New Media Business Woo Aims to Redefine Wellness for Gen Z

When you hear the word wellness, what might spring to mind is a serene woman wearing yoga pants, sipping a green juice and buying a vagina-scented candle. It’s an aspirational image created by the likes of Goop, the lifestyle and wellness empire founded by actress Gwyneth Paltrow—and one that may alienate anyone who doesn’t fit into this trope. Negative clichés of the wellness industry paint it as too exclusive, cheesy or “woo-woo”—a term that means adhering to unconventional beliefs with little or no scientific basis. A new media business, launching on April 26 and backed by British broadcaster ITV, aims to be an antidote to all that. Called Woo—a spin on “woo-woo”—its goal is to redefine wellness for Generation Z by making it more relatable and culturally relevant. Woo was founded by Stephen Mai, who has spent much of his career building youth media brands as the former chief marketing officer of Boiler Room and LadBible. Mai discovered wellness after burning out in the media industry, but he found there was little in the space that “didn’t conform to tropes,” he told Adweek. His idea was to create a wellness-focused media business that “felt accessible, democratic and aspirational—and turned it into a new cultural lifestyle,” he explained. “[Woo] isn’t just a younger version of Goop. How do we get people to stop rolling their eyes?” A new kind of media business Woo is backed by ITV’s Studio 55 ventures, an initiative that invests in new media and entertainment businesses aimed at 16- to 34-year-olds. A spokesperson for Woo declined to disclose how much ITV has invested in the business, but said it was a significant figure. How do we get people to stop rolling their eyes?Stephen Mai, founder and CEO of Woo While wellness and physical and mental health have become bigger priorities for many people since the Covid-19 pandemic, the idea for Woo has been brewing for a few years. After leaving Boiler Room in 2019, Mai wanted to start his own media company but was “really burnt out,” he said. He ended up moving temporarily to Bali and working for lifestyle brand Potato Head—and then spent much of the pandemic in Australia, consulting and drawing up his business plan. In the meantime, to deal with stress and anxiety, Mai had taken up wellness practices such as sound healing (a meditative practice that uses different musical implements to create vibrations around the body) and weekly hypnotherapy sessions, which he said “completely transformed” his life. But he realized that “if I’m using all this [wellness] stuff—and even I’m finding it a bit cringe,” there was a gap in the market for more people like him who might think wellness wasn’t for them. Stephen Mai, ex-CMO of Boiler Room and LadBible, discovered wellness after burning out in the media industry. He also wanted to build a media business that could be sustainable in a rapidly changing landscape and avoid the “inefficiencies” that had hindered some legacy media brands, he said. That meant its revenue “couldn’t be based solely on advertising,” he explained. “A lot of businesses I worked on made enough money to keep the lights on but didn’t make enough to scale,” Mai said. His original idea was to create a consumer product—specifically a CBD soft drink—that would fund a media brand. That concept later evolved to Woo’s current revenue model—a media business funded by a product marketplace. Launching in September, Woo’s e-commerce marketplace will be a key revenue driver for the business. At first, it will be a curated selection of products made by other companies, from cannabidiol (CBD) items, candles, skincare, beauty and sexual wellness brands to other “feel-good” products—including fashion and streetwear, books, magazines and music. Eventually, Woo aims to develop original products, too, such as by launching its own capsule fashion collection. Advertising on Woo’s website and marketplace will be “limited” and veer away from the typical display ads found on many media sites, Mai said. Instead, it plans to form brand partnerships that “create things that add value to our audience,” such as branded editorial content, experiences or art installations, he added. Woo coined the term 'woo-ness' to avoid some of the wellness industry's negative connotations “Because we have a marketplace model to support the business, we can be more selective around the brands we want to work with—brands we feel inspired by,” Mai continued. “We’ll be able to offer some brands an end-to-end solution, where we can do campaigns but also sell their products in the marketplace. But everything we want to create should help brands tell a story in a way that is authentic—and potentially shifts how our audience feels physically or mentally.” Reaching the uninterested Woo’s content will be available for free and be “platform agnostic,” which means “we’re going to wherever we think the audience will be,” Mai said. While there will be a Woo website, the content will be distributed first across video, social media and podcasts. ITV’s video-on-demand service, ITV Hub, will also host Woo’s shows, which will hopefully capture “the youth audience that gravitates to ITV for [series like hit reality show] Love Island,” Mai explained. Woo fits into ITV’s strategy to commission more content that appeals to younger viewers. "We need to expand reach," ITV chief executive Carolyn McCall told Adweek. "Particularly we need to attract the 16- to 34-year-old [age group] in a different way, because they are the ones who are leaving linear [TV] more quickly than anything. So we have to work very, very hard. I think all media actually have to work very hard to keep and attract [that group]." There's not a rigid definition [of wellness]. You don't have to be perfect, be vegan or do yoga seven times a week. Stephen Mai Woo’s shows will include The Bigger Trip, which explores the ways Gen Z are using psychedelics; Nature’s Calling, a comedy series about TikTok star Oatmilk Leader (Mary Steven) and musician Niko B venturing into the outdoors; Life in Love, a documentary series featuring real Gen Z couples; and Higher Frequencies, a sound healing series that will use music from up-and-coming artists. Woo's Life in Love follows real Gen Z couples. All the content “targets people who are usually uninterested in and unbothered by” wellness, Mai said. Because of some of its negative connotations, Woo will use the word wellness sparingly—instead it has coined the term “woo-ness”—and try to avoid the tropes found on sites such as Goop. Even its brand identity and logo, with its bright blue, 3D liquid-style font, goes against Goop’s sleek, black and white aesthetic. While Woo aims to be gender neutral, it also skews a bit male because “everything wellness tends to be so female presented that it alienates a big chunk of the audience who may need it the most,” Mai explained. Generation Z has been called one of the most anxious generations to date, with 2018 research from Kaspersky Lab showing that 87% of young people are anxious about something in their lives. Some of these stress factors have worsened since the pandemic, yet many young people may be turned off by a wellness industry that “communicates in a very singular, one note” way, Mai said. Woo aims to be gender neutral and reach audiences who don't think wellness is for them. “We want to break down preconceived notions of what wellness has to be and make it a broader proposition, so people feel comfortable looking after themselves,” he continued. “There’s not a rigid definition [of wellness]—you don’t have to be perfect, be vegan or do yoga seven times a week.” Inspiring new behaviors So far Woo has hired a team including Mary Steven, the TikTok star who fronts its series Nature’s Calling, as its TikTok editor; Kit Chilvers, the 22-year-old founder of influencer network Pubity Group, as its memes director at large; and employees from LadBible, Vice, Boiler Room, i-D and Red Bull. Mai is keen to build a diverse workplace that practices what Woo preaches—and avoids the pitfalls that can lead to the burnout and high stress he experienced in other media environments. While he has been introducing his employees to wellness practices such as hypnotherapy, meditation and sound healing, he also maintains that “the biggest contributors to mental health in the workplace are consistency, communication and a really strong foundation.” Woo's shows include The Bigger Trip, which explores the ways Gen Z uses psychedelics. He hopes that a more positive working environment centered around wellness, where creativity and experimentation are encouraged, will also inform the content that Woo creates and inspire a new generation. “We’re experimenting. The category and the way people interact with it is going to change. This is just a jumping off point to start inspiring that shift. It’s when everyone does it that you start to see real behavioral change in a generation,” Mai said. “We want to create a more positive point of view, an antidote to all the doom scrolling. It feels like the world is ready for something like this.” How 3 Black Vegan Entrepreneurs Are Cooking Up More Inclusive Approaches to Wellness

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Meet Woo, the Media Business Redefining Wellness for ‘Anxious’ Gen Z

Founder Stephen Mai wants to reach those who usually find wellness tropes 'woo-woo' or cringe

Brittaney Kiefer

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