Curated Wellness CEO Brian Van Hecke said he saw a need for personalized wellness advice in this era of an increasing amount of work being done from home. He cited an estimate by UpWork that shows that as much as 26% of workers will continue to work from home for the remainder of the year. Van Hecke also said a recent report in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine indicated there has been “decreased overall physical and mental well-being” as a result of the shift towards work from home.
Connecting products with personalized care
Van Hecke hopes his new wellness delivery model can help buck that trend. For a range of sign up and subscription fees the new company offers a curated set of high quality supplements at discounted prices. Manufacturers include Thorne, Pure Encapsulations and MegaFood.
In addition to the ‘store front,’ the company also offers consultations with trained Nutritional Therapy Practitioners (NTPs) who will guide clients through a health assessment and a discussion of goals. Then comes a recommendation for a choice of supplements based on those results.
Van Hecke said the expertise he saw in the NTPs with whom he’s had personal experience led him to the idea behind Curated Wellness. It was a way to help NTPs out who are tasked with setting up individual practices in a challenging and rapidly changing health care market. And it was a way to help consumers out as well, who might not otherwise be able to afford such personalized consults.
“I wanted to take that expertise I had seen first hand and try to make it accessible to people nationally. And I wanted to help the NTPs out, and let them focus on client care,” he said.
“We formed Curated about a year ago with two facets. In one we offer a sort of tele health, with access to holistic medical practitioners trained in nutrition first methodologies. And second, we offer a members-only supplement store,” he said.
Going with trusted names
Van Hecke said he had considered at one point about going down the private label route, and offering a Curated Wellness-branded line of products. But he ultimately decided that offering a picked set of the highest quality name brand products made more sense.
It’s a model he found to work well in another industry he was active in.
“I have worked in technology, in the area of audio/video integration,” Van Hecke said. In that industry, no one would expect a contractor to show up with a box bearing his own name.
“We were professional resellers of high quality name brands like Samsung. Names you could trust,” he said.
“At Curated Wellness we do something similar. We offer only a select number of brands that make the highest quality products with the most reliable QA testing,” he said.
Access to trained practitioners
The practitioners who work with Curated Wellness are trained and certified by the Nutritional Therapy Association, which offers an online curriculum from its base in Olympia, WA.
Curated Wellness’ member pricing stats at a $19.95 membership fee for access to the supplement store that includes member discounts. A second level, which goes for about $180, gives a consumer a couple of sessions with an NTP, one to set up the diet and supplementation recommendations and another to assess progress. The top level, which sets a consumer back $50 a month, includes the other benefits as well as ongoing support from an NTP.
“We are in the business of supporting people and we do believe that nutrition matters and we want to provide that knowledge to as many people as we can,” Van Hecke said.
“We are building a community,” he said.
