Katie Canales/Business Insider
As the $3.7 trillion wellness industry continues to blossom, the concept is seeping into co-working spaces in wealthy markets.
- The Assembly, which describes itself as a wellness club, operates out of a century-old church in San Francisco's Mission District.
- It was founded two years ago and has 630 members, all of whom pay the required $250 monthly membership fee.
- Members have access to workspace, unlimited fitness classes, and so-called wellness sessions, like Reiki Healings, cupping treatments, and tarot-card readings.
- The club is a part of a trend that's changing how we balance our professional lives and our wellbeing.
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There's a full schedule of events at The Assembly co-working space and "wellness club" in San Francisco.
On Monday, there's a Soul Activation Channeling Presence, a Reiki Energy Healing is scheduled for Wednesday at 1 pm, and a Chakra Therapy with Crystals session is penciled in for Friday morning.
When its mostly female members aren't grabbing a $3 kombucha at the in-house beverage bar or gazing into their laptops working on their various entrepreneurial and creative endeavors, they can also book a cupping session, use the club's outdoor showers, get tarot readings, group acupuncture, and manicures, or book clean beauty consultations to help guide their eco-conscious beauty-product decision-making.
The Assembly has 630 members that utilize its facilities housed in what was originally a church in San Francisco's gentrified Mission neighborhood. Part of the collective's mission? To make "people feel good with exceptional workouts, wellness, food, community, and connection."
The Assembly is part of a trend that's seeing the $3.7 trillion wellness industry transform how we integrate wellness and community into the workplace. An emphasis on employee wellness has seeped into corporate culture, with companies increasingly offering services to their workers aimed at benefiting their physical, mental, and emotional health. And that focus has permeated the co-working space as well, an industry that has sprung up in its own right in response to a rise in remote workers.
There's a slew of these self-described wellness clubs in New York and in Los Angeles. Embattled co-working giant WeWork jumped into the wellness sphere in 2017 with its launch of Rise By We, which was the company's vision for a "complete wellness experience." And similar to The Assembly is The Wing, another women-focused social club founded in 2016 with locations in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and 10,000 members to date.
Wellness treatments in some of these communities often feature historically Eastern healing practices - like the aforementioned Reiki healing or Chakra therapy - an overarching trend in the wellness wave of the last decade popularized in part by Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop brand.
There's a reason why the wellness business is so lucrative. As Vice reports, "it's hard to argue with 'listen to your body'" when a product or service is marketed as being able to simply make you feel good.
Combine that with a need for a place to go to work, and it turns out people are willing to pay the asking price for such wellness and community. Membership fees at The Assembly are $250 a month, plus a one-time $250 initiation fee. If you pay for the first year up front, that initiation fee is waived and you get 10% off, which comes to $2,700 annually.
Co-founded by Molly Goodson, an online media guru-turned-entrepreneur, the wellness club opened its doors in 2018 and now has 630 members and is still accepting applications, so there's clearly a market in San Francisco that's willing to shell out the monthly fee for such an experience.
Other private clubs in the Bay Area are priced similarly, but they're a bit less expensive. The Wing has a location in the city's Financial District, with its membership fees starting at $185 a month.
Other clubs in San Francisco - with not as much of a focus on wellness specifically - include the prestigious invite-only Battery club (about $200 a month,) The Academy in the city's Castro District (starting at $99 a month,) The Bohemian Club, and the century-old private women's club The Metropolitan. And then there's The Olympic Club, the oldest athletic club in the United States.
We visited The Assembly on a January afternoon, on what coincidentally was the day of the collective's two-year anniversary. Here's what it's like inside the church-turned-wellness social club.