I spend an alarming amount of my life thinking about the future of wellness. I invest in wellness companies. I talk to founders building wellness companies. I write about wellness companies. I occasionally leave my house and actually go out to dinner and, despite my best efforts, end up talking about wellness companies. (It’s a personality trait at this point; possibly a medical condition…)

And a big part of my job is figuring out what’s coming next:

• Which consumer behaviors will stick

• Which categories will explode

• Which businesses will make investors a fortune

• Which ones will quietly disappear after raising $40 million to reinvent something that probably didn’t need reinventing (lol)

I’ve made some pretty big predictions this year.

Some have aged rather well, some are still playing out, and a few have made me reconsider what I thought I understood about this industry.

Which is a slightly uncomfortable thing to admit when you’ve built a career around having opinions about where it’s going.

But here’s something I’ve learned about investing: being right about the direction of a market doesn’t necessarily mean you’re right about how it gets there, or who wins, or what consumers actually want.

And sometimes the most interesting opportunities are hiding inside the assumptions you got wrong.

So, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, and because I apparently enjoy publicly documenting my questionable judgment, here are three things I’ve changed my mind about in wellness this year.

1. I thought menopause finally getting attention meant we were closer to solving it.

I’ve spent a LOT of time talking about menopause this year.

The billions of dollars in opportunity. The 42-year-old woman nobody seems to understand. The diagnostic trap. The companies finally waking up to the fact that half the population will go through this, and might actually appreciate some help.

And I genuinely thought we were at an inflection point.

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At any rate, today’s post is technically about fashion. Sadly, still without affiliate links. And naturally, with a wellness angle.

I’ve been hearing more and more people talk about wanting to wear clean clothes.

Not clean like freshly laundered. Clean as in free from forever chemicals, potentially harmful dyes, and whatever else might be lurking in the leggings I’ve been wearing for the last decade.

We’ve already spent years worrying about what’s in our food, our skincare, our water, our cleaning products, and, if you’re anything like me, an alarming number of things you never previously thought to worry about.

So I wasn’t exactly looking to add my pants to the list.

But here we are.

And the more I started looking into it, the more I realized there’s a much bigger question here than whether my leggings contain questionable chemicals.

We’ve spent billions of dollars building businesses around what goes in our bodies and what goes on our bodies. Are we about to do the same for what we put our bodies in?

And if so, who actually wins?

Because I’m not convinced the answer is as obvious as it might seem.

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Warren Buffett. Howard Marks. Howard Schultz.

(Yes, I realize this is an aggressively nerdy list. Some women fangirl over Hollywood celebrities. I apparently reserve that level of embarrassment for legendary investors 💁‍♀️)

So when I got the chance to get on a call with Howard Schultz, I used every ounce of self-control I have to not be weird. I’m confident I failed. I’m sure I was lovely and slightly feral.

But here’s the twist: the highlight of the call wasn’t Howard (at least not wholly…). It was the man who has been by his side for a decade: Frank.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know who Frank was before that call (sorry, Frank, if you're reading this. And Howard, if you are too, I promise to be less feral next time, although the fact that you're reading this isn't helping…). Within about ten minutes, I understood why Howard has trusted him for so long. He was warm and kind in a way that made it clear he knew exactly how star-struck I was, and his questions were wicked smart.

A few months later, we started chatting again, because Frank runs a company called Aescape (think robotic recovery technology). And as these conversations tend to go, I ended up down a rabbit hole about what I think could be one of the biggest opportunities in wellness right now…

Why have we built an entire wellness economy around exhausting ourselves, but still treat recovery as a luxury?

And more importantly, what happens when that changes?

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I’ve seen more oral care pitch decks in the last five months than almost any other category.

Some of the biggest funds I work with are actively hunting in the space. One of our own portfolio companies, Flaus, is thriving. New toothpastes, enamel products, oral probiotics, whitening systems, saliva diagnostics and devices keep showing up in my inbox.

The easy explanation is that oral care is the new skincare.

I’ve heard that line a lot lately, and I actually think it’s wrong. Or at least incomplete…

Because whenever an entire category suddenly becomes interesting to founders, consumers AND investors at roughly the same time, I want to understand what changed.

We have had mouths for quite a while, we’ve had toothpaste for quite a while, dentists have been yelling at us to floss since approximately the beginning of time…

So why oral care? And why now?

I started pulling at that thread, and the answer is much more interesting than prettier toothpaste, because a strange collection of things is happening at once:

• We’re taking more drugs that change what happens in our mouths (hello GLP1s)

• We’re eating differently (also hello GLP1s)

• We’re learning more about the oral microbiome

• We’re increasingly obsessed with longevity and prevention (arguably an understatement)

• Beauty has moved from covering problems to preventing them

• And consumers who will spend $200 on their skin are starting to question why the rest of their face gets Crest and a dentist appointment every six months.

• Even dentistry itself, perhaps one of the least sexy consumer experiences imaginable, is getting a makeover.

Now is when I feel confident saying, the entire mouth is having a glow-up.

And naturally, I think we’re very early.

First: oral care has something most wellness categories would kill for.

Sex appeal.

Think about what we actually notice when we meet someone: Their smile. Their teeth. Their breath.

The mouth sits in a very unusual place in consumer psychology because it is simultaneously health, beauty, hygiene and intimacy.

Gut health can promise you better digestion.
Skincare can promise you better skin.
Oral care can promise health while also promising that someone will want to kiss you.

That holds power. And historically, we’ve done surprisingly little with it.

Whitening figured this out first. Consumers weren’t necessarily whitening their teeth because their dentists told them it would improve their health. They did it because white teeth became associated with attractiveness, youth and status.

But whitening may have been the appetizer, because now we’re beginning to care about what’s underneath the white teeth.

GLP-1s may accelerate the whole thing.

This is the piece I think people are underestimating.

Millions of people are changing how they eat through GLP-1 medications, and the downstream effects don’t stop at weight loss.

Dry mouth can occur. Reflux and vomiting can expose teeth to stomach acid. Changes in eating and hydration can change the environment of the mouth. Bad breath has become part of the conversation around these medications, too.

Suddenly enamel, saliva, hydration, breath and dental health become more relevant.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the second-order GLP-1 economy: protein, muscle preservation, bone health, nutrition, hydration. And as I’ve said, I think oral health belongs on that list.

And that’s when oral care starts looking less like a cute beauty trend and more like part of a much larger healthcare shift.

At the same time, we’re discovering that the mouth isn’t just teeth.

We spent the last decade becoming obsessed with our gut microbiome.

Meanwhile, there is another complex microbial ecosystem sitting directly upstream: Your mouth.

Researchers are increasingly studying the oral microbiome and relationships between oral health and systemic health. Periodontal disease, for example, has been associated with conditions including cardiovascular disease and diabetes, although association doesn’t necessarily mean causation.

Saliva is being studied as a diagnostic medium. The mouth is slowly being reframed from something you clean into something you manage. And we’ve seen this movie before: We used to wash our faces, now we manage our skin barriers.

Skincare didn’t create oral care. It trained the consumer for it.

This is where I think the “oral care is the new skincare” comparison actually becomes useful.

Twenty years ago, skincare was cleanser and moisturizer. Then consumers learned about retinol. SPF. Acids. Collagen. Microbiomes. Skin barriers. Lasers. Red light.

We were taught, product by product, that there were dozens of things happening to our skin that deserved attention.

And crucially, we learned to spend money before something went wrong.

That behavioral change is now spreading:

• Supplements did it

• Wearables did it

• Longevity did it

And oral care is walking into a consumer market that has already been taught to optimize, prevent and premiumize.

We don’t need to convince someone who owns a $500 red-light mask that prevention is worth paying for. We just need to convince her that her mouth deserves some of the attention she’s been giving her forehead.

But consumer behavior is only half of what I’m watching, because really I care about where the money gets made…

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I’m fascinated by it.

I am also 36.

So, no, I am not writing this from the perspective of a woman currently navigating hot flashes in the middle of a board meeting. I’m writing it from the perspective of someone who spends an inordinate amount of time watching where money, consumer behavior, and culture are moving next.

And menopause keeps showing up.

Not loudly. Not in the way GLP-1s show up. Not with billion-dollar acquisitions and an entire financial ecosystem trying to figure out who gets to own the category.

It shows up in the quiet conversations…

• My founder who tells me she hasn’t slept through the night in months.

• My friend who is suddenly rereading emails three times, losing her train of thought in meetings, and texting me, Is something wrong with me?

• My student who lowkey admits she has no idea what’s happening. She just knows she’s exhausted, distracted, and doesn’t feel like herself.

None of them are looking at menopause.

They’re trying to figure out why the person they were five years ago suddenly feels harder to access.

And then everyone moves on.

That last part is the interesting part.

Because we still have enormous gaps in menopause research, data, treatment, and education. For something that will affect roughly half the population, our understanding of it is remarkably shallow.

And I keep wondering what happens when the women experiencing it have more money, more power, more agency, and fewer reasons to just put up with it.

What does the utopian future of menopause actually look like?

I have a few ideas…

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And at the end of the night, one of the most disciplined women I know walked outside, pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her bag, and lit one.

Nobody said anything. In fact, another friend asked if she could have one.
(even after living in Europe, my jaw still hit the floor…)

I’ve been thinking about that moment ever since. Not because I think smoking is suddenly back. But because of the look on her face…It was the most relaxed I’d seen anyone all night.

And then, seemingly unrelated things started happening:

A friend told me about an underground party (we’ll leave that one at that…). Another invited me to a SoulCycle class for the first time in years (thank you, Sheena).

On paper, these things have almost nothing in common, but in my mind, they’re all the same theme…

We’ve spent the last decade turning wellness into a full-time job, and I think we’re starting to see the rebellion.

We track our sleep. Optimize our hormones. Hit our protein goals. Monitor our recovery. We’ve gotten so good at measuring our health that we’ve practically turned being alive into a performance review.

And listen, I love the science. I invest in this stuff. I genuinely believe in understanding our bodies and using data to improve our health.

But lately, I keep hearing about people taking things a little further in the other direction.

Not just skipping their morning routine.

Actively seeking out experiences that seem to fly in the face of everything we’ve been told about wellness.

More indulgence. More pleasure. More spontaneity. Less worrying about whether every decision is good for us.

I think the wellness industry may have created its own counterculture.

Not against health. Not against science. Not even against optimization, but against the idea that every single thing we do needs to make us better.

And the businesses emerging from this shift might look a lot less like the wellness industry we’ve spent the last decade building.

They might look more like a nightclub.

Or a bathhouse.

Or, yes, an underground sex club.

Let me explain because this tells us everything about the future of wellness…

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I assume they were expecting Pilates. Pickleball. Hyrox. Something involving a reformer I hadn’t heard of yet.

Instead, I told them I wanted to talk about run clubs and hiking groups, and I suspect that was not what they had in mind.

But I am me, so naturally I shared the data:

• Hiking clubs grew 5.8x on Strava in 2025

• Running clubs grew 3.5x

• Club activity overall nearly quadrupled

And if you’ve ever had dinner in Venice, you’ve seen the jarring Venice run-club crowd: literally hundreds of people running through the neighborhood with massive brand sponsors, entire (social) lives forming around their meetups.

And honestly, to me, this isn’t just people choosing a different way to exercise…it’s people choosing a different way to spend their lives.

Which again reiterates that the fastest-growing thing in fitness right now doesn’t have four walls. Instead just a group chat…

And the more I looked at it, the more I started questioning something I thought I understood very well:

What if we’ve been obsessing over the next workout when the real fitness trend has almost nothing to do with working out?

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It’s usually somewhere between the second glass of wine, a dinner that has gone on far longer than planned, and the realization that nobody has any idea what time it is.

Someone looks around the table and says some version of:

“Wait. How did we become friends this fast?”

And I just smile, because I’ve watched this happen over and over again.

This year, we went to Sayulita, Mallorca and Desert Hot Springs.

Dozens of women came as strangers and left with new friendships, new perspectives, new ideas, and, in more than a few cases, a completely different relationship with what they want their lives to look like.

I always hear:

“I expected the retreats to be beautiful.”

“I expected the yoga to be good.”

“I expected everyone to eat very, very well.”

And then…“what I didn’t expect is how often the conversations would continue long after the the plates were cleared and the meal was over…”

There’s no better feeling than the overwhelming number of women who tell me that something shifted for them.

So next year is Taos, Tuscany, and Santa Barbara.

Three very different places. One very similar philosophy: Build a few days that are so good you forget to check your phone.

• Move your body

• Eat something incredible

• Go somewhere beautiful

• Meet women who make you think bigger

• Laugh until your stomach hurts

• Stay at the table too long

And maybe, somewhere along the way, have a conversation that follows you home.

Because I don’t create retreats to help women escape their lives…I create them to give women enough space to remember what they want their lives to feel like.

Here’s where we’re going in 2027.

TAOS, NEW MEXICO | MAY 20–23, 2027 (3 nights / 4 days)

• 3 nights tucked away in the high desert, surrounded by mountains and wide-open New Mexico skies

• Daily yoga, breathwork & meditation to start each morning

• Beautiful farm-to-table meals

• Desert hikes, pool afternoons & time to explore the magic of Taos

• A long weekend built around moving, eating, laughing, connecting and leaving feeling completely recharged

TUSCANY, ITALY | JUNE 28–JULY 3, 2027 (5 nights / 6 days)

• 5 nights at a private villa surrounded by vineyards, olive groves and rolling Tuscan hills

• Daily yoga, breathwork & meditation overlooking the countryside

• Farm-to-table Italian meals prepared by our private chef, plus plenty of local wine

• Pool afternoons, countryside hikes, charming villages & a few very special Tuscan experiences

• Long lunches that turn into afternoons, dinners under the stars, and six days of living at a much slower Italian pace

SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA | SEPTEMBER 23–26, 2027 (3 nights / 4 days)

• 3 nights tucked into the Santa Barbara coast, where the mountains quite literally meet the ocean

• Daily yoga, breathwork & meditation to start each morning

• Seasonal farm-to-table meals showcasing the best of California

• Coastal hikes, pool time, ocean air & a few surprises inspired by everything we love about Santa Barbara

• Golden-hour dinners, great wine, incredible women, and a weekend that feels much farther from real life than the drive home suggests

Interested? Send me a note asap, because they always sell out fast <3
(there’s already only 1 room left for Tuscany)

Hope to see you there!

xx,

Rach

Enjoyed this? Forward it to someone who needs the reminder that slow can be strategic.

New here? I’m a wellness VC and founder. I write about what’s actually happening in wellness — from the inside.

For more, follow us on Instagram

Because I have spent enough time inside the fitness industry to know that sometimes the prettiest brands have the ugliest spreadsheets.

I learned that at Xponential.
I learned it running my own studios.
And lately, I’ve been watching a story unfold that is basically a case study in everything that can go wrong when financial engineering meets four walls.

I’m not going to name the company, because honestly it doesn’t matter and it’s not the point. But I want to tell you what has been particularly interesting to me.

Because this isn’t just a story about a fitness company that failed.

It’s about where the money went, who got left holding the bag, and why almost nobody in the industry wants to talk about it.

And trust me, the story gets stranger…

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Which is a slightly ridiculous thing to say about a category that has already reshaped pharma, weight loss, telehealth and approximately every dinner conversation in Los Angeles.

But hear me out.

A few months ago, we published our GLP-1 Economy white paper because I couldn’t stop thinking about everything these drugs would change outside healthcare.

If millions of people suddenly eat less, drink less, lose significant amounts of weight and think differently about food, that doesn’t just create a very large pharmaceutical market.

It changes restaurants. Grocery stores. Alcohol. Apparel. Fitness. Beauty. Supplements.

That was the thesis.

I now think we may have underestimated it.

Because something’s been happening that shows we’ve had this completely wrong...

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On any given Tuesday, I might talk to a founder building toothpaste for your oral microbiome, another trying to make your house healthier, and someone putting a supplement into a product I did not know could physically contain a supplement.

One weird company is just one company, but five founders who don’t know each other building around the same idea? That’s when I start paying attention.

Because trends rarely announce themselves as trends. They show up as weird little breadcrumbs first:

• An ingredient suddenly appearing everywhere

• A behavior that sounded insane two years ago and now nobody questions

• Three founders solving a problem I didn’t know we had

My job is basically to figure out which breadcrumbs are nothing...and which ones lead to a very large pile of money.

Lately, there are seven I cannot stop seeing.

One is so deeply unsexy that I’m becoming increasingly convinced it’s about to be everywhere. But the part I find much more interesting? I don’t actually think these are seven separate trends.

Put them next to each other and they tell a much bigger story about where wellness is going next...

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Not investor-speak “camp.” Actual summer camp (bunks, dining hall, the whole thing). I told myself I’d sneak in some emails during downtime…I did not get a single email done.

And within about 24 hours, I felt different.

Not because I’d hit my protein goal. Or my sleep score. Or done my usual red-light-sauna-cold-plunge-Pilates stack before 9am.

I was outside. I was walking everywhere. I was connecting with people. I ate when I was hungry and slept when I was tired. I mostly forgot where I’d put my phone.

And somehow, without trying to be well at all, I felt really, really good.

Which got me thinking: When did feeling good become so much work?

I say this as someone who makes a living thinking about wellness…so I say this with love, but we've turned it into a leaderboard. (HRV, VO2 max, biological age, cortisol, the exact temperature of the plunge…)

A lot of this is genuinely great. I invest in this stuff. I believe in what better data and diagnostics can do for how long and how well we live. But somewhere in there, I think we quietly turned wellness into one more thing to be good at (some might say another performance review).

And I wonder if we’re close to the point where the pendulum starts swinging back? Not away from wellness, but way from trying so hard at it.

But here’s where this gets much more interesting to me as an investor: Last week, $368 million changed hands for 22 summer camps. The CEO of Warner Bros personally tried to buy one of them for $80 million.

Yes. A summer camp.

And I think the reason why tells us more about where wellness is going next than almost anything happening in wellness right now…

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At the time, everyone talking seriously about GLP-1s was a doctor. Which, sure, made sense: this is one of the biggest medical breakthroughs of our lifetime.

But I kept thinking the economic implications are just as significant (if not more). Like, they’ll be generationally significant…so we built the research I couldn’t find anywhere else.

We talked to the best plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills, GLP-1 injectors across the country, CPG founders building around the shift in real time.

I got brought into Harvard Business School to speak about it. Then flown to New York to speak on stage at a major investor conference.

Somewhere along the way, I became one of the people people call when they want to understand not just what GLP-1s do to the body, but what they do to the economy.

Here we are, three months later, and Bank of America is spending more than $250 million a year on GLP-1s for its employees. So I think we can retire the question of whether these drugs are going mainstream. The much more interesting question is: what do they change next?

Because I love the conversations happening around GLP-1s now. I just don't think we're talking about the depth of it:

• Have you thought about what this means for restaurants? How chains are quietly redesigning entire menus around it? Because millions of people suddenly eat less, prioritize protein, and leave half the fries on the plate…

• Or what it means for clothing retailers, when shoppers need to try on sizes they've never worn before, or suddenly feel comfortable walking into a store they used to avoid?

• Or even what grocery stores need to in order to rearrange shelf space to keep their revenue up?

There are layers on top of layers here. I unpacked a lot of them in the original white paper.

But today, I want to give you my investor thesis on the part of the GLP-1 economy almost everyone is still missing, who the next consumer is, what's about to change...

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If you’ve been around a while, you know I have a habit of disappearing to Spain for a few weeks (sometimes a few months…) every year.

Given that’s on my mind, this week I told a friend that Bathhouse truly has the energy of Ushuaïa in Ibiza. We laughed. I wasn’t joking.

The wellness industry isn’t competing with gyms. It’s competing for Friday night.

Groups of friends moving between the sauna and the cold plunge. Couples on dates. People ordering food. Someone reading a book in the corner. Others staying for three or four hours with absolutely nowhere else to be.

It didn’t feel like a wellness business. It felt like nightlife. And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what that means, because it's about to become one of the biggest opportunities in consumer…

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If you’re new here: welcome. If you’ve been reading for a while and just know me as “the VC who won’t shut up about GLP-1s and boutique fitness closures” — hi again, and also, fair.

A few weeks ago someone introduced me as: “Rachel left finance to work in wellness.” It’s a good story. It’s also completely wrong…

I’ve spent my entire career doing the same thing: Trying to understand where people are headed before they get there. Sometimes that meant building financial models at UBS. Sometimes it meant watching a new generation of consumer companies emerge while I was at Tiger Global. Sometimes it meant opening yoga studios. Today it means investing in the next generation of wellness companies before the rest of the market catches up.

The industries changed, but the job never did.

And I think that’s probably the best way to explain who I am.

I’ve never been very good at picking one lane.

Who even am I?

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.

I was never the kid who fit cleanly into a box. My sister was the three-sport athlete, student council president, sorority president. Sari is stereotypically perfect in every category.

I...was not.

I was wildly social, but I also loved math and had crippling social anxiety.

I wanted to work on Wall Street and live in Africa.

Looking back, I’ve basically been one long contradiction. What I was, unmistakably, was a dreamer.

In high school we had one of those assignments where you wrote down your goals for the future.

Mine were:

• Work on Wall Street.

• Live in Africa.

I remember being genuinely excited to turn it in, and then my teacher’s feedback was essentially: “that’s not how life works.”

His expectation of me was pretty simple: Grow up in the suburbs. Marry my high school boyfriend. Live a perfectly nice life.

Except, mine was never going to look like that.

(For the record: I did both…lived in Africa and worked on Wall Street)

I’ve thought about that assignment a lot over the years, because people have always wanted me to choose.

• Finance or wellness

• Business or yoga

• Investor or founder

• Logic or intuition

The Wall Street years

I spent years at UBS, then moved to Tiger Global. I had the kind of jobs that look, from the outside, like the opposite of “wellness girl.” But that’s not actually true, and it never was. I was crunchy the entire time. I wore my Toms to the office, brewed my own kombucha, spend way too much time wandering health food stores…

…long before wellness became a trillion-dollar industry.

At UBS, I became mildly obsessed with Monster Energy because I thought the market was looking at the company through the wrong lens. While I was at Tiger, I found myself endlessly fascinated by companies we were investing in like Peloton, Warby Parker and Restoration Hardware. It felt like consumers were changing right in front of us.

Looking back, I wasn’t just obsessed with wellness. I was obsessed with the businesses shaping it.

And maybe even more obsessed with the moments when consumer behavior quietly starts to change.

That’s still my favorite part of investing.

Building Empowered Yoga

I want to be honest about what came next, because I’ve heard people call the founder-operator years “unglamorous,” and that word is far too kind. Building Empowered Yoga was savage. It was awful in ways I was not prepared for (and that’s saying something, because I was, if nothing else, hyper-prepared).

If you’ve never built a brick-and-mortar business...it’s hard to explain how humbling it is.

Nothing teaches you unit economics faster than wondering how you’re going to make payroll. Nothing teaches you leadership faster than getting a text that an instructor quit fifteen minutes before class starts. Nothing teaches you empathy for founders faster than becoming one.

But it gave me something no deal ever could: real confidence, earned the hard way, that turned out to be applicable far beyond a yoga studio and far beyond brick-and-mortar. Everything I do now e(very founder conversation, every underwriting call, every uncomfortable operational truth I’m willing to say out loud) traces back to what that studio put me through.

Operating made me a dramatically better investor.

Every opinion I have about boutique fitness. Community. Pricing. Retention. Expansion. Four-wall businesses. I earned the expensive way.

for our kind of curious people

Why Wellness Growth Ventures

I kept meeting founders building incredible businesses. Not just wellness businesses, category-defining businesses, and I kept seeing the same gap.

Traditional investors often didn’t understand wellness well enough to underwrite it.

People inside wellness understood the consumer, but many had never actually built or invested in businesses.

I’d somehow ended up living in both worlds.

Starting Wellness Growth Ventures never felt like changing careers. It felt like combining every career I’d already had.

What you can expect here

Which brings us here.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ve probably noticed I don’t write about wellness the way most people do.

I’m usually less interested in what’s happening than why.

• Why frozen yogurt suddenly matters again.

• Why I think boutique fitness is heading toward a shakeout.

• Why GLP-1s are creating entirely new categories.

• Why I think homebuilders might quietly become wellness companies.

Because I don’t think wellness is just an industry anymore. I think it’s one of the biggest consumer shifts happening right in front of us, and I wanted a place to write about it through the lens I know best.

I write about wellness the way I’d underwrite it. With numbers. With skepticism toward hype. With genuine excitement when something’s actually good. I’m an investor who happens to have lived inside the thing she invests in. This is a place for anyone who wants the version of wellness content written by someone who’s read the cap table, not just the caption.

So...what can you expect here?

• Investment theses

• Consumer trends

• Founder stories

• Behind-the-scenes looks at venture capital

• The occasional rant about boutique fitness

• Probably more GLP-1 content than any reasonable person should consume

• And every now and then, a recommendation for a facialist, a hotel or a random Amazon purchase because, well...I’m still me

Mostly, though, you’ll find someone trying to connect dots before everyone else realizes they’re part of the same picture.

Sometimes I’ll be right. Sometimes I’ll be wrong. But every piece starts the same way:

With something I can’t stop thinking about.

One last thing…I’m not writing this because I think I have all the answers. I’m writing it because I genuinely believe wellness is one of the most interesting industries in the world. Because it’s reshaping how we eat, shop, age, work, socialize, travel, exercise and take care of ourselves. It’s reshaping how we live.

And I can’t think of a more interesting business to study <3

So whether you’re an investor, a founder, building inside this industry, or you’re just endlessly curious about where consumer culture is headed next...

I’m so glad you’re here.

xx,

Rach

This one’s free 🫶 I wanted this story to be available to anyone who’s curious about who I am, how I think, or why a Wall Street girlie somehow ended up running a wellness venture fund. Most weeks, though, the real fun happens inside the membership. That’s where we go much deeper on the business of wellness, consumer psychology, venture capital, career, money, and the cultural shifts I think everyone else is missing (aka what I call fun).

Enjoyed this? Forward it to someone who needs the reminder that slow can be strategic.

New here? I’m a wellness VC and founder. I write about what’s actually happening in wellness — from the inside.

For more, follow us on Instagram

Which sounds ridiculous until you realize frozen yogurt has never really been about frozen yogurt. It’s about what the cup says about the person holding it.

That's why I think the return of froyo is one of the biggest wellness signals of 2026.

In the late ‘90s and early 2000s, New York had Tasti D-Lite.

Tasti D-Lite wasn’t dessert. It was plausible deniability. You got the ritual of dessert without admitting you wanted dessert.

Then came Pinkberry.

Pinkberry did something genuinely brilliant.

It made restraint beautiful.

White walls. Tiny cups. Tart yogurt. You could’ve mistaken it for Glossier years before Glossier existed.

It wasn’t selling frozen yogurt, it was selling an identity. The little cup became an accessory. Proof that you cared about yourself, about wellness, about discipline.

Then 16 Handles arrived and turned frozen yogurt into entertainment. Self-serve machines. Endless toppings. Pay by weight. The category slowly drifted from restraint toward abundance.

Eventually the entire culture followed. Real butter became healther than a laboratory-engineered substitute. Eating a smaller amount of exceptional ice cream felt more sophisticated than eating a bowl of something designed to imitate it.

Then the mascot changed…The Pinkberry cup became the Levain cookie. Levain’s six-ounce cookie became an icon because it perfectly captured the mood of the moment.

The body ideal changed alongside the food.

The froyo era celebrated visible restraint. The next chapter celebrated fullness: richer ingredients, curvier silhouettes, the rise of the BBL, the early Kim Kardashian era.

We simply traded one silhouette for another.

Which is why I don't think frozen yogurt is a nostalgia trend. Here's what I actually think is happening as an investor…

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I’ve lived on three continents, I host retreats around the world for a living, and I’ve hiked Kilimanjaro enough times that it’s starting to feel like a personality flaw. If there is a way to land somewhere feeling like a damp towel, I have personally field-tested it…which means I’ve also field-tested the way out.

So this RWR is a little different. It’s not just what I’m buying, it’s what I’m doing…the full protocol, in order, with the products slotted in exactly where they earn their place.

Before you even get to the airport:

Book the latest overnight flight you can. You want to be genuinely tired when you board, not fighting your body for six hours. But before you get on, day of: work out, get your steps in, move your body. I know it feels impossible on a travel day. Do it anyway. It’s the single biggest difference-maker on this list and she’s free.

Eat dinner before boarding. The airplane meal (which is also just not the most nutritious food) is hours you need to be sleeping, and you will not be sleeping through a cart clattering down the aisle. Eat real food on the ground, board ready for bed.

The second you board:

Honest Hand Sanitizer…hands, tray table, armrests, done. Cannot be getting sick. Will not be getting sick.

I refuse to spend a trip I planned for months in a hotel bed with a throat situation.

This one doesn’t smell like vodka, and the spray format means I’m not doing the awkward gel-glob thing over a tray table.

One in every bag.

Bose QuietComfort Headphones go on next, and they stay on.

This isn’t a music thing for me, most of the time there’s nothing playing. It’s a noise thing. Other people’s conversations, the seatback screen next to me, the guy who wants to chat at 30,000 feet…gone. It’s the single easiest way to control your own environment on a flight you otherwise control nothing about.

Non-negotiable, every flight, regardless of length.

Then start preparing for bed immediately. Not after the safety demo, not after takeoff. Now. Whatever your sleep situation is (magnesium, melatonin, CBD, xany) this is when it starts.

Setting up "bed":

U Beauty Plasma Lip Compound goes on first. Cabin air is basically a dehydration experiment and your lips are the first casualty.

This is the only lip product I've used that still feels like it's doing something hours later. It's a treatment that happens to look good, not the other way around.

Reapplied roughly every time I wake up in a weird position.

Then, U Beauty Bioactive Mist over everything. Yes, second U Beauty product in one list, which tells you where I’m at with this brand.

Spritz, close your eyes, pretend you're somewhere with humidity. I spray this over whatever is or isn’t on my face every couple hours in flight, and again when I land.

It’s the difference between skin that recovers in a day and skin that sulks for a week.

Eye mask on. Actually try to sleep. This is the whole job now.

About 90 minutes before landing:

Wake up (or give up, whichever comes first) and put on Augustinus Bader The Eye Patches. This is the single best thing you can do for your face on a plane besides sleep.

Leave them on until descent. TBH they're expensive, but I love them. Wear them at your seat, let’s normalize it, you will never see these people again.

While the patches work, shake a BelliWelli Fiber Travel Packs into a bottle of water.

Travel destroys my digestion. (I know it destroys yours too because this is the number one thing people confess to me in DMs, so let's just talk about it.)

These travel packs are the exact fiber I take at home (with collagen and electrolytes, so it's pulling triple duty), in a format TSA can't argue with.

We’re dehydrated and bloated, this fixes us.

On descent:

Epic Cinnamon Mints

Unglamorous yet essential.

Xylitol instead of aspartame, cinnamon flavor (obviously), no Red 40, and they solve the two problems every flight has: your ears on descent and your breath on arrival.

I buy these in multiples.

The moment you land:

Touch grass. Walk. Drink water.

Free. Ships immediately. The actual science of beating jetlag is mostly this — get sunlight the morning you land, move your body, and hydrate like it’s your job. Everything above helps. This is what works. I’ll be doing all three within an hour of landing, probably still wearing the eye patches.

That’s the carry-on.

If you have a friend with a long-haul coming up, forward them this (consider it your contribution to their not looking like a damp towel).

xx, Rach

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Not at $300 million in revenue. Not once they’re household names. Earlier.

Every time I say this to someone inside a large food company (or to any of the bankers I used to sit next to), I get the same list back: small acquisitions are annoying. They don’t move the needle. Integration is expensive. A $20 million brand barely registers inside a company doing $30 billion a year.

And, to be fair? They’re right about all of it.

I just think they’re going to have to do it anyway. Because something is happening inside your grocery cart, and the numbers have stopped being polite about it.

The 35% clue

In 2021, small independent food brands (anything doing under $100 million in sales) made up 13% of the U.S. market. Tiny. From 2021 to 2023, they generated 15% of the industry’s growth. Interesting, but nobody’s canceling their ski trip over it.

Then, by 2025: small brands were responsible for 35% of category growth.
Large brands? Less than 1%.

Read that again, then go look at your pantry…

How Big Food missed it

For the last few years, Big Food had pretty good camouflage: pricing.

Inflation let everyone raise prices, so revenue went up, earnings went up, and the whole industry could tell itself the machine was still working.

Meanwhile, underneath that beautiful spreadsheet, fewer and fewer households were actually buying the stuff. The carts got emptier while the prices got louder (and we’ve all been complaining about it).

Big Food was watching the revenue line, while we were already out the door.

• We went to private label when we wanted cheaper.

• We went to small brands when we wanted better.

You buy the store-brand paper towels because you genuinely do not care, then spend $8 on a protein bar because it has 20 grams of protein and somehow tastes like a snickers. (No judgment. Same, friend.)

Which leaves the giant legacy brand stranded in the middle: not the cheapest thing on the shelf, not the most interesting thing on the shelf. Just... there. Losing to private label on price and to the startup next door on function.

That middle is a terrible neighborhood, and it’s getting worse.

So today’s post:

1. Why Target suddenly stocks every startup snack you’ve double-tapped on Instagram (spoiler: it’s not generosity).

2. The skeptics are right that integration isn’t worth it. They lose anyway. (The reason why is my favorite part of this entire piece.)

3. One beverage company already ran the whole playbook (in public, over several years) and walked away owning a piece of the fastest-growing drink category. Almost nobody has clocked it as a strategy. I think it becomes the template for all of food.

4. And the five categories I’d be buying today. One of them is secretly a meal company disguised as a snack company, which will make sense once you see the stat about how America eats lunch now that made me put my phone down.

If you invest in food, build in food, or simply eat food: this is the part you want👇

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It’s called RWR (Rach’s Wellness Rotation).

Basically the things I’d text you if we were friends.

Which, at this point, I feel like we are.

It’s been living on Instagram and Substack while I decided whether you, “the email people”, deserved it.

I’ve decided you do.

Here’s the premise: nothing is sponsored. Nothing is gifted. These are just the products I keep buying...partly because I genuinely love this stuff, partly because I spend an unreasonable amount of time researching everything that goes on my face, in my body, and around my house.

Occupational hazard of being a wellness investor.

Which brings me to today’s edition, because this isn’t really about products.

It’s about the biggest shift in consumer health I’ve seen in my career, told through the things sitting on my counter.

Those of you who know me know I tell everyone I’m in perimenopause.

Is it true? Hard to say.

Which is sort of the point. Nobody can really tell you.

But I like getting ahead of things (sorry Mom and Dad, no grandkids headed your way), so I’ve basically decided I’m there and built a whole routine around it.

Here’s the problem: unless you’re deep in Reddit at 2 a.m., nobody is really telling women what to do about perimenopause. Your doctor probably isn’t even telling you your symptoms are perimenopause.

No shade to doctors. I’m a huge fan. But most received almost no menopause training. Not “a little.” Almost none.

So women spend years being told they’re fine, or anxious, or “just stressed,” while their hormones quietly redecorate the entire house.

And here’s the investor part, because you know I can’t help myself. This is a market of more than a billion women entering a decade-long life stage with essentially no trusted brands serving them.

Every category I invest in, or want to invest in, eventually comes back to this. The women’s health thesis I’ve been writing about for years? This is its center of gravity.

So today, three things I’m paying attention to…
First: the symptom list. Including the weird ones and the one that sends women to a cardiologist only to hear everything looks normal.

Second: my routine, item by item. One of these costs pennies a day and somehow spent thirty years being marketed almost exclusively to gym bros.

Finally: where I think the next billion-dollar companies get built. One of my three picks isn’t a product at all.

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Three decks hit my inbox in the same week last month: a mold-detection startup, a circadian lighting company, and a whole-home water filtration play.

My first reaction was that my deal flow had gone sideways.

My second reaction is this newsletter.

Because by the third deck, I stopped thinking “wrong inbox” and started thinking “oh no. This is a thesis.”

Everyone keeps asking me what the next big wellness product will be. The next Ozempic. The next Oura. The next adaptogenic beverage in a can pretty enough to leave on the counter.

I think it’s the wrong question.

The next chapter of wellness isn’t a product at all. It’s infrastructure.

And yes, I’m aware that “infrastructure” is the single least sexy word I could have chosen for a newsletter about the future of an industry built on glow. Stay with me. Because once you see this pattern, you will start seeing it everywhere, and I’m only a little sorry about that.

The decade we spent on the body

The first wave of wellness had one big idea: you are the project.

Eat this. Lift this. Track this. Cold plunge into this. Wear a ring that tells you how badly you slept, as if you didn’t already know.

Fitness, nutrition, supplements, wearables, and then GLP-1s arrived as the grand finale, the most literal version of “optimize the individual” imaginable. We spent twenty years and a few hundred billion dollars treating the body as the variable.

It worked, sort of. It also exhausted everyone.

The thing getting funded now

Now look at where the money is actually going. Two groups of companies, at first glance totally unrelated.

Group 1: the good stuff in. Sleep temperature. Circadian lighting that shifts with the day. Recovery tools designed for your living room instead of a clinic. Water that’s actually filtered before it hits your skin.

Group 2: the bad stuff out. Mold. PFAS. VOCs in your paint. Microplastics in your cutting board. Chlorine in your shower.

None of these companies are optimizing your body. They’re optimizing the box you keep it in.

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