Why Wellness Brands Have to Stay Close to Their Customers

The short version

Wellness brands ask for an unusual amount of trust. You are asking someone to trust you with what they eat, how they move, how they sleep, how they look, or how they feel. And unlike a lot of consumer categories, the relationship does not end when someone makes a purchase. Your product becomes part of their routine, their goals, and sometimes even how they think about themselves.

That makes staying close to the customer especially important. The best wellness brands don’t just research customers when they are launching something new or trying to understand acquisition. They keep talking to them while developing products, refining messaging, testing experiences, understanding retention, and figuring out why people leave. In a category this personal, customer understanding cannot be something you refresh once a year.

I learned this early at Fitbit

I started my career as a UX researcher at Fitbit, and it was probably the first place I understood how personal consumer research could become. We might start an interview talking about step counts, sleep tracking, or a feature on someone’s wrist. But pretty quickly, the conversation would become about something much bigger: how someone felt about their body, whether they were taking care of themselves, the goals they had set, or the health habits they were struggling to change. We were ostensibly researching a product, but the product sat inside someone’s relationship with their health.

I spent years in consumer product after Fitbit, including at DoorDash, before starting Strella. Today, I spend much of my time talking to insights, brand, and product leaders across consumer companies, including fitness, food, supplements, sleep, and wellness. And I keep coming back to the same thing: the closer your product gets to someone’s body or daily life, the more important it becomes to deeply understand the person using it.

Think about what wellness companies are actually asking people to do. Change what you eat. Take something every morning. Trust a claim about what a product will do to your body. Walk into a fitness studio and exercise in front of strangers. Wear a device while you sleep. Commit to a membership because you believe it will help you become healthier, stronger, or feel better. These aren’t purely functional decisions.

McKinsey’s Future of Wellness research found that 84 percent of US consumers consider wellness a top or important priority in their lives. When something matters that much to people, they bring more expectations to the products they choose. And the consequences of getting the experience wrong are different. If a random consumer product disappoints me, I bought something I didn’t like. If I spend a month taking a supplement because I believe it will improve my health and nothing happens, the disappointment is bigger. I didn’t just buy something; I attached a goal to it.

The same is true of a fitness membership I thought would finally get me into a routine, a sleep product I hoped would help me feel better, or a food product I incorporated into my diet. Wellness brands aren’t just selling products. They’re entering into people’s goals for themselves. That is why trust matters so much, and it’s why these companies should arguably be doing more customer research than the average consumer brand, not less.

Staying close means talking to customers throughout the relationship

One thing I’ve seen repeatedly is how much you can learn when customer research becomes continuous rather than episodic. Before launching something, you might be asking whether people actually want it. When you’re working on positioning, you need to understand whether a claim means what you think it means and whether people believe it. Once someone starts using the product, the questions become whether it fits naturally into their life and where they’re getting confused. A few months later, you want to know why some people are still there while others have left. And as the market changes, you need to know whether the customer you understood a year ago is even the same customer today.

We’ve seen this across our customers at Strella:

Daily Harvest has used research to compare product concepts before committing to what to build and to understand the checkout experience as its purchase model evolved.

Ritual has studied how consumers figure out which supplements they need and tested pricing and purchase experiences before rolling them out more broadly.

Hatch has put prototypes directly in front of customers while simultaneously learning how those customers value the product today. Amanda Amyx, their Senior Director of Design & Research, described the impact of that cadence: “The fact that we were able to have a new data set every week deepened our understanding of an entirely new growth audience.”

[solidcore] takes a similarly continuous approach, talking to prospective clients, current members, and people who have left. Its research with former members runs continuously rather than as a one-time churn study. Gillian Almeida, their VP of Strategy & Insights, put it simply: “A one-time study provides a snapshot; ongoing, always-on listening provides a signal.”

That’s the distinction that matters to me. Research shouldn’t just help you answer a big question. It should help you notice when the answer is changing.

The answers are changing faster than ever

This is becoming even more important because consumer behavior is moving incredibly quickly. Take how people discover wellness products. McKinsey’s State of the Consumer 2026 found that 22 percent of consumers now use large language models for health and wellness topics, rising to 26 percent among Gen Z. Sixty percent of Gen Z regularly use AI overviews in search.

That alone changes how consumers arrive at a brand. They may have already asked ChatGPT about a supplement ingredient, compared workout methods, researched a symptom, or summarized reviews before ever landing on your website. At the same time, consumers increasingly arrive with their own data. McKinsey found that 75 percent of Gen Z and 73 percent of millennials use health-monitoring devices, compared with 32 percent of boomers. People know more, they research differently, and their expectations change faster.

A customer study from twelve months ago may still contain useful foundational insights, but it cannot tell you everything about the customer standing in front of you today. That is one of the biggest reasons I believe brands need to increase the cadence of research.

More research doesn’t have to mean more massive studies

When I say brands should do more research, I don’t mean every company needs to commission a giant foundational study every month. In fact, I think that framing is part of what has historically made research difficult to do continuously.

Research can be much lighter weight. Talk to ten customers this month about why they joined. Talk to ten longtime customers about why they’ve stayed. Talk to ten people who recently canceled and have them walk you through what happened. Put a prototype in front of customers before spending months building it. Show them two versions of a claim before printing thousands of packages. Watch someone actually try to buy your product rather than assuming the conversion funnel tells you everything you need to know.

The point isn’t research for research’s sake. It’s reducing the number of important decisions your company makes based on assumptions about the customer. And with AI dramatically lowering the time and cost required to run qualitative research, there is less reason than ever for customer conversations to be reserved for the handful of biggest questions each year.

There is a simple question I think more wellness leaders should ask: What have we learned directly from our customers in the last 30 days that changed something we were going to do?

Not what did the dashboard tell us, or what did we learn in last year’s segmentation, or what does the team believe customers want. What did customers actually tell us?

If it’s difficult to answer, there is probably an opportunity to get closer. Analytics can tell you that someone canceled a membership, but they can’t tell you about the three weeks leading up to the decision. An exit survey can tell you someone selected “too expensive,” while a conversation might reveal that the real issue was that they stopped seeing progress, started attending less often, and then the price stopped feeling worth it. A conversion funnel can show you exactly where someone abandoned checkout, but it cannot tell you what they thought they were signing up for.

Those differences matter because one gives you a metric and the other gives you something you can act on.

The opportunity for wellness brands

Wellness brands have something most companies would love to have: the opportunity to become part of someone’s life. A class can become someone’s Tuesday morning routine. A supplement can sit next to their toothbrush. A sleep product can be the last thing they interact with every night. A food brand can become something they eat every week.

That is an incredibly valuable relationship, but it also means the bar for understanding that customer should be higher. If your product touches someone’s body, health, habits, or identity, you should know how their needs are changing. You should know where their trust is being strengthened and where it is eroding. You should know why they started, why they stayed, and why they left. And you shouldn’t have to wait for the next annual study to find out.

The opportunity for wellness brands isn’t simply to do better research. It’s to build companies that are constantly learning from the people they serve. The brands that do that will make better products, communicate more clearly, catch problems earlier, and build the kind of trust that keeps customers around.

Strella helps wellness and consumer teams stay close to their customers through AI-moderated qualitative research, from early product development through ongoing customer understanding. Talk to customers continuously, go deeper than a survey, and get answers in days instead of weeks.

Frequently asked questions

Why is customer research especially important for wellness brands?
Wellness products touch unusually personal parts of people’s lives: their health, bodies, habits, goals, and identities. That creates a higher level of trust between a brand and its customers, which makes understanding their needs, expectations, and experiences especially important.

How often should wellness brands talk to customers?
There is no universal cadence, but customer conversations should happen often enough to detect meaningful changes in behavior. Instead of relying exclusively on large annual studies, brands can supplement foundational research with smaller, continuous conversations throughout the year.

Does doing more research mean running more large studies?
No. Continuous research can be lightweight: ten conversations about a new concept, interviews with recently churned customers, prototype testing, messaging research, or conversations with longtime customers about why they stay. The goal is to reduce the number of important decisions made purely on assumptions.

Why aren’t analytics and surveys enough?
Analytics are excellent at showing what happened. Surveys can help quantify how common something is. Qualitative conversations are particularly useful for understanding why. A cancellation metric tells you someone left; a conversation can reveal the series of experiences that caused them to leave.

What is the biggest benefit of continuous customer research?
It helps companies notice when their understanding of the customer is changing. Consumer expectations, discovery behaviors, competitors, and products evolve quickly. Continuous research gives teams a signal over time rather than a snapshot from a single study.