In each edition we delve into the minds of those who are redefining the boundaries of health. Our goal is to share the insights and stories of those leading the way to achieve the highest attainable standard of health for everyone.

In this edition of Health Innovation Insider we speak to Samuel Ibbott about his journey into the world of health innovation with the success of Social Wellness Club.

Please can you tell us about the Social Wellness Club, why you created it and why is it beneficial to people’s health?

Social Wellness Club is on a mission to promote, encourage and normalise feeling better in your everyday life. We serve as a hub for individuals through our online community, flagship events and social hang-outs featuring industry leading speakers.

SWC is changing the narrative and offering people a healthier way to socialise and live. Our events feature accomplished and inspiring speakers across our 4 key pillars of wellness (nutrition, sleep, mindfulness and activity), from England athletes to International Keynote speakers to Wim Hof Method instructors, the list is endless! You can expect DJ’s, food and drink brands and electric energy: SWC style. We also host plenty of smaller events from our weekly coffee clubs to weekend series meet-ups. SWC events are all about levelling up, learning something new, making new friends, and having lots of fun in the process!

SWC was created as my myself and my co-founder Marius Hurley-Bennett have learnt the value of community and have faced plenty of challenges in our own wellness journeys whether it’s information overload, consumption of information often being individual and lonely, or the general challenges and stigma that exists around pursuing a healthier lifestyle.

These experiences have given us the drive to create a community that helps to solve these challenges, ultimately helping people to become happier and healthier versions of themselves. This is all nicely summed up in our motto – Together We Thrive.

What do you believe is the biggest challenge to us staying healthy?

For me, it’s both the ease and availability of suboptimal choices and the challenges/stigma around pursuing a healthier lifestyle.

Modern society means we have everything we need at the click of a button, which is incredible, however it also makes it even easier for us to make suboptimal decisions. It’s easier to order a takeaway than cook a meal with numerous whole foods and nutritional ingredients. It’s easier to chat to people online than it is to arrange something in person. And it’s definitely easier to spend my evening scrolling through TikTok than it is to move my body.

Living in London and being in my twenties, I have experienced these challenges first hand in recent years as I’ve embarked on my own wellness journey. For example, I decided to stop drinking alcohol almost 12 months ago now, but for the first 3-6 months of this I would always feel I needed to give a “proper excuse” for why I was not drinking, such as feeling under the weather or training for an endurance event. Fortunately I have now reached the point where I am confident in my decision to say that I do not drink because the negatives massively outweigh the positives for me, but it took a while and plenty of social anxiety to get to this point.

To be honest, I find it crazy that modern, western society means it is more accepted and would raise less questions if I was to say my evening plans consisted of fast food and beers in the local pub, than if I was to tell people I am going home to stretch, light a candle and journal (for example). This challenge becomes even greater if you don’t have the right tribe of people around you. This needs to change. So if this is you, and you don’t have the right tribe around you, you do now… This is exactly what the Social Wellness Club was created for!

If someone invested £1 million in your business tomorrow, what would you do with the money? Would you grow the concept outside of London?

We have big plans to expand the Social Wellness Club globally, as the challenges we are trying to solve do not respect land barriers therefore neither should we. One of the greatest things about wellness is how diverse and broad the topic is, however this also acts as a key challenge for us as there are so many avenues we would love to take SWC down. However, we simply do not have the time or resource to do everything we want at the current time (myself and my co-founder Marius are balancing SWC with our full-time jobs in investment banking and recruitment respectively).

An investment like this would help us to move closer to achieving the big goals we have set ourselves, taking Social Wellness Club to a whole new global level, helping more people to become happier and healthier versions of themselves!

What advice would you give to other founders, trying to create businesses to improve our health?

I’m going to steal one of my favourite quotes from one of my favourite people – Chris Williamson. So my advice would be “do the thing”. If you have belief in your idea, or strong reasons for pursuing it, then do the thing and make it happen.

I’ve always counted myself as an entrepreneurial person, from selling sweets at school to washing cars at my local pub when I was a teenager to constantly pitching new business ideas to my friends and family in my adulthood (sorry Pret but I thought of the coffee subscription years before you!).

However, I’ve always stopped at the idea stage and never actually done the things needed to see if I could turn these ideas into reality. Recently someone labelled me as a “Wantrepreneur” rather than an “Entrepreneur” and this term has stuck with me ever since. So don’t make the same mistakes that I have, and “do the thing”! The worst that will happen is you’ll learn valuable lessons from it. The best thing that will happen is your dreams will turn into a reality. The balance is definitely in your favour…

Secondly, I would say network with anyone and everyone in the health community that you can. One of the best parts of starting SWC has been the people I have been fortunate enough to meet along the way and the network I have been able to create for myself! This network has already proven invaluable in helping us get to where we are today, and I have no doubt that it will be one of the most important factors in taking SWC to where we want it to be in the future.

So this is an easy win to take away from reading this – please do connect with me today. My details are here 🙂

LinkedIn – Samuel Ibbott

Instagram – @samIbbott

Email – sam@socialwellnessclub.co.uk

Please could you tell us an interesting fact about yourself?

When asked this question I usually go for the fact that my parachute didn’t work when I went sky diving for my 18th birthday (fortunately for the emergency chute I’m here to tell the story today..!)

But I’ll also pick a wellness related one here and say – I battled chronic daily headaches for 9 months in 2022-23 which, via endless research and specialist appointments, has opened my eyes to the shockingly high prevalence of “neuroplastic pain” sufferers, and the power of the brain pain connection and mind body techniques as treatment. This is now a space within the health world that I have a keen interest in continuing to learn about and share with my network.