“There’s so much noise in wellness,” says co-founder Rebecca Parekh, who developed the Well while working as the head of cross product sales at Deutsche Bank and later as the chief operations officer for Deepak Chopra. (A third co-founder, Sarrah Hallock, is a former marketing executive at Vitaminwater, Bai, and Wtrmln Wtr.)

“We want to meet people where they are, whether they’re looking to resolve a sleep disorder, de-stress, lose a few pounds—or just want to work hard and play hard. We want to be a trusted, gold-star source for all of it,” Parekh says.

How It Works
The Well is currently extending invitations to apply for 200 founding membership slots, half of which are already taken. By the time it’s at full capacity, there will be space for 2,000 members.

Included in the fee, members get monthly, one-on-one meetings with a dedicated health concierge; unlimited yoga and meditation classes; exclusive access to fitness classes that will range from high-intensity training to qigong; and full use of the communal spaces, which will include a dry sauna, steam room, laconium (for milder heat therapies), coed relaxation areas, and a private training studio. (Just don’t expect it to replace your gym—the workout classes won’t be as comprehensive, and the training studio will be small.) A full-service restaurant and cafe with an ayurvedic twist will be open to the public on the club’s street level.

The club will also offer classroom education—on everything from energy healing to mindfulness—at no cost for members.

McGroarty expects this New Age aspect to be a selling point. “Ten years ago, if you talked to people about sound baths and energy healing, it was considered totally hippie,” she says. “Now it’s absolutely front and center. People are so overwhelmed by digital connection and desperate to shake up their brains.”

Members can also purchase add-on services, ranging from massages in the 10-room spa to acupuncture, reiki, and reflexology. “Every practitioner will have shared access to your medical records [via an electronic medical records system], so you won’t have to answer all the same questions over and over again,” Sarhan says.

A Global Pipeline
The team expects to scale the Well globally beginning with a second location in New York and subsequent openings in San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mumbai, and Singapore. (According to Parekh, they’re all places where people have very little time and an increasing desire to find work-life balance.) Long-term plans also include a digital media division.

Global Wellness Summit’s McGroarty cautions that there will be big competition.

Six Senses, the five-star wellness hotel brand, is developing its own membership club, debuting in New York in 2020. Wellness real estate is also growing at lightning-fast speeds—it’s already estimated to be a $130 billion global market. And big-name hospitals such as the Mayo Clinic are increasingly playing in the preventative health space.