From a Health Tech Entrepreneur who saw the market early
The Health and Beauty industry is an interesting one.
Health is a phenomenon that resonates with humans. It has always being a subject of discourse among the people and their governments. It doesn’t matter if it was the Roman Emperors of the old world or the local leader of the newest community created yesterday in Canada, conversations around health will always be important to the human community. After all, “Health is Wealth”
Beauty is another phenomenon that’s a core part of human life. The concept of making something beautiful is a natural human trait, it’s an innate human characteristic to be a beautifier; to make something look better than it was, to add creativity to a product, process, person- to life. Beauty will always be a part of human life and our conversations for as long as we live. After all, “Life is Beautiful”
Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers;
The global health and wellness market is worth over $4.2 Trillion, the digital health market, not exactly a new branch in health but a concept that developed tremendously because of the Coronavirus pandemic in the year 2020 is currently worth over $300 billion and it is growing at a ridiculous CAGR rate of 28.5 % projected to worth over $700 Billion by the year 2025, very impressive numbers but I promise you that the most impressive piece of the information herein is that; we are only just getting started.
Life is Beautiful…
The global beauty industry is worth over $700 billion, from product manufacturing to full beauty product marketing, international logistics operations, and supply chain of backend beauty businesses to brick and mortar retail and eCommerce sales of beauty products and services. Every category of beauty business finds a way to thrive because “life is beautiful”.
From Rihanna’s exciting premium Fenty beauty products to Kylie Jenner’s exotic lipstick range, from cosmetics to hairs, social media beauty influencing to television advertising, billboards to fashion shows, the beauty industry is really a very lucrative industry that just keeps giving.
The world will never stop talking about beauty so why should you?
Wellness and Personal Care is here to stay
Wellness and personal care is a branch of health whose influence has shown a steady increase in performance over the last few decades. This increase is a direct reflection of its adoption by the general populace. From body fitness to mental health care, personal grooming to aromatherapy, yoga to physiotherapy, full-body massages to personal care, wellness as a branch of medicine has grown in influence steadily and so has the market grown financially. The millennials adopted the wellness and personal care culture wholeheartedly and the same has happened with the Gen Z digital generation and it is easy to predict that technology-influenced Gen X won’t be any different. This is a generational paradigm shift that has caused a positive multiplier effect on the vibrancy of the wellness and personal care industry, one that is expected to continue to grow for the foreseeable future.
If you don’t take care of yourself, who will?
Barring an apocalypse, informed people will always strive to take care of themselves. A wise person once said, “taking care of yourself is not selfish”. I am inclined to agree. After all, “if you don’t take care of yourself, who will?”
What is Digital Health?
Digital health is the branch of health that leverages technology to provide healthcare services to its patients (customers). The current and future customers of digital health are; (a) the people that have a need for healthcare services and (b) people currently using digital means to communicate globally. Sounds familiar right? We are the customers, all of us online, all of us with a mobile device, all of us on the internet. We are the customers of global digital health.
According to the FDA, “the broad scope of digital health includes categories such as mobile health (mhealth), health information technology (IT), wearable devices, telehealth, telemedicine, and personalized medicine. From mobile medical applications and software that support the clinical decisions doctors make every day, to artificial intelligence and machine learning, digital technology has been driving a revolution in health care. Digital health tools have the vast potential to improve our ability to accurately diagnose and treat disease and to enhance the delivery of health care for the individual”.
Why Digital Health, Why Now?
What other options do we have? The year 2020 Coronavirus pandemic has shown us that we can leverage technology to live a decent life and we can do it without physically being in contact. Every industry that has created a solution to make this a reality has achieved tremendous success over the past year. From Zoom achieving an astronomical global world download and usage of their product to Tik Tok being adopted globally by a diverse generation of people as the go-to video content creation platform for social media to Amazon.com achieving a record number of sales, increasing company valuation- a feat which made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world by some miles. Solutions that take care of our everyday activities and offer us the opportunity to do it without being in physical contact have experienced success and will continue to experience success for the foreseeable future.
This is the gospel truth, there can be no time as ripe as now, no tech adoption rate faster than this, and no window to be a digital global market leader more open than now. The time is now, the opportunity to take the market is available to investors, stakeholders, and the government.
This is absolutely the best time…
The year 2020 coronavirus pandemic increased the conversation around health globally. Our lives were all distorted when the virus outbreak was declared a pandemic and we had to learn to adjust our respective lifestyles to our new reality. This increased digital adoption has reinforced the idea of providing platforms and solutions using technology as a medium to achieve good health, wellness, personal care, fitness, and beauty. This is the service that a startup company I co-founded: www.healthandbeautycenter.ng offers her global customers – a one-stop destination for all health and beauty inquiries. What we do is leverage technology to offer customers digital health services, beauty, personal care, and general wellness services and products to take care of themselves whilst taking cognizance of the industrious and constantly growing gig economy to offer digital health and beauty services.
An amazon of all things health, beauty, and wellness
Partnering up with service providers of health and beauty services, we created a digitally exciting ecosystem of a niche economy and called it “Health and Beauty Center”, our vision for creating this exciting digital product for the globe is simple; we want to be the ‘amazon’ of all things health, beauty, and wellness.
How to cash out disrupting the global health and beauty market
1. Think Data: This is a numbers game and numbers don’t lie. The numbers tell you what to do, it shows you where the customer interest is leaning, what products or service excites them, it shows you what the customers want and what they need, and provides indication for where to concentrate your resources so that they are maximally optimized. Mining the health data of customers globally offers you the opportunity to care properly for them using predictive technology ala artificial intelligence.
2. Build Digital Influence: Social media has changed how we communicate with each other and we will never go back to how it was yesterday. In fact, today’s communication channels are the most primitive our global communication channels will ever be. Therefore, influence on digital platforms has equaled influence in real life, perhaps with even more transactional value. Social media influence can now be monetized effectively so why not build digital influence in the health and beauty space?.
3. Target a global digital health and beauty market: The global community has changed. Look around you, everybody is communicating with somebody from another continent regularly. The world is online, sell to the world. When we started at www.healthandbeautycenter.ng we discovered from our Cloudflare data analytics that the major customers interested in our solution were not from our continent Africa, they were all over the world, from the USA to France to the UK, same as Canada even all the way from Puerto Rico. A digital health and beauty start-up company in Nigeria Africa was serving the globe.
4. Produce Digital health Products: Imagine a product that is created once, one that can be sold multiple times, a product that is non-perishable, one created and driven by technology, a product that has the possibility to hit a profit margin of over 1000%, 10,000% or 100,000%, a product that needs no recurrent expenditure for maintenance, you can tell that this is a very good product to sell. The most impressive part of producing and selling digital products is that you can create a sales funnel that is fully automated, thereby simplifying the supply chain process, reducing overhead costs and maintaining steady high product margins for your business, and increasing its profitability and valuation tremendously.
5. Offer Amazing Customer Service: Customer service is the bedrock of any successful business no matter how tantalizing the product is. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says consistently that the one thing that Amazon.com focuses on fanatically over the years is continuous innovation that ensures better customer service/experience for her customers. Efficient customer service will increase customer retention and ensure consistent company growth. No surprise that Amazon.com stock is one of the most valuable in the world and Jeff Bezos is the richest man in the world as of today.
Conclusion
The health and beauty space will continue to soar as long as humans live, we cannot do without health and we cannot do without beauty, what we can do without is the medium with which we are being served health and beauty products and services. The brick and mortar, physical channels of offering these evidently necessary health and beauty services are no longer preferred and will continue to be that way, people have found a more comfortable way to be served. The new and exciting medium to support the current market is leveraging technology to do this. Don’t sleep on this.
The market is ready for flight, are you ready to take off?
Wole Opesanmi
Health Tech Entrepreneur, Inventor, Future of Work enthusiast. Here to tell my story.