Redefining Gen Z Wellbeing Culture

One year ago, British broadcaster ITV dug deeper into the ultra-lucrative and swiftly diversifying business of wellbeing with online platform, Woo. Merging retail with a multimedia magazine style format, it follows the 2021 launch of ‘mindful media’ concept Unwind with ITV (ultra-soothing programming for the 4-5am graveyard slot) but is dedicated to the especially polycrisis-beleaguered Gen Z and covers categories including travel, sex, and ‘space’ (anything from running routes to personal refuge) in its redefining of how young people access, understand and imbibe their wellbeing.

Via a team of 40, that experimental approach to wraparound wellness through a fascinating, forward-thinking and sometimes WTF bonkers pop cultural lens has already garnered 208 million monthly impressions across its social and digital channels and 5.4 million video views – based on approximately 250 social media posts and 12-20 editorial stories weekly, plus a couple of TV-style tentpole shows per quarter and a cluster of celeb-fronted monthly content.

There’s also a digital marketplace of 4300 products via 170 brands and, leaning into the mountain of Gen Z insights its hungrily amassing, Woo Studio – a new proprietary creative agency and incubator, providing white label content and collabs (Virgin 02 and New Balance have already indulged).

With a year in review, here’s the original rationale, what’s resonating and where it’s going next:

Finding the Feelgood, Redefining Wellbeing for “Generation Anxious”

Helmed by award-winning London-based, Asian-Australian strategic marketing don Stephen Mai, it’s mission to “turn generation anxious into generation zen” by making wellness “discoverable, aspirational and culturally relevant” not only draws on the post-pandemic fetishization of wellness as a form of protection and self-optimisation, but an elasticated understanding of what wellbeing actually means, particularly to young people: a huge 76% of Gen Z (and also millennials) now perceive wellness to be ‘anything that makes you feel good’.

According to Mai most approaches to wellness are misaligned with youth culture, “making Woo about taking the rigidity out of wellbeing,” and, somewhat ironically considering the semi-cosmic name, “breaking down the barriers to entry that have made it feel alienating, inaccessible or somehow ‘Goopified’.” For sure, Goop it (mostly) is not – the vibe is so Y2K cyber-psychedelic it’s borderline Dazed Beauty, unsurprisingly considering Mai sees Woo as, “what i-D or Dazed [& Confused] would look like if they’d been invented today” – but there are a few price points that would give Gwyneth a run for her money.

What it does is recognise wellness as being so top of Gen Z minds now that it’s permeated audiences daily pop cultural diets, with the dominant on focus mental, spiritual, sexual and the lesser-discussed aspects of physical health: “91% of Gen Z are stressed, 23% to unmanageable levels. If the last generation was about adrenaline and big energy, this one is about an energetic serenity.”

Stephen Mai: The Man with the Plan

A long-time disciple at the coalface of youth culture, Mai has plenty of previous in both creating platforms corralling teen cool, and debunking youth stereotypes (“generally I don’t think people are good at marketing to young people, because they treat the group like a monolith”). He began his career at MTV Australia where he excelled at orchestrating client partnerships (he was originally a traffic assistant, inputting TV ads into a scheduling spreadsheet), before moving onto Vice Media UK, then entertainment media group LADBible where he transformed “a misogynistic, click-bait-centric website” into an online publisher celebrated for its influential and irreverent social change campaigns.

Roles at online music broadcaster & club promoter Boiler Room and Bali-based sustainable lifestyle brand Potato Head followed but it was LADBible that proved the youth appetite for social activism done with style (“our UOKM8? Campaign drove the conversation around young people and mental health at scale, shifting media agency conversations”) while the vestiges of Vice-born stress spawned Woo. Suffering from burnout, hypnotherapy provided him “with complete clarity,” and a newfound tool “that took away any self-limiting beliefs” – a transformative experience of the kind he wanted to share with others.

Woo’s first incarnation was as a CBD drink, before Mai realised it necessitated a full media platform to do it justice – an opportunity that serendipitously presented itself via ITVs new media incubation hub, Studio 55 Ventures.

People & Formats Reaching Places Other Wellness Brands Cannot

Mai, arguably the master media remixer, has always posited Woo as a hub for cutting-edge, cross-genre experimentation – blending music, filmmaking and unorthodox “wellness talent” to birth exciting yet accessible health regimens (“the wellness rituals that are designed to help people are rarely accessible to younger generations”).

Key projects include the Higher Frequencies series – ASMR infused music tracks by rising stars Beabadoobee, Vegyn, and Ashnikko where each artist’s track has been integrated with sonic frequencies capable of causing specific physiological changes in the listener. Also look to actor Jamie Flatters, star of the Avatar franchise sequels, who is not only developing a hypnotherapy video for the site but is also writing, directing, and starring in a series of short films about Gen Z self-love.

There is also a clear opportunity to establish a youth-driven alternative to traditional journalistic thought leadership – a new vibe for news media, if you will – evidenced in Woo’s talk show style Youtube TV series No Wrong Answers. Funny yet incisive, it’s has flavours of Channel 4’s seminal noughties show Pop World with Simon Amstell and Miquita Oliver) and is presented by the excellent David Larbi, Callum Mullin and Klaudia Fior. The latter is a young political journalist with a biting street smart edge who’s been extremely vocal about her disdain for the BBC. All were ostensibly cast via TikTok. “We generally want to work with people who have strong voices and aren’t classically trained, there is certainly an appetite to explore different pathways for talent,” says Mai diplomatically.

Formats are ultra-flexible, with Mai confirming that long and short-form content, written and visual, all perform well in line with Gen Z’s infamously paradoxical appetites: “remember that this is the generation that kick-started binge-watching eight hours of TV, but which also induced a three-second recognition [make it comprehensible at speed or don’t bother] rule.”

The Rules: Inspiration, Optimism

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, Actual Solutions

While rules might seem anathema to a Gen Z platform founded on what Mai himself deems “a maverick mentality” the trouble with stretching the parameters of wellbeing to the extent that a feature about The Cat Boosting Polish Tourism (yes, that was a real piece of content) is that a.) legitimate expertise and a vaguely core focus still matters and b.) the internet isn’t exactly short of cheeky cats. So, what are the rules for keeping Woo’s USP and credibility intact, keeping both audiences and brand partners on the hook?

According to Mai, “Inspiration, optimism and being solutions-focussed” is the in-house mantra. But the Polish cat vid, I maintain, surely wouldn’t have passed the last test? Mai concedes that in these early days there’s a necessary gaming of the social algorithms, where striking ‘highly trending’ content chords is essential to leveraging “basic joy triggers – memes or micro bits of creative inspiration bringing people into our ecosystem, particularly those who may not have found us otherwise, but could benefit from what we do”. He refers to such uninterested mass audiences as its “everyday heroes.”

An article on rapper ASAP Rocky watching his partner Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime performance is similarly light on solutions by anyone’s standards, but most stories do offer pragmatic direction, insight, or the solace of some myth-busting. Random finds with promise include ‘Shower Songs: An Intro into the World of Rain Music’ (“a lifesaver for insomniacs and an unusual source of community”), ‘How Young Singles are Avoiding Dating Burnout’ and indie punk rapper Master Peace’s quiz answers discussing his ADHD.

“Gen Z have grown up armed with an awareness of and the language of self-help, talking about triggers, holding space and being able to name conditions, but they don’t necessarily the solutions or skills to actually help themselves. If we can give people tools to address and improve their wellbeing, then maybe it’s the foundation to helping create a more collaborative, less divisive world,” states Mai.

The “Third Reality” Approach: Counter-Narratives Avoid Victimhood or Hopelessness

Mai often refers to Woo as a “third reality” (sometimes it’s the “wooniverse”) in relation to its desire to generate optimism without nixing the cynicism vital to galvanising social change. Or inadvertently invoking a dangerous sense of victimhood; he is keenly aware of how labelling Gen Z ‘Gen Anxious’ could easily stoke a self-fulfilling prophecy.

“It’s really about creating a space between where we are and we want to be – a kind of third reality that neither denies what’s happening in the world but nor does it labour the most difficult, distressing elements to the extent we fuel a sense of helpfulness,” says Mai, acknowledging relatively modern phenomena such as Eco Anxiety – paralysis in the face of climate crisis – impacting teens. “We aren’t trying to be the voice of a generation but culture does drive action and change. We work really hard not to make the problems feel so big that people can’t engage anymore. We want to influence people subconsciously.”

Regardless of how it’s branded, it smells like meta-modernism, the term coined by Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker to describe the shift in contemporary culture to a hopeful form of realism (“oscillating between sincerity and irony”) and is most poignantly delivered via what Mai calls its “counter-narratives” – stories that positively reframe talking points or groups of people subject to contention, mystery, or marginalisation.

Key examples include a photo story showing the joy of being transgender (“trans people how they want to be seen”) young photographer Joe Puxley’s enchanting images capturing the emotional tumult of adolescence and the documentary series Life in Love – an unusual exploration of sex, sexuality, and intimacy “where supposedly salacious relationships, such as the hetero couple into kink were revealed in a far more tender, authentic, nuanced way, subverting preconceptions.”

The New Anxieties: Woo’s Most-Wanted Trends & Topics

With a year’s worth of data under its belt, which are the hottest trends, most queried ideas, or resonant topics? Mai reveals it’s currently sobriety, particularly ‘how to club sober’, sex, identity (accurate representation of oneself and one’s community perceived as a key tenet of wellbeing) and sleep.

Many dovetail with its aforementioned focus on counter-narratives (“we did a whole series of sex diaries which were essentially about dispelling the notion that everyone is having more sex than you”) while Mai says, “there is also conversation around menstrual health that needs to be had and how it affects women and perhaps how valuable it would be for relationships if men had a better understanding of it.”

The Woo Shop: Products, Price Points & Collabs

Considered “the physical manifestation of the site,” retail has underwritten Woo from day one (“too many people do something interesting and then try and monetize it later, we wanted to create a fully integrated model from the start”) but will be ramping up significantly, as “the key revenue driver for our media proposition”. At first glance, it’s more Goop than Boots, but the figures reveal that 37% of products sit in the £21-£50 ($26-$62) price range, 15% are under £20 ($24) and some go as low as £2 ($2.50).

Regardless, the entire marketplace is wrapped in a consciously soft sell (“no purchase necessary” is an over-slogan) based on the assumption those who can, will. Brands include natural supplements and healing remedies manufacturer Ross J. Barr, sex toy label So Divine, Moonbird handheld breath coaching tech and Veja sneakers.

It’s currently exploring proprietary products based on site insights and collaborative ranges, most likely in (Mai’s favourite) category streetwear, engineered by its specialist marketplace and consumer products team.

Woo at Large? Mai Eyes IRL Wellness Ideas

Where Woo hasn’t gone as yet is near the socialisation of self-care; there’s no community as such beyond a swelling fanbase of individuals. Beyond a fleeting mention of the metaverse (potentially ideal for Woo, thanks to its multisensory canvas and cross-sector history) it’s a premise Mai moots most strong via a discussion of sauna culture, which he considers a key vehicle for bringing body positivity out of the relative confines of representation and into the real world.

Citing the Vibali sauna in Berlin he says, “I think we need some kind of mainstream movement for destigmatising everyday shame related to the body, particularly as regards British attitudes towards nudity. Body neutrality and positivity is a wellness trend I’d like to see come to fruition as an evolution of popular culture. For the future of Woo, I see value in creating physical wellness spaces at the intersections of art, music and culture – resorts representing that ‘wooniverse’ or third reality – with which people have the same affinity as festivals. The goal is to make wellness a subculture like music or fashion that gets people to integrate everything from meditation to sound healing into their lives with ease.”