How the wellness bro came to rule the City
As finance bros roam the City clutching pink smoothies, Anna Moloney examines the changing culture of health and rise of the wellness bro
If you were opening a trendy smoothie bar, touting pink-swirled, collagen-packed shakes as your star product, where in London would you choose to open? For Julia Baldet, who gave up her private equity job to try her hand at the smoothie scene, it wasn’t where you’d expect. She swerved the heartlands of the ‘wellness girly’ (Chelsea, Notting Hill, Clapham) in favour of those of the finance bro. More specifically, Threadneedle Street – now famous not only as home of the Bank of England but Elevate Wellness.
How a City smoothie shop went viral
Touted as “London’s answer to Erewhon” – one of LA’s swankiest supermarkets known for its $20 Hailey Bieber skin-enhancing strawberry smoothies – Elevate only opened in June but is already a social media hit. When I mentioned to one of Morning Wire’s interns that I was going to check out a new smoothie bar in Bank, she already knew exactly what I was talking about. “It’s all over Tiktok,” she informed me. This was confirmed 10 minutes’ later when I found myself having to stall my entrance to its Royal Exchange site to avoid disturbing an Instagram shoot going on between two stylish 20-somethings.
This isn’t by chance. Six months before the shop was even open, Baldet had already set up the Tiktok account and by launch, having used the account to document the behind the scenes antics of opening a smoothie shop, she had amassed 10,000 followers ready to flock to the site. Backed by former execs from Joe and the Juice, Atis and Erewhon itself, Baldet was able to raise £400,000 seed funding after leaving her job last May and spending two months training as a barista.
When I speak to Baldet, four weeks into opening, she tells me even she’s been surprised by the pull, with many customers making the trip to the City just to get their hands on Tiktok’s latest status symbol. On average, Baldet says, they’re shifting between 1,500–2,000 smoothies a week, which, ranging in price from £8.90 to £15 with superboosting add-ons, is no mean feat.
But while Baldet may have had the Tiktok pilates crowd in mind from the start, it was only later on when she started to identify the other half to her lucrative customer base: the finance, or as they’re increasingly becoming, the wellness bro. “It was when I was speaking to a journalist who had noticed four guys in suits drinking blue smoothies outside and asked me if I was expecting a lot of men to come, that I realised, actually yes!,” Baldet says. She recalls how when she worked in private equity she used to bump into one of her firm’s male partners at Pilates, while also noting that her male colleagues were often more picky than her already pretty health-conscious self when it came to analysing their nutrition.
The rise of the wellness bro
That City workers have become increasingly health-conscious is well documented. Not only in the upper echelons of the Square Mile’s salad wars – Farmer J, Atis, Salad Project, Pick Your Own, the list goes on – but even now trickling down to the Tesco meal deal, in which the boiled egg pot usurped McCoy’s flame grilled steak crisps as the most popular snack of 2024. But the gender element has become more interesting. No longer is wellness seen as ‘girly’ (read: frivolous), but rather smart. That Psycle chose to open its newest branch is Bank is telling, while Mark Zuckerberg’s tech-bro-to-gym-bro glow up is perhaps the most high profile bellwether.
“They [men] love Excel spreadsheets, they love data and being able to track these things,” Baldet says, while Grace Cook, the journalist referenced, notes the appeal of “competitive wellness” for finance types, now using their affinity for risk assessment in order to “hack their own hard drives”.
Wellness is no longer a fringe topic in the City. It is an economic line item.
Baldet admits she did initially have a more yummy-mummy-centric, West London site in mind for Elevate, but soon realised time-poor, capital-rich finance bros were an even better prospect. The higher footfall of Threadneedle Street (Baldet took a people counter clicker out when scouting locations) solidified the decision – Baldet too likes data.
Health is wealth: The male emphasis on output
For Baldet, that also perhaps means greater pressure to get the products right, with her attributing her male customers as more performance than performativity-led, with a strict emphasis on output. Experts back that up. “Wellness is no longer a fringe topic in the City. It is an economic line item,” Caitlyn McClure, vice president of clinical services at Northern Illinois Recovery, says, explaining how male finance workers are conscious of how their health can translate into performance specifically at work. “The return on investment is measurable.”
This is not unique to men, but rather a symptom of the broadening appeal of wellness in recent years. “Women have long been targeted by wellness marketing, yet the newer campaigns speak to shared neurobiology rather than cosmetic goals, and men respond when the framing links wellbeing to clarity and reliable energy,” clinical psychologist notes. Such framing allows men to see taking care of themselves as professional rather than indulgent, with embarrassment around wellness waning. Banya Spa in Hoxton says men now make up around 52 per cent of its customer base, “challenging the stereotype that wellness is a ‘female-focused’ space”.
Reduced stigma in this area is to be celebrated, especially in light of the male mental health crisis, but that doesn’t mean it is free from its own issues. The line between gym bro culture – in which obsessively tracking macros and privileging discipline is the norm – and eating disorders is easy to cross, while expanding the perceived link between aesthetics and professionalism (known all too well by women) to encompass men also is naturally not ideal. London cosmetics doctor Vincent Wong said he was seeing far more male clients booking in skin treatments, with “looking after your health and appearance becoming part of the professional image”.
I suggest to Baldet that perhaps then there’s a horseshoe theory for ‘wellness girlies’ and ‘finance bros’. She quickly identifies the gap. “They don’t post Instagram stories – that’s the difference.”