Curated Wellness CEO Brian Van Hecke said he saw a need for personalized wellness advice in this time when more and more work is being done from home. He cited an estimate from UpWork showing that up to 26% of workers will be working from home for the remainder of the year. Van Hecke also said a report recently published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine indicated that “general physical and mental well-being is decreased” as a result of the shift to work from home.
Combine products with individual care
Van Hecke hopes that its new wellness delivery model can counter this trend. For a range of sign up and subscription fees, the new company offers a curated set of high quality additions at discounted prices. Manufacturers include Thorne, Pure Encapsulations, and MegaFood.
In addition to the ‘business front’, the company also offers consultations with trained nutritional therapists (NTPs) who guide clients through a health assessment and a discussion of goals. Then follows a recommendation for a choice of dietary supplements based on these results.
Van Hecke said the expertise he saw in the NTPs that he had personal experiences with led him to the idea behind curated wellness. It was a way to help NTPs tasked with building individual practices in a challenging and rapidly changing healthcare market. And it was also a way of helping consumers who otherwise might not be able to afford such personal advice.
“I wanted to use this expertise that I had seen firsthand and try to make it available to people at the national level. And I wanted to help the NTPs and keep them focused on customer support, ”he said.
“We founded Curated about a year ago with two facets. In one, we offer a kind of telehealth with access to holistic medical professionals who are trained in nutrition-first methods. Second, we have a member-only supplement store, ”he said.
Go by trustworthy name
Van Hecke said at some point he thought about going the private label route and offering a line of Curated Wellness branded products. But ultimately he decided that it made more sense to offer a select set of branded products of the highest quality.
It’s a model he found good in another industry he was in.
“I worked in technology, in the field of audio / video integration,” said Van Hecke. In this industry, no one would expect a contractor to show up with a box of their own name.
“We were professional resellers of the high-quality Samsung brands. Names you could trust, ”he said.
“At Curated Wellness, we’re doing something similar. We only offer 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 is $ 19.95 for supplement store access. A second tier, which costs about $ 180, gives a consumer a couple of sessions with an NTP, one to set diet and supplement recommendations and another to evaluate progress. The top tier, which makes a consumer $ 50 per month, includes the other benefits as well as ongoing support from an NTP.
“We support people and believe that nutrition is important and we want to make this knowledge available to as many people as possible,” said Van Hecke.
“We’re building a community,” he said.
