Wellness made chaotic: ITV-backed Woo launches marketplace for Gen Z

When Woo launched earlier this year as a Gen Z-pegged wellness, media and culture brand – armed with backing from ITV’s Studio 55 and a team linked to Vice, Boiler Room and i-D – it had hefty aims. The goal was to “redefine wellness for an entire generation by making it relatable, and culturally relevant”, and the offering was broad, spanning editorial, products and digital media (also to be streamed on ITV hub). Now, the brand finalises the “product” side of its ambitions with a new marketplace and a campaign, titled No Purchase Necessary, hoping to continue its wellness revamp.

“Wellness generally has a certain aesthetic,” Shirin Majid, Woo creative director-at-large, states. “It’s either functional or clinical” or “full of cliches” (Shirin lists “flower crowns” and “Gwyneth Paltrow” as some of these cliches); “basically it’s not relatable to young people”. Woo hopes to “do the opposite” with a new campaign. This means visuals that are “wild, colourful and chaotic instead of clean and minimalist”, Soren Harrison and Amir Hossain at Bedroom explain.

The marketplace launch came with many spinning plates. There’s the site itself, from digital design company No Plans. Collating a huge range of products from homeware and tech, fashion and beauty, lifestyle and art, and “shoppable services” like private breathwork, the marketplace allows you to shop via a selection of product edits or “moods”. Each of these “moods” has then been used as a jump-off point for campaign films created by director duo Bedroom and Woo, with photography from Amir Hossain.

Moods like “trippy” are visualised in the films through scenes of friends interacting playfully. “Our visual direction was focused on stimulating the brain through colour psychology and surreal and slightly absurd angles and compositions – largely inspired by Bedroom’s music and fashion work featuring their own friends,” Shirin says. For example, green was used as the main colour palette for the film Reset, blue for Chill, yellow for Main Character, etc.

According to Bedroom’s Soren and Amir: “Often when wellness is captured in design, the content feels exploitive and hollow, so we wanted to express our vision through an unexpected lens that exists as their own fun scenarios as well as having underlying messages.”

Meanwhile, for the marketplace, No Plans “needed to find a way to dynamically showcase Woo’s breath of editorial content and videos without diminishing the skew of products on the site”, Daniel Baer, partner and creative director, states. Equally, it was important to showcase Woo’s bubbly design identity: “whilst keeping the site easy to use and navigate.” The mood filters offered a way for No Plans to curate diverse product categories not normally placed together. “So for trippy, for example, you will have mushroom powder sitting alongside a sweater from AGR and a ‘high from design’ coffee table book,” Daniel summarises.

See the newly launched marketplace, with products shot by Marloes Haarmans, here and the full range of campaign films below.