We Are Not Buying Into True Wellness in the UK. We Are Buying the Appearance of It.

I spent my last morning in Austin at Gevity.

I had read about it. I had seen it on Linked-in. But nothing prepared me for what it actually felt like to walk through the door.

By 12:30pm on a Tuesday afternoon the space was full. Not quietly occupied — full. Co-working tables taken. Conversations happening everywhere. People moving fluidly between the training spaces, the spa, the sauna, the restaurant — and then back to their laptops. Not separate activities slotted around a working day. Integrated. Seamless. One life.

I paid £100 for a day pass and I would not blink to do it again.

What struck me was not the design.

Although the design is exceptional — immaculate, considered, not a detail out of place. Over-indulgent in the best possible way. But that was not what made it extraordinary.

What made it extraordinary was the people.

Within an hour of arriving I had exchanged contacts with more people than I had in three days of cold studio outreach earlier in the week. The receptionist gave me her personal email in case I ever wanted to return with my team. I spoke about investments in the changing room and cooked dinners in the sauna with complete strangers who felt immediately like peers all after i did work calls and a mat pilates class. 

Gevity has not created a members club. They have curated a culture. And that community had open arms for a complete stranger from Cardiff who wandered in on her last day in Texas.

That is the difference.

So much of what we see in the UK wellness space right now is wellness as a vanity metric. Beautiful studios. Stunning branding. Instagram-worthy reformers. Wellness as a trend — something you do to signal who you are, not something that is genuinely woven into how you live.

What I experienced at Gevity was the opposite. These members were not there to be seen. They were there because this is simply how they work. How they recover. How they connect. Wellness as an integral part of every day — not a class they book, not a membership they forget to cancel, not a resolution they make in January, not a selfie opportunity for instagram.

A movement. Not a membership.

And it made me ask a question I have not been able to shake since, as i sit in departures ready to head home to the UK.

In the UK we wear wellness like a status symbol. The £200 reformer membership. The branded water bottle. The studio with the perfect lighting and the waitlist that makes you feel chosen.

But are we buying belonging — or are we buying the appearance of it?

Because if we were truly integrated — if wellness was genuinely woven into who we are and not what we want to be seen as — the churn rates would not look the way they do. Half of new members would not be gone within six months. Studios would not be closing at the rate they are.

Maybe the real question is not why boutique fitness studios are failing financially, which i will continue to discover. Maybe it is why so many of their members were never really there in the first place.

The UK wellness scene has so much to do before we reach this.

We have the studios. We have the talent. We have the demand — the numbers prove that clearly. But we have not yet built spaces that make wellness feel this inevitable. This natural. This genuinely community-led.

I truly hope we get there. And as someone who works in the boutique studio launch space — helping founders open and build financially sustainable wellness businesses — there is so much I am bringing back with me from Austin.

Because what Connor Michalek and Espoir Michalek have built at Gevity is not just a beautiful space. It is a proof of concept for where the entire wellness industry is heading.

It is everywhere. And it is just the beginning of how humans integrate wellness as a movement — not a membership.

Bethan Dando is the founder of The Wellbeing Company Global Ltd, home of WEL-B and Pilates Class UK. She spent Feb 2026 in Dubai & March 2026 researching the US AND UAE wellness markets ahead of WEL-B's go-to-market raise.

https://www.livegevity.co/