Pillar Wellbeing members’ health club to launch at Raffles London, Old War Office, summer 2023 / Raffles London, OWO
Pillar Wellbeing, which provides personalized and self-contained fitness and wellness services to the hospitality industry, will launch at Accor’s Fairmont and Raffles hotels at Katara Towers, Doha in Q2 2023 and at Raffles London, Old War Office, in Q3 2023.
Raffles London will be the flagship of Pillar Wellbeing, with the team looking to grow the membership base of 250 members.
The company provides a B2B2C business model to luxury hotels and resorts built around the pillars of movement, recovery and nutrition so they can transform underutilized gym, spa, food and beverage and social spaces into wellness membership clubs. Raffles London will have three types of users: residential tenants or owners, hotel guests and members of the public.
Co-founders Harry Jameson, chief executive, and Handley Amos, chief executive, say they are in talks with five or six other potential partners in places like Istanbul, Geneva and Tuscany about exiting. They aim to expand to at least six sites in the next 18 months.
During his career as a personal trainer in London, Jameson worked out of Harley Street, leased gym space from luxury hotels such as the Langham and Rosewood, and ran spas for the Four Seasons, One and Only and Rocco Forte hotels. He has built up an elite clientele over the years, including former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. This set the stage for what would become Suen’s prosperity after a meeting of the minds with Amos.
“About 80 percent of the gyms in these facilities are filled with great equipment but are unmanned, so you have a huge investment from a Capex perspective and a huge underinvestment in services,” Jameson said. HCM:.
“I joked with Handley when we met, because of his hospitality, that it seemed like these hotels had built the best kitchens in the world, but no chefs were working,” he said. “Then we started to figure out what the future of hospitality might look like and where this intersection of his world of F&B and my world of health, fitness and performance might meet.”
Clients at each Pillar Wellbeing location will have the support of 12 to 15 professionals, from trainers to physiotherapists, chiropractors and nutritionists.
Jameson will be responsible for staff training, given that he runs the Future Practice academy, which trains fitness professionals as wellbeing consultants, with Oliver Patrick, clinical director of Pillar Wellbeing.
“All of our coaches will be given the ‘Practice of the Future’ course, in addition to a further nine hours of digital learning content exclusive to Pillar, plus three weeks of on-site physical, one-to-one coaching,” Jameson said. “We work with coaches who have at least three years in the industry and are highly qualified, the only exception being when they come from a professional sports background.
“We take the cream of the people out there and give them extra training so they can talk about sleep, stress, digestive health, immunity, cognitive function and fertility.”
The team will use data-driven insights wherever possible; The Pillar Wellbeing app is designed to read measurements on most wearable devices, but will also use customer consultations and self-reported data to coordinate the best wellness strategy for each customer for fitness, recovery and recovery. nutrition
“Ninety percent of all diseases, mental and physical, are lifestyle-based, and only ten percent of everything that happens to each of us is due to our genetics,” Jameson said. “We are in a really strong position to influence the future outcomes of our clients.”
The business’s restaurant, Pillar Kitchen, will be open to the public and led by executive chef Joy O’Hare. A seasonal, vegetable-focused offering, it’s designed to support gut health and immunity.
Restaurant staff at each location will be guided by Pillar’s food and beverage team on menu creation, branding and service delivery.
There are already two collaborations with Lululemon and Technogym for apparel and equipment, and the team is actively seeking new partners to expand into other areas.
In terms of funding, Pillar has used the UK Enterprise Investment Scheme and is currently in the middle of fundraising. Entrepreneur Debbie Voskow OBE, who founded Love Home Swap, which she sold to Wyndham Destination Networks for US$53m, and more recently The Better Gut, is a shareholder and executive chairman.
“We’re a private member’s area where people who want to can optimize how well they perform every day and eliminate the possibility of things going wrong with them,” Jameson said. “We want Pillar to become a one-stop shop for people to move and recover properly.”