If there’s something that we’ve all become more familiar with in the last couple of years, it’s the importance of practising wellness and self-care as part of living more balanced lives. For some this may mean going for a walk in nature, catching up with friends, going to the gym or joining a local volunteering group, but one thing that these activities all have in common is: human connection.
Humans are inherently social. We are hard-wired for social relationships. Coupled with our evolving needs to connect more authentically, increasingly more wellness and fitness brands are diversifying their offering and finding new ways to reach their audiences.
In Europe, the wellness market is thriving. Despite Covid, in 2020 sales totalled $1.1 billion, with Germany, France and the United Kingdom in the world top 6 countries for wellness. With the rise of social media platforms and systems like digital asset management for sharing content in real time, wellness brands are building communities and engaging with their audiences, often by co-creating content with them or encouraging UGC (user generated content).
Whether they are focused on fitness, mental health, or beauty, innovative wellness brands are proving that by paying close attention to their customers, working with them, and adapting to their new needs and expectations, they can lay the foundation for a future that’s even more connected and accessible. Most importantly, making a positive impact, not only on the wellness industry but the rest of the world.
We’d like to give a shout out to some of our favourite European wellness and fitness brands that are building communities on social media and innovating with their visual storytelling strategies.
Here are 5 brands in the wellness and fitness space to watch and learn from:
Gymshark
Set up in 2012 by Ben Francis, the disruptive wellness and fitness clothing brand, Gymshark, has built a $1 billion business with the help of influencer marketing and community building. Social media plays a key role in their content strategy, which includes strategically partnering with content creators to build a community of people who share similar goals, values and interests. Their global community of more than 12 million followers sees Gymshark as a representation of their fitness identity. In October 2022, they opened their first-ever physical store in London, as a place where their community has the opportunity to get together in person.
The brand is constantly evolving to support the needs of its audience, helping cement its status as a consumer-centric company that puts its money where its values are.
What we love about the brand: Their strong drive to encourage people from all backgrounds to take up fitness, with diversity and inclusion at the heart of their visual content strategy.
Headspace
As the world’s leading provider of mental health and wellbeing solutions, Headspace has touched the lives of over 100 million people in 190 countries through mindfulness and well being tools. Their extensive library of resources which includes podcasts, meditations, videos and articles is available through an annual or monthly subscription, and at the peak of the pandemic they made some of this content available for free.
They have built a large community of followers across their social media channels, such as YouTube, Instagram, as well as Facebook private groups where they share best practices, mindfulness journey and success stories.
What we love about the brand: How they are using and sharing engaging and fun visual content to raise awareness about the topic of mental health, available in different formats to cater for different types of people.
Flowlife
The Swedish company is a leading brand in Scandinavia that specialises in massage and recovery products for the sports sector and those who enjoy an active lifestyle. Since their launch in 2016 they now have over 20,000 customers and collaborate with top athletes from Sweden across their social channels offering advice, tips and inspiration to their followers.
In this video the Flowlife team went to the Stockholm olympic stadium for a workout session with Johan Wissman, who was an Olympian 200 and 400 sprinter and relay runner.
What we love about the brand: How they’ve managed to create a consistent visual narrative across their digital channels, incorporating storytelling into their brand identity.
NEOM Organics
NEOM Organics is a wellbeing brand that was launched in 2005 in Harrogate, UK, by Nicola Elliott and Oliver Mennell with a focus on creating natural products for busy young professionals to reduce stress and boost their wellbeing. Their product range includes candles, essential oils and bath soaks to offer self-care and stress relief.
Their ethos is to help young professionals who often don’t have enough time to wind down, by offering simple and effective at-home pampering combined with natural fragrances.
They have a large community on socials where they share content, product news, health advice and tips with the help from influencers to help drive brand awareness and customer engagement.
What we love about the brand: Apart from their amazing products, they’re innovative with their social media strategy, using cross-platform promotion to drive more engagement and grow their followers. An example is posting TikTok videos on their Instagram channel, as seen on the video below.
Sanctus
Sanctus is a growing wellbeing brand founded in 2016 in the UK by James Routledge who was struggling with his mental health because of the closure of his previous company. He started a blog to share his experience and it was very successful that it became a community blog attracting many followers, this led to the wellbeing brand that is today. The mission of Sanctus is to support thousands of people at businesses across the UK with high-quality 1-2-1 coaching that blends personal and professional development with proactive mental wellbeing support.
Some of its customers include Red Bull, KFC, Boston Consulting Group. Sanctus has created a large community of followers on the Linkedin platform, where they actively engage with members, offering advice and wellbeing resources for the workplace.
What we love about the brand: Their use of authentic content with a hint of humour across their social channels, in particular Linkedin, to help demystify the stigma around mental health in the workplace. They often feature some of their team members including their CEO.
We would like to continue expanding this list, so if you know any other wellness and fitness brands in Europe that are building thriving communities on socials let us know, we’d love to include them!
Community is at the heart of everything that we do at PhotoShelter. It’s why we created our PhotoShelter for Brands European creative community on Slack. It’s a fantastic place to network with other creative professionals from a wide range of industries to learn from each other and share ideas.
If you’d like to join, simply visit PhotoShelter for Brands Slack Community, head over to the #EUROPEAN-CREATIVES channel, introduce yourself and say hello. Share your LinkedIn and Twitter and start networking today!
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