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The Fastest-Growing Wellness Subscription Super App

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Published:

May 11th, 2021

Categories:

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Author:

Andreas Bezner


Wellness and health awareness have grown to be a top priority in many people’s lives. According to the statistics platform Statista, the global health- and wellness market was valued at $4.4 trillion in 2019 and is expected to reach $6 trillion by 2025. As explained in our blog post on the wellness market, the increasing demand for digital health and wellness products and solutions opened new investment opportunities. “Funding for digital health startups shattered records in 2020, with global equity funding hitting an all-time high of $26.5 billion last year”, the health industry news platform Healthcare Dive wrote in January 2021.


Femtech is still “a sleeping giant” but has great potential

Women constitute more than half of the world’s population and are still a consumer group that is often overlooked in the digital health and wellness market. An analysis by PitchBook concluded that femtech – technology that supports women’s health – is a significantly underdeveloped slice of health tech. The Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger (article in German) describes femtech as “a sleeping giant”. A pioneer in women’s health and wellbeing is Bellabeat, a California-based wellness tech company that was founded in 2013 and is exclusively focusing on women by offering sleep, activity, and reproductive health monitoring services.


Introducing Bellabeat: the holistic wellness app for women

Bellabeat is an all-in-one tracking app developed especially for women. Launched in 2013, it covers a broad range of health topics, including reproductive health, sleep, meditation, and exercise. The San Franciscan femtech start-up is one of the numerous apps currently jockeying for a position in the booming global wellness market.

Unlike most other wellness apps, however, Bellabeat is paired with beautifully designed wearable devices. The stylish necklace, bracelets, and smartwatch don’t look like gadgets at all, yet they accurately track the wearer’s vital signs, helping them to monitor and optimize their health and well-being. There’s even a smart water bottle that tracks users’ water intake and reminds them to hydrate.


Bellabeat

Bellabeat is further differentiated from the competition by combining health and fitness insights with menstrual cycle tracking. This enables women to plan their wellness routines, workouts, and diet in line with their hormonal cycle. For instance, the app can recommend the best times to exercise and days when the user would benefit from extra self-care and mindfulness (using the resources in the app, of course).


Can Bellabeat reshape the future of wearables?

Bellabeat has also tapped into the wearables market. Health devices worn on the body enable consumers to track their activity levels, sleep, heartbeat, body temperature, or hydration. According to the market research company Grand View Research, the global wearable technology market size was valued at $32.63 billion in 2019 and is projected to expand at an annual growth rate of 15.9 percent between 2020 and 2027. The rise of wearables has merged with wellness, and the average person is estimated to generate more than 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime. Nevertheless, most devices have not been designed with women’s health in mind.

With Bellabeat’s smart jewelry explicitly targeting women, they have become a relevant player in the wearables market: “While tech giants like Apple and Samsung have played a major role in this development, there are also numerous other players in the wellness and beauty sector that shaped this market with the help of new, innovative products and technologies such as San Francisco startup Bellabeat”, a “Forbes” article about Bellabeat states.


How Bellabeat compares with other wellness apps

Several factors give Bellabeat an edge over its competitors. The incorporation of wearables means that Bellabeat generates far more data than apps that require users to manually enter information about their health and well-being. Bellabeat tracks the wearer’s heart rate, respiratory rate, body temperature, stress levels, sleep patterns, menstrual cycle and symptoms, how many steps they have taken, how many calories they have burned—and more.

Other wellness apps tend to specialize in niches like reproductive health, fitness or meditation. For instance, apps like Calm or Headspace exclusively offer mindfulness features such as guided meditation, narrated sleep stories, and relaxing music. Hims and Hers are a blend of wellness shopping app and telehealth service providers, while Clue helps women conceive pregnancies by tracking their ovulation.

Bellabeat is essentially a personalized wellness coach that does it all. By bundling all aspects of wellness into a single app, it simplifies the user experience and makes it easier for women to optimize their health and fitness. This is great news for women—but it’s also great news for investors, given that women use wellness tech more actively than men and are also generally more willing to pay for such services.


Bellabeat App

Within four years of Bellabeat’s launch, it had sold 700,000 units and a brief pre-order window for the new Ivy product at the end of 2020 saw 20,000 units sold. With robust growth and sustained profitability, this is a business with immense potential from valuation multiple expansion to be more in line with the enterprise value-to-sales multiple of its peers. And as the femtech industry has been recently described as a “sleeping giant”*, there looks to be demand for a brand like Bellabeat disrupting the status quo.


Summary – this is what makes Bellabeat unique:

The digital health and wellness market is valued at over $4 trillion. Still, Bellabeat is one of only a few wellness tech companies to focus exclusively on women’s health, even though women make up more than half of the world’s population and are generally speaking more willing to pay for subscriptions.

Unlike most competitors, Beallbeat offers a holistic approach to health: the Beallbeat products help women easily track their overall health and connect to their body and mind throughout different stages in life.

It is the fastest-growing wellness subscription service with over 10 million users worldwide.

With health devices and smart jewelry, Bellabeat has the potential to become a serious competitor to the incumbents Samsung and Apple in the wearables market.

Bellabeat is clearly taking advantage of the increasing demand for health and wellness and will likely benefit from the very healthy projected annual growth rate of 15.9% (from 2020 to 2027) for wearables and has the potential to compete with Apple and Samsung in this sector. The rise of wearables has merged with wellness, and the average person is estimated to generate more than 1 million gigabytes of health-related data in their lifetime. Nevertheless, most devices have not been designed with women’s health in mind, which sets Bellabeat in a unique spot.

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