5 emerging health and wellness brands to watch in 2020

The health and wellness sector is just one industry that’s seen a surge in techy solutions to age-old problems. Whether it’s femtech, affordable fitness clothing, or at-home aromatherapy, it’s obvious that wellness is much more than it once was. It’s a rapidly changing landscape, and the health and wellness brands dominating the space today might not be the household names of tomorrow – especially when consumers are craving more innovation, more personalisation, and fewer barriers-to-entry than ever before. This means it’s more important than ever to keep up with your healthcare market research.

Check out our list of five emerging health and wellness brands to watch in 2020:

Headspace

If you’re in need of some headspace, you should really try Headspace. At its simplest, Headspace is an app that offers guided meditation suited for a variety of scenarios and outcomes. It’s intuitive, brightened up with cheerful-looking cartoon characters, and designed to inspire a more chilled-out version of you – and it’s hugely popular. 

What began in 2010 as an events company dedicated to teaching the practice of meditation has grown into a health and wellness brand that succeeds in a crowded market. The Headspace app now has over 60M users across 190 countries. And it’s a globally-recognised brand for a reason – the practice of meditation is rooted in rigorous science and clinically-validated research, with studies showing clear benefits of using Headspace on everything from focus to compassion. 

Headspace, as a brand, set out to educate about the benefits of meditation – and it has certainly achieved that. But it’s also succeeded in making meditation available to those who might not normally try it. Snappy branding aside, it’s the genuine usefulness of the app that has set it apart as an emerging health and wellness brand in recent years.

ClassPass

There are tons of benefits to fitness classes. You get that empowering camaraderie, the expert guidance, and the right equipment to reach your personalised goals. What’s not so great about fitness classes? They can be a pain to access – they’re pricey, you might have to bulk-buy sessions, and they’re not always available at short notice. Is that the modern way to exercise? ClassPass says no. 

For ClassPass, the motto is “every class with one fitness pass”, with access to a huge variety of classes across thousands of facilities, at the cost of a monthly subscription. It’s a simple concept, and it’s taken off – the brand has seen over 70M classes booked across 2,500 cities worldwide, and has partnered with goliaths like Google, Morgan Stanley, and Gatorade on their quest to revolutionize consumer wellness. By simplifying the process of booking and attending fitness classes, ClassPass is championing increasing the variety in people’s fitness regimes and getting them more active, more often. And it’s all wrapped up in one super-sleek app. 

hims

Only 1 in 10 men feel comfortable talking about their looks and health with a doctor – and that’s especially true when it comes to commonly stigmatised men’s health problems, like hair loss and erectile dysfunction. How do you encourage people with these problems to seek a diagnosis and get the right treatment? As with many things, there’s a techy solution to this problem – and it comes in the form of health and wellness brand hims. 

There’s a reason that hims became a unicorn (valued at over $1bn) last year and successfully expanded to the UK, and it’s not all about its snazzy branding and minimalist packaging (beautiful as it is). hims tackles the issue of men’s health head-on, taking an informal and educational approach to the problems that men might normally be uncomfortable speaking openly about. 

But education and creating a healthy dialogue is only half of the hims solution. It offers a full-service diagnosis and prescription service that connects you with a physician, helps you get a proper diagnosis, and sends your prescriptions to your home – so you can start effectively treating any issues without even leaving the house. Better yet, they’re helping to make looking and feeling your best as affordable as possible, with their prescription products being between 50-80% cheaper than their brand-name counterparts in the USA. 

Forward

Picture the most futuristic doctor’s office you can imagine. Give or take a few hoverboards, that’s pretty much what you get with Forward, the health and wellness brand transforming primary care practices. 

When you see a GP, you expect an age spent in the waiting room, only to have the briefest possible conversation with a practitioner who rarely has time to dig into the finer details of your health. Forward took one look at all of that and said a prompt ‘no thanks’. The brand is all about using the very best technology to improve primary care. Everything from the machines they use to assess the full spectrum of your health, to the interactive dashboard that gives you full access to your health data, is powered by state-of-the-art tech.

Forward creates a full picture of you, transforming disjointed data points into one centralised source of truth that encourages an ongoing relationship between healthcare practitioners and their patients. The emphasis is shifted to prevention, wellness, conversation, and personalised health plans that are designed to fit your goals. As Forward’s founder put it: 

Imagine a doctor’s office that feels more like an Apple Store – an Apple store that learns so it gets better with more data.

Ritual

Ritual is a health and wellness brand all about the reinvention of vitamins for women. Inspired by the lack of transparency in recipes for prenatal vitamins, the brand set about creating an alternative – a capsule that’s “simple, effective, and backed by science”. 

Made from a blend of nine nutrients that are naturally lacking in women’s diets, Ritual’s capsules are specially designed to be slow-releasing, and cleverly formulated to combine multiple ingredients without having to take multiple pills. Clinical trials show that Ritual’s vitamins help to fix nutrient gaps, improve blood and organ health, and improve bone integrity. The brand’s overall aim is transparency – it’s open about the sources of its ingredients, which nine nutrients the capsule features, and the science that goes into them. That same transparency conveniently carries over into the product itself – the clear capsules have been branded ‘Instagrammable’, with whole articles dedicated to how aesthetically pleasing they are. 

How do the up-and-comers in health and wellness know which problems to solve, and how to solve them? It’s all down to keeping a close eye on consumer trends. Download our Health and Wellness Consumer Trends Report to find out how consumers are changing their habits, and why: