who founded Yogaworks in 1987; and Gurmukh and Gurushabd Khalsa, who founded Golden Bridge Yoga in 1992. As with Pilates, these early yoga innovators and hundreds more like them would inspire thousands of yoga entrepreneurs and hundreds of thousands of teachers. Yoga would become a truly global phenomenon in the 2000s, and in the 2010s it would be imported back into India as wellness took hold in that rapidly advancing economy.

At the same time, an entirely new group exercise method in the 1990s would have a transformational impact on the boutique fitness movement in the decades to follow. In 1994, Johnny G and John Baudhin founded Mad Dogg Sports to accelerate the adoption of their invention—Spinning^®, which vastly improved on the stationary bikes of the day and lent itself to a group exercise delivery method. First implemented in health clubs and later in neighborhood studios, Spinning^® would inspire multiple offshoot indoor cycling brands and become the foundation of the first live streaming at-home delivery model—Peloton^®.

The First Wave of wellness is also when therapeutic massage and other spa treatments began to move outside of the luxury resorts and retreat centers where they had flourished for decades and into more accessible neighborhood day spas. The Day Spa Association was formed in 1988 and the International Spa Association (iSPA) in 1992 to serve that nascent industry. In addition, the first small studios offering the ancient wellness practices of acupuncture, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, Tae Chi Qigong, and Reiki emerged during this time.

In short, the Boomer-led First Wave of wellness created a vibrant industry where none had existed before. First Wave entrepreneurs applied new thinking to age-old practices and leveraged the latest technologies—personal computers, videotapes, and DVDs—to reach millions of people and stimulate decades of massive growth. All of this laid the groundwork for the next wave, which would be even larger and more impactful.