INTERVIEW DEAN KOWARSKI
Virgin Active is moving beyond the gym, creating social wellness clubs that reflect changing lifestyles and redefining what it means to compete in the premium space. Group CEO Dean Kowarski explains. A new premium playbook What are you seeing in the UK market? Post-COVID, the market has polarised: consumers are either trading down to low-cost or up to premium. Low- cost operators are doing a great job of ful lling a speci c consumer need around price and accessibility, while the premium end has expanded beyond the traditional gym format into wellness- and longevity-led concepts. Certainly, if you want to compete in the premium space now – as we do at Virgin Active – it’s no longer enough to offer a gym. Consumers expect a far broader, more exible wellness proposition that integrates social connection and community and that supports their wider lifestyle. But what do we mean by wellness as opposed to health? The way we see it, health is the outcome people used to go to a gym for, quanti ed through metrics such as blood pressure and heart rate. It is a state of being at any given point in time. Meanwhile, wellness is the action: the daily decisions we each make to pursue a better self, from which improved health is simply the outcome. At Virgin Active, we want to be part of that action. What are the forces shaping your thinking? We’re tapping two major cultural shifts, the rst of which is the rise of wellness. Across all age groups, there’s incredible awareness of the impact of preventative wellness, with far higher proportions of disposable income now being allocated here.
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