Remix Chats with Livia Wang, Group CEO of Access About The Billion Dollar Wellness Industry
From humble beginnings in a junior PR role at a fashion publication to running a global wellness empire. Remix chats with Livia Wang, Group CEO of Access on how the company is helping to shape the billion-dollar wellness industry.
Your journey from a junior PR role at a fashion magazine to the CEO of Access is quite unique and very impressive. How did your background and experiences shape your approach to building a global brand management and leading wellness company?
Working in public relations within the fashion industry is really where my love of brands started and that first job taught me much about the potential of brands to positively impact our lives as consumers. At the outset, I saw expensive clothes, luxury bags and high-end jewellery – some of which weren’t really aligned with my personal tastes. From starting to understand how these products integrate with customers’ lives, you can decode the role of the brand and its value.
Access has a diverse portfolio of wellness brands. What criteria do you use to select and represent brands, and how do you maintain a rigorous scientific approach to the products you offer?
At a brand level, we run our own clinical studies to demonstrate quality and this year we launched Theronomic, Australia’s first tribiotic health supplement, combining pre, pro and post-biotics. Our plant-based nutrition brand, eimele, brought to market the world’s first ingestible weight loss solution that operates on GLP-1 and blood sugar regulation, in a similar way to the blockbuster Semaglutide injections. Calibrate Reds sold out globally, with 100,000 units trading within one hour of launch.
In your role as a leader in the consumer goods industry, what are some key global wellness and consumer goods trends that you believe will shape the industry in the coming years?
Post-pandemic, everyone is more health conscious, and we are seeing wellness quickly evolving into a multi-trillion-dollar industry. Top trends include wellness that actually works, with a focus on testing and efficacy at a foundational level. For example, SRW and cellular health, through testing our customer’s biological age markers, we can demonstrate the efficacy of our longevity products with confidence. The concept of holistic wellness including inner, outer and mental. For example, Vida Glow, which is a women’s health brand changed the way people think about wellness in an industry that was focused on topical solutions. They introduced the concept of ‘ingestible beauty’ with an array of wellness benefits, including improvement to hair, skin and nails. As well as a shift away from offline practitioners towards digital platforms that offer personalised health, beauty and wellbeing service and advice at scale, supplemented by shoppable content, for example, our VTN Global Community.
Access recently expanded to Singapore and Malaysia. Could you share more about the decision to expand internationally, and the experiences and lessons learned from this expansion?
Access is growing rapidly with a plan to enter more global markets over the next 12 to 18 months. Because we have a social e-commerce model, we are seeking influencers, premium health, beauty and wellness experts and retail partners to align with to help us scale globally. Cross border trade is complex and every market has its own set of legal, tax and commercial frameworks to navigate, it’s helpful if you have a local partner in each region to work with.
The Wellness Access Institute (WAI) is an interesting initiative. What inspired the creation of this organization, and how does it contribute to the wellness industry's development and accessibility?
The Wellness Access Institute is a forward-thinking wellness innovation incubator that accelerates science to society. Comprised of a collective of international experts across academia, science and technology, WAI brings the latest findings and innovations and promotes wellness backed by evidence to improve the lives of our customers.
Advertisement
