How Othership is Bringing Community to the Wellness Space

Originally published on CAnadian Business | By BRIONY SMITH | july 22, 2024

The burgeoning sauna-and-cold plunge chain transformed an ancient wellness practice in order to battle post-pandemic loneliness

It all began with an unorthodox date. Robbie Bent’s future wife Emily had been learning about the benefits of ice baths, the practice of submerging yourself in frigid water for short periods of time to boost your health and resilience. So, for their third outing, they went to South-Western Bathhouse, a sauna and cold plunge spot in Mississauga. They loved it so much they did it every week for four years, and sought out bathhouses and saunas during their travels together. When they finally moved back to Toronto, they felt they were missing something: community. Namely, a healthy community, with less of a fixation on booze.

The pair teamed up with their best friends—Amanda Laine, Harry Taylor, and Myles Farmer—and built their very own ice bath in their backyard, inviting pals to come use it for free. “If you knew where it was, you could just let yourself in,” Bent says. Soon, their ice-bath WhatsApp group ballooned to hundreds of people. When winter arrived, they converted a garage into a space with a sauna and ice bath, and encouraged neighbourhood denizens to visit, with payment by donation. That, too, quickly turned into over 1,000 devotees. And that’s when Bent knew, he says: “This is a viable business.”

So, in 2022, Bent and his friends opened their first official Othership sauna and cold plunge space on Adelaide St. W. in Toronto, welcoming stressed-out city dwellers to revel in sober fun and connect with fellow humans via a series of different guided classes, free-flow sessions and social events. It has been wildly popular: They’ve had 200,000 visits over their first two years, buzzing Google reviews and frequent sold-out classes.

“We really strayed away from promoting the health benefits of hot and cold,” Bent says. “We promoted the community elements: The sharing, the coming together, the socializing and making it a cool, accessible, open, safe and very well-designed space to hang out.” This is in line with current industry trends; according to the Global Wellness Summit, one of the biggest wellness shifts has been toward gathering vs. more solo pursuits. Call it social wellness.

The demand at Othership was so high that, one month into opening, the team signed the lease on a second, even bigger Yorkville location, which was more than double the size, with 90 seats, and opened that November. And, this summer, they’ve opened their first space in the United States, debuting in the Flatiron district in New York City. As well, their Williamsburg location is set to start construction this summer with an open date in Q1 next year.

Each of their facilities is more ambitious than the last. They bootstrapped their first location, self-funding via their own cash and a small business loan. They discovered that they had to design the ice baths themselves, and redesign their sauna ventilation set-up to accommodate 36 people. For their expansion, they turned to a funding round, ultimately raising $8 million in a Series A. It did, however, take a bit of an emotional toll. “The [funding round] didn’t feel good. It was very hard to do and we dealt with a lot of rejection. People still didn’t understand the concept when we raised the round. It was in 2022 and we’d only been open for six months. Nobody in the U.S. really understood what we’re doing, and a lot of people hadn’t been there. The rejection was awful. I had to do hundreds of meetings and hear hundreds of people say no,” Bent says. “Once we secured the funding, it actually felt even worse because now it’s a liability. There’s $8 million of investor money that we had to give a return on, so it felt like the first step in the battle. And all of that money immediately went back into new builds: Yorkville, and then Flatiron and Williamsburg in New York.”

Expanding into the States has presented the founders with new challenges. Insurance is much more expensive. The co-ed change rooms and custom-built ice baths from their Toronto locations are not up to code in the U.S. so they needed a much larger footprint. “We’d signed a lease prior to knowing this, and so our spaces are actually too small, which we had to overcome by digging out the floors to sink the ice baths down to free up some space and to rent out additional basement space. The build budget is coming in at two times what we actually thought in comparison to Yorkville,” Bent says. “Finding all new vendors was very difficult, dealing with the city was very difficult. It’s actually taken us two years from starting to get open. We’re way delayed, way over budget.”

While the American market can be hard to navigate, it also presents a lot of opportunity as well. “It’s very difficult for a Canadian business to get access to capital from Canadian investors. The institutional investment environment is much more developed in the U.S., so for us, our goal is to build one hundred units across all major cities in North America,” Bent says. They plan to spread across the northeast first, exploring options in Boston, Washington D.C., Chicago and Philadelphia, then hopefully head to larger markets like Texas, Florida and California. “In five years, we’d love to have 25 to 30 Otherships up and running, continue to develop more content on our breathwork app and explore other verticals where we can provide transformation, including cohort-based options and retreats,” Bent says.

New York alone will have multiple locations; their goal is to keep operations tight and expand quickly through Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey, opening a new space every six months, something that is easier there than in, say, Canada where cities are few and far between, which can mak growth often more difficult. “In New York we can build seven to 10 units because of how dense the neighbourhoods are,” he says. “It’s also a place we found where the Othership customer lives: The business customer, the person with the 9-5, the teacher, the accountant, the person who’s always on their phone. If you live in a huge city, you are exposed to stress and struggle. No matter what job you have, city life is expensive, you’re always on. New York epitomizes that. It’s a very hard city to live in. There’s a lot of loneliness and people are always on the go. We thought this was where people might need this the most.”

More and more people are flocking to wellness businesses. According to the Global Wellness Institute, the global wellness industry was worth US$5.6 trillion in 2022, jumping to projected levels of US$8.47 trillion by 2027. The Canadian wellness market alone is worth $127 billion. North America has maintained wellness spending, even in the face of the pandemic, jumping to 123 per cent over 2019 numbers. People, it seems, just want to feel good. Nicky Poole is the director of development and education with Core Essence, a wellness and design consulting firm that has worked with hotels like the Waldorf Astoria, Fairmont, W, Hilton, and The Ritz-Carlton; she thinks the pandemic worsened the loneliness epidemic, spurring a rise in social wellness spending. “Consumers can notice immediate results, including elevated mood and feeling more rested and less stressed. It also costs less than a traditional massage or face-to-face appointment with a therapist,” she says.

Over the past decade, there has been a huge boom in the development of Nordic-inspired spas in the Canadian marketplace, according to Jennifer Findlay, founder and CEO of Core Essence. They are, however, typically large, outdoor spas, located on the outskirts of major Canadian cities like Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. They often offer a more accessible price point, but, for urban dwellers, the driving distance means it’s not going to be a daily or even weekly journey. “This is where Othership has dropped in. The group has taken the centuries-old tradition of contrast bathing, packaged it up with a fantastic brand and intelligent design and brought it to the downtown core,” Findlay says. “From a therapeutic perspective, contrast bathing can be embraced as a daily health practice, a lifestyle practice. Members attend with a high degree of frequency, which further fosters a strong sense of community: A fundamental pillar of the Othership model. From a business perspective, this is brilliant. Known customer preferences facilitates anticipated service and exceptional experiences; customer engagement facilitates loyalty and strong word-of-mouth referral. The members are drinking the Kool-Aid, and everyone wants to be a part of the inner circle!”

Bent believed in the power of hot and cold to help build community and combat the loneliness people were struggling with during Covid, all the way back from the very beginning, when it was just a single tub in his backyard. “There was no such thing as emotional wellness classes in the sauna or ice bath in the world. We pioneered the concept. We’re proud to be Canadians that created something from scratch: All of the design, the programming, the idea to even have a 75-minute ice bath and sauna spa experience didn’t exist. We built it internally from a garage,” he says. “Now, we just feel proud to take something that has Canadian roots and bring it to the world.”