Hi there,

Welcome back to another week of Brand Matters. This week, we're exploring why wellness has become a trillion-dollar industry — and what happens when brands try to sell healing without understanding what it actually takes to help people transform.

Also in today's issue:

• Brand Wars: Whoop and Oura Ring compete for your wrist with completely opposite ideas about what health tracking means

• Moncler puts De Niro and Pacino in a room together and reframes what warmth actually is

• Airbnb goes AI-first while Reddit sues AI companies for scraping user data

• Netflix posts its best ad-sales quarter ever as streaming advertising hits its stride

• Zero-click search is coming for your brand visibility — are you ready?

Let's get started.

Healing Is Hot Right Now

I was sick as hell near the Amazon basin when a fellow traveler offered to take me to see a traditional curandero. The medicine man invited me to an ayahuasca ceremony. I didn't know what to expect—just that I was desperate enough to try anything.

Two ceremonies later, something had shifted. The fog in my head had cleared. The tightness in my belly and chest was gone. I felt more alive than before the sickness began—like I'd been given a different lens to see through. Not euphoria. Just... clarity I didn't know I was missing.

That experience got me curious enough to spend eight years learning what this whole world of healing is really about.

Apart from being the copywriter for Lento, I'm a meditation teacher who's spent years with a community of healers in the Amazon basin. In that time, I've seen everything in this wellness-healing industry. The good and the bad. The respectful and the extractive. The harmonious and the chaotic. The truth and the absolute nonsense.

Here's what I've learned: most brands entering wellness are treating healing like any other product category. They're not. When you sell healing, you're promising transformation. You're asking people to trust you with their pain. That comes with responsibilities most brands aren't prepared for.

Everyone's Having a Breakdown

Why is healing so popular right now? Because most of us live in a neurotic state.

High expectations at work. Relentless pressure to perform. Dysfunctional childhoods that bleed into our adult lives. Disconnection from our bodies. Depression. Anxiety. The list goes on.

The truth is, this wasn't new. It was just invisible—until COVID made it impossible to ignore.

When you can't leave your apartment and your usual distractions disappear, you're forced to notice what's actually happening in your head. Restricted movement and lack of social contact made the subtle inner voices louder, revealing the suffering, the struggles, and the urgent need for help.

The global wellness economy hit $6.3 trillion by 2023, with projections pointing to $8.5 trillion by 2027. But numbers don't show whether we're actually healing or just spending.

And now, in 2025, the world hasn't exactly gotten easier. Global warming, wars, political chaos, economic stress—all of it piling onto our personal struggles. The result? A market desperate for relief.

This is why the wellness sector is exploding. From mushroom microdoses to desert sound baths, hot yoga to vision quests. There's something for everyone out there.

But here's the real question: are these just trends to cash in on, or genuine solutions to our predicaments?

The $6.3 trillion wellness gold rush has a problem

All this demand has created a gold rush. And wherever there's a gold rush, there are people looking to profit.

People are investing more in practices that nurture them. Gym memberships, yoga classes, sauna passes, meditation apps—these aren't luxuries but essential monthly expenses. It's beautiful to see a cultural shift toward a more integrated way of being where mind, body, and spirit are part of the same system.

Take the curandero who first treated me in the Amazon. He could have charged me so much money for the ceremonies based on their impact, yet he was aware that I had no money at that moment, and accepted me as a volunteer to do some construction work for him. He could have charged wealthy Westerners ten times what he usually asked. But he kept his prices accessible and turned away people he felt weren't ready for the work. That's the difference between healing as service and healing as business opportunity.

When you turn "healing" into a product, you take on deeper responsibilities than selling shoes or software. You're promising transformation to people in pain.

The Truth About Healing First

Before we talk about how to do wellness right, let's be honest about what healing actually is. There's an undeniable truth my teachers shared with me:

Nobody can heal anyone else.

Many brands and coaches today promise peace of mind and happiness through their apps, workshops, or sound baths. But it doesn't work that way.

Healing always comes down to the individual—their approach to life and their capacity to break toxic patterns. It's a lifelong journey, not a destination. Thousands are out there searching for an easy fix, chasing the next experience that promises instant wellness, only to move on when reality doesn't match the marketing.

So if you're a brand or coach in the wellness space, your role is to become a companion, not a healer. Be honest that transformation is gradual, requiring ongoing commitment—not instant results.

Your job is to guide—offering products, services, and solutions while making it clear they have to do the work.

When you first say this, many will leave. But those who stay are your people. They're ready to take responsibility and transform alongside you.

Walking the Talk

As a meditation teacher and Amazonian traditional medicine student, I can't teach meditation if I'm not practicing it. I can't speak about mindfulness if I'm not making an effort to bring it into my daily life, my work, my relationships.

The same applies to brands. If your marketing promotes wellness but your internal culture burns out employees, the contradiction will show. Millennials and Gen Z aren't naive, they'll notice.

WeWork branded its spaces as hubs for "community, mindfulness, and human flourishing" while reports revealed relentless hustle culture and leadership scandals. Patagonia actually embedded wellbeing into operations—flexible hours, on-site childcare, encouragement to get outside. One treated wellness as a costume. The other lived it as a value.

But coherence isn't just about internal culture. It's also about respecting where these practices come from.

Many healing practices—from sweat lodges to ayahuasca ceremonies—have deep roots in Indigenous cultures. Removing them from their context, stripping away spiritual meaning, and reselling them as "exotic experiences" isn't just bad taste. It's exploitation.

Recently, Adidas faced massive backlash in Mexico after launching a shoe collection with a design almost identical to traditional Oaxacan huaraches. The outrage was so strong that the Mexican government considered legal action.

If shoes caused that level of uproar, imagine the response if your brand retreat offers a sweat lodge as just another "wellness activity."

This is where most brands fail. They see a practice that looks good on Instagram and grab it without understanding its origins or meaning. Partner with tradition-bearers and elders instead. Honor the origins. Create exchanges that are mutually beneficial and genuinely respectful.

@theinspiredunemployed

Applications are now open x

Who Healing Actually Serves

Wellness isn't just for the Instagram-ready crowd in linen pants.

Tulum, Bali, Koh Phangan, parts of Portugal—they've become magnets for Westerners hosting $3,000 "healing workshops" that only a select few can afford. Luxury retreats marketed as spiritual transformations, priced so high that the communities where these practices originated can't even participate.

Indigenous traditions saw healing as collective and accessible. It wasn't about being part of an exclusive tribe—it was about ensuring everyone had a place in the circle.

For brands, this is the insight that matters: if your version of "healing" doesn't welcome all races, ages, body types, genders, abilities, and income levels, it's not truly healing. It's just another way to gate access and create hierarchy.

The shift from healing as collective practice to healing as premium product isn't just about pricing. It's about who gets to feel worthy of care. When wellness becomes aspirational rather than accessible, when it requires the right aesthetic, the right body, the right budget—we've fundamentally misunderstood what healing is.

If healing is real, it's shared. Not commodified. Not exclusive. Shared.

Choosing Real Partners

Ancient traditions did not see healing the way we do in the modern world. For them, a healer or shaman was someone who trained for life to guide others on their journey.

I remember visiting the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in my native Colombia, home to the Kogi people. A native guide and translator named Ramon once told me that shamans, or Mamos as they call them, must live in a dark cave for several years to comprehend the secrets of the world—the visible and invisible realms, which even modern psychology still struggles to understand.

Today, shamans are everywhere. I see Instagram reels advertising shamanic initiations in Bali, weekend retreats in Portugal, Kundalini awakening circles, and countless experiences promising certifications after just a few hours of training.

When choosing partners, look beyond Instagram profiles, follower counts, or social media influence. There are thousands of genuine practitioners who bring valuable tools learned and practiced with love, respect, and professionalism. But not everyone is like that. Choose wisely.

Living It: What We're Learning at Lento

Wellness is all about alignment and embodiment. Most brands focus on how "wellness" looks—Instagram feeds, beautifully curated spaces, personal profiles. Very few analyze how their wellness message is actually embodied in their internal culture.

That's where it starts.

Tom's 900km walk across South India wasn't a marketing stunt. It came from himself struggling with mental health and wanting to do something that mattered. When he started Lento, that commitment became part of how we work, not just what we say.

We've partnered with Calm to access meditation sessions, especially for moments of stress. Freddie's Fit Club supports us with workouts and exercise routines to care for our bodies. But here's what we're still figuring out: how to make these resources genuinely useful rather than just nice-to-have perks. How to create space for people to actually use them without guilt.

Because wellness isn't a nice-to-have group activity. It's essential to who we are as creatives and human beings. And it's hard work—the kind of work that doesn't show up in Instagram posts but shows up in whether people feel supported or burned out.

Brand Wars: The Battle of Wearable

Whoop

Black fabric strap, no screen, deliberately ugly. The design choice is the strategy - this isn't lifestyle tech, it's a training tool. Their positioning hinges on one insight: serious athletes don't want their recovery tracker to look pretty, they want it to be accurate. So Whoop markets exclusively through elite performers - LeBron, Michael Phelps, CrossFit champions. Not because celebrities sell products, but because in performance culture, social proof comes from the top. If Olympic athletes trust their recovery data to Whoop, everyone below them in the performance pyramid will follow. They're selling the same thing luxury watches sell - membership in an exclusive club. Except the exclusivity isn't wealth, it's commitment to optimization. $30/month subscription model means the barrier to entry is dedication, not money.

Oura Ring 

Titanium ring in metallic finishes - designed to look like jewelry you'd wear anyway. The strategy is opposite: make health tracking invisible, aspirational, aesthetically acceptable. Oura positioned itself in the biohacking space, which is wellness for people who think wellness is too soft. Kim Kardashian and Gwyneth Paltrow wearing it isn't celebrity endorsement in the traditional sense - it's signaling that Oura belongs in the longevity and self-optimization conversation, not the fitness one. They partner with researchers and publish studies because their audience wants scientific legitimacy, not athlete testimonials. They're not competing with Whoop for the CrossFit crowd - they're targeting the executive who meditates, the founder who's into cold plunges, the person optimizing for longevity not performance.

Ad Vault: Moncler

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino sitting down together in black and white, talking about friendship and warmth. Not in character, not in a movie - just two guys who've known each other for fifty years having a conversation while a camera happens to be rolling.

That's Moncler's new global campaign, and it doesn't do any of the things luxury fashion campaigns usually do. No surreal scenarios, no moody stares at the camera, no product shots of jackets on mountain peaks. Just De Niro and Pacino talking, shot by Platon in stark documentary-style photography that strips away any sense of this being an "ad" at all.

What Moncler is doing here is reframing what they sell. They're not competing on technical specs - they're trying to own the emotional territory around warmth. The bet is that at the luxury level, people aren't buying functional warmth, they're buying what warmth represents: connection, care, being seen. By putting two people together whose real friendship is documented across decades of collaboration, they make it harder to be cynical about whether Moncler actually believes this or if it's just expensive brand theater.

Lento Vibes

A bit of random inspo from around the grounds:

• Airbnb Charts AI-First Future: CEO Brian Chesky says Airbnb is becoming an “AI-first application” with a focus on chat agents handling bookings and support—still cautious, but accelerating. 👉 Read more

• Reddit Takes Legal Aim at AI Data Mining: Reddit sues Perplexity AI and three firms (Oxylabs, AWMProxy, SerpApi) alleging industrial-scale scraping of its user comments to train AI models without permission. 👉 See the case

• Figma Make Shortcuts Design Workflows: Figma introduces a new “Copy design” feature that brings AI-generated prototypes into editable canvases—bridging the gap between generated ideas and design execution. 👉 Check the tool 

• Is Your Brand Ready for Zero-Click Search? As AI-powered search delivers answers without clicks, brands must rethink visibility, voice and influence—not just traffic. 👉 Read the warning

• Netflix Posts Best Ad-Sales Quarter Ever: Netflix says it doubled its U.S. ad-upfront commitments, posted its strongest ad-sales quarter to date, and signalled new AI-based ad formats are coming. 👉 Read the update