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| Siddharth Shankar, Founder of Mystic Spa |
Siddharth Shankar, Founder of Mystic Spa gave interesting insights of the wellness industry at the webinar today. Roughly speaking, the wellness industry covers allopathy, alternative therpay, beauty products, spas, medical tourism, fitness and slimming and the like. Hence, it caters to both physical and mental wellness.
The industry is closely associated with today's lifestyle and has seen sudden development over the last 2 - 3 years. It has already had a long standing in India -- yoga, ayurveda, meditation. Shankar says it has an excellent growth rate of 30-35% p.a. and it set to become a 2 - 2.5 billion dollar industry soon. "Within a time horizon of 5-10 years, this would be a good industry to get into,"says Shankar.
He adds that one of the most capital incentive area would be allopathic treatment and nutritive products. In comparison, allopathy, beauty, fitness and slimming require less investments. He also explained how maintaining a demographic profile is important. "Ayurveda does well in the south, spas and the like do well up north where people need to deal with daily stress,' he adds. Also, medical tourism in India has been seeing 4 - 5 million overseas patient. However, more than 50% of this industry is not organized. It is highly segmented. Shankar adds that it is important for government to take care of the non-medical issues such as operations.
He advised start-ups to associate themselves with larger brands in the initial stages. The work processes become less time consuming and there is also a lot of experience gained indirectly through such associations.
The wellness industry is quite a tricky industry. One needs to be very careful with what one promises to deliver to customers. It is very individual centric and you are bound to have equal amount of satisfied and unsatisfied customers. So, the entrepreneur needs to be careful in deciding what segment he is catering to.
Further into the question and answer round he said that spas can be kept up and running if they keep their man power trained and up-to-date, maintain good HR policies and provide adequate incentives. He also stated that the major cost areas for the spas would be in training academies and product development. Spas located at high end malls are approachable and providing good delivery with consistency ensures more customers.
Stand alone spa investment
1500 sq feet - 40 lakh
5000 sq feet - 1 - 1.25 cr
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