This guest post by wellness entrepreneur and media strategist Perry Howell draws on more than a decade of experience shaping global brands including HBO, SiriusXM, Tinder and Paris Hilton’s 11:11 Media.
Now based between Sydney and Los Angeles, Perry is the founder of Pilates Gang and host of Core & Commerce, where she explores how modern wellness brands grow through community, content and culture. With a background spanning The London School of Economics, Miami University and The University of Sydney, her perspective sits at the intersection of marketing intelligence and mindful living – making her uniquely placed to unpack what today’s wellness industry is getting right, and where it’s falling short.
I didn’t move from Los Angeles to Sydney to start a pilates business. I moved after years inside brands like SiriusXM, HBO, Tinder and Paris Hilton’s 11:11 Media, where my job was to understand how audiences actually form, what makes them stay, and what makes them leave.
Over time, I started noticing the same pattern in wellness. An industry built on long term behaviour change had become overly focused on short term conversion. Free trials, intro offers, discount funnels, class packs designed to get people in the door, but not necessarily to keep them there.
From the outside, it looks like growth. From the inside, it is churn.
When I arrived in Sydney, what stood out was not the quality of the wellness scene. It is, in fact, exceptional. It was how familiar the playbook felt. Beautiful studios, strong instructors, smart operators, all competing on the same things: price, proximity and promotion.
Very few were building anything that felt like culture.
That is the gap I have been intentionally exploring with Pilates Gang.
It started as a test. A group of women gathering for a Pilates class, encouraged to come alone, with the intention of genuine connection. Twelve strangers showed up.
Two hours after the class had ended, we were still there, eventually being asked to leave so the cleaners could come in. No one wanted to go. Not because of the workout, but because of how it felt to be in that room.
That was the signal.
Not just that people wanted connection, but that the environment had been engineered for it. The conditions mattered. The framing mattered. The intention mattered.
The question then became: how do you design for that feeling, consistently, and at scale?
With Bondi as our backyard, the answer was deliberately simple. A walk club. No booking system, no paywall, no conversion strategy. Just a consistent time, a consistent place, and an open invitation. Show up, walk, and maybe make plans to take a class at a local studio with someone you just met.
But simplicity does not mean lack of strategy.
Every element was considered. The consistency. The tone. The accessibility. The absence of friction. What looks like a casual meetup is, in reality, a rethinking of how brand, community and behaviour intersect.
Within weeks, attendance grew by more than 900 percent. Events capped at around 20 people started seeing waitlists of more than 180. Not because of manufactured scarcity, but because people genuinely wanted to be there.
That was the moment it became clear.
The most valuable thing in wellness right now is not a better product. It is a stronger sense of belonging.
And belonging, when built intentionally, is not soft. It is a growth strategy.
Belonging does not come from a funnel. It comes from consistency, familiar faces, shared rituals, and the feeling that if you did not show up, someone might notice.
For years, brand strategy has been treated as something separate from community. You build the brand, then you add community as a layer.
I think that is backwards.
If your business depends entirely on paid acquisition, you do not have a brand. You have a media budget. The moment you stop spending, the system stops working.
I’ve seen this from the inside, and I know first hand that community is the one thing brands cannot bottle or buy.
But, if it’s built properly, it can be borrowed — carefully, and on the community’s terms.
That is part of what Pilates Gang is becoming. Not just a community, but a space where the right brands, instructors and studios can plug into something that already has trust, energy and momentum, and contribute to it in a way that feels additive, not extractive.
What I am building with Pilates Gang is not just a community. It is a model for how wellness brands can rethink growth entirely, by participating in culture rather than trying to manufacture it.
We are already seeing the pressure points. Acquisition costs are rising. Retention is quietly becoming the bigger issue. Studios do not have a traffic problem. They have a loyalty problem.
Loyalty is not built through optimisation. It is built through participation.
This is where the industry has misread the moment. There is a belief that wellness has become more premium. In some ways it has. Prices are higher, spaces are more considered, the experience is more refined.
But what people are responding to is not exclusivity. It is access to something that feels human in an increasingly optimised world.
In Los Angeles, you see this with run clubs. In Sydney, it is starting to happen in different ways. People are creating spaces that feel more like communities than businesses.
The irony is that the more something feels like a community, the more commercially valuable it becomes. Because it cannot be replicated.
You can copy a workout. You can copy a studio design. But, you cannot copy a group of people who choose to show up for each other, week after week.
That is the only real advantage left.
This does not mean monetisation disappears. It becomes more effective. More durable. More aligned.
When people feel connected to something, they do not need to be convinced to return. It becomes part of their routine.
That is very different to constantly trying to reacquire your own customer.
What I am building with Pilates Gang is not anti business. It is simply a different order of priorities.
Community first. Culture second. Monetisation third.
Not as a philosophy, but as a scalable, modern brand strategy.
Wellness is no longer just competing with other studios. It is competing with everything. Content, social lives, work and convenience. If it does not offer something deeper than a transaction, it becomes optional.
And optional is where brands fade.
The next generation of wellness brands will not be defined by how well they convert.
They will be defined by how strongly people feel part of them.
More information: The Pilates Gang is a community-driven wellness collective bringing together Pilates, content, and culture through pop-up events, studio collaborations, and a growing network of creators who share a passion for movement and mindful living.
