In the health and wellness business, January is the biggest and most important month of the year.
It’s a time when ‘new year, new you’ resolutions inundate our social media feeds as people head into the new year with a refreshed mindset around health.
But for Laura Henshaw, the co-founder and CEO of the fitness and wellness app, Kic, the messages around dieting and weight loss that so many women are subjected to at this time of year are incredibly harmful.
“The wellness industry is a billion dollar industry. It’s huge,” Henshaw told Women’s Agenda in a recent interview. “And a lot of that money comes from making people feel shit about themselves.”
“People are getting sick of being told that ‘if you join this program, you can lose five kilos in two weeks’ or that you have to overhaul your whole life.”
So, instead of buying into aesthetic-driven New Year’s resolutions, Henshaw and the team at Kic encouraged their community to focus on setting small intentions to increase their overall happiness and health. In doing so, Kic helped its community steer away from negative weight loss messaging that is so pervasive in the new year.
“A YouGov survey found that only 7 per cent of people complete their New Year’s resolutions,” Henshaw explained. “So that’s 93 per cent of people who don’t. So often, on the first of January, we have all these ideas of setting fitness related goals, and there’s often a real focus on weight loss.”
“And for us at Kic, that’s not what we are about. We are not about talking about weight loss or focusing on the way that our body looks. It’s about how we feel.”
Bucking the trend of the health and wellness industry, and instead encouraging its members to focus on building sustainable habits, initially felt like a risk for Kic, Henshaw says.
But the ‘Feel Good’ campaign immediately resonated within the Kic community, so much so that the business saw a 100 per cent revenue increase compared to the previous year in Australia and a 140 per cent increase in the UK. Subscribers to the app increased by 19 per cent, too.
“Speaking to so many of our community members, they have managed to sustain the routine they started because it was actually sustainable,” Henshaw says.
“It didn’t overhaul their life and they don’t feel like they’re in this kind of diet culture mindset where their diet or exercise routine controls their life. They’re in control, which is really special.”
Henshaw said it was incredible to see people connecting with Kic’s unique value proposition within the market and it’s given them more confidence as a business to lean further into it.
When it comes to risks in business, Henshaw and her co-founder Steph Claire Smith, are no strangers to taking leaps.
In its initial days, Kic (then known as Keep It Cleaner) belonged to a third party. Henshaw and Smith were considered to be the “talent” and were not part of the business operations, Henshaw explains.
“The vision that we had meant that we needed to run the business and we had a ceiling on us if we weren’t in control of where we could take it,” Henshaw shares. “So we made the decision to leave that third party organisation and go out on our own and build our own app.”
Neither Henshaw nor Smith had a tech background but they had three months to build their own app. At first, they parterned with an app development company but have since taken their app development in-house, building their own tech team. It was a challenging time, Henshaw says, but the pair have never once regretted the risk.
“We took the biggest risk we have ever taken to date. We left the third party and we had three months to build our own team, our own products, and reshoot all the content. We lost the whole subscription database – that was just by the nature of the contract.”
“But when we relaunched, we attracted a significantly greater number of users than we had with the initial program.”
Looking back, Henshaw says there was a certain magic to their naivety.
“I do often think about, if that had happened now, would we have taken that risk? Because we’re more informed about what can go wrong.”
Kic is bootstrapped which Henshaw says has helped them to be self-reliant and always find a way forward through the various challenges the business has faced.
“For us, I’m very grateful that we haven’t had funding up until this point because it has meant that we have just got to work it out,” she says. “And it is actually incredible what you can do when you have no other option.”
“Like for us in that three month period, we had to launch the app because that other program was being wound down. And if people didn’t have a product to then go to, they would go find something else. And we would lose that customer base. And so we didn’t have a choice.”
As for her leadership? Henshaw says she is proud to be able to say Kic is her life’s work.
“Because the vision and the mission is so closely tied to me and my personal values, and I’m just so passionate about what we do – it’s the most special thing in the world because I just see it as such a big opportunity to be able to make a true impact,” she said.
“When you are a founder, you can’t ever really switch off and sometimes that’s difficult and I’ve had to find ways to try and kind of balance my mental health around that.
“It’s challenging, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”