From hype to health: The real longevity playbook

The shift from aesthetic wellness to measurable health. A conversation with Lisa Tengbom by Paula Ironside.

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The wellness industry didn't just grow, it expanded into something ambient. It became part of how we signal identity, discipline, even taste. Green juices, cold plunges, infrared saunas, rituals that promise not just health, but a certain kind of life.

But as the category scaled, so did a quiet fatigue. Not necessarily with the practices themselves, but with what they represent: a culture increasingly driven by appearance, immediacy, and the illusion of progress.

What happens when feeling better is no longer enough?

Longevity enters at precisely that point of friction. It asks for something less seductive and far more demanding: evidence, consistency, and time. Not a reset, but a system. Not a moment, but a trajectory.

In Los Angeles,where health, performance, and identity intersect more visibly than almost anywhere else, this shift is already underway.

It's also where Lisa Tengbom found herself.

Originally from Sweden, with a background in economics and a career in finance, Lisa didn't come to wellness through the front door. But as a former elite skier, discipline, recovery, and long-term performance had always framed how she thought about the body. When she began to see the industry shifting, not chasing a trend, but building something structural, she paid attention.

She moved to Los Angeles and joined Pause Studios, a recovery and longevity concept expanding rapidly across the US, where she now works across strategy, operations, and brand. Our conversation moves between business and biology, but always returns to the same underlying tension:

In an industry built on trust, what does it actually take to be believed?

Lisa Tengbom

From wellness to longevity

For years, wellness sold a feeling. The shift toward longevity is selling something harder to fake: a result. That distinction, between how something feels and whether it actually works, is where the entire industry is quietly reorganising itself.

Everyone talks about wellness, but longevity feels like something different. How would you explain the gap?

Wellness is more feeling-based. It's about what you get from a sauna session or a cold plunge, relaxation, a sense of reset, energy. Longevity is the data-driven version of that, and then some. You're using biomarkers, smartwatches, concrete measurements. The goal isn't just to feel good today. You're making decisions now that affect how you age, how you perform, how you function ten or twenty years from now.

From a business perspective, that matters a lot, because it means consumers aren't just buying a lifestyle anymore. They're buying into something long-term. The bar for trust and credibility is much higher. But so is the gain if you win them over, given the natural stickiness of the category.

When did you personally realise this was becoming a real industry rather than a trend?

When the money started moving, but more specifically, when serious operators started building companies with real operational depth rather than just a cool concept and good branding.

For me, as a Swede, the Daniel Ek moment was one of those signals. When someone like that moves into a space, it tells you something has shifted. It's no longer about aspiration. It's about long-term value.

But also when consumer behaviour actually changed. Not just interest, data on spending, routines, priorities. The global wellness economy is valued at $6.8 trillion, doubled from 2013, and is expected to reach nearly $9.8 trillion by 2029. That's growing faster than global GDP. At some point the numbers stop being a trend and start being a structure.

Why do you think Los Angeles has become such a central hub for longevity innovation?

LA sits at this intersection of health culture, consumer adoption, and early trend acceleration that's pretty unique. People here are genuinely willing to try things early, invest in themselves, adopt new habits fast. But it's also one of the best places in the world to build a brand. And in longevity and wellness, you're not just selling a service, you're building a new consumer habit, almost a new identity, backed by science. LA is one of the few cities where health, culture, aesthetics, and entrepreneurship naturally overlap in a way that makes that possible.

Building credible wellness brands

Growth solves some problems and disguises others. In longevity, the ones it disguises tend to be the most dangerous. Visibility is easy to manufacture. Credibility is not. And in a category where people are making real decisions about their health, the gap between the two is where brands quietly break.

What separates a serious longevity company from a trend-driven brand?

Depth versus demand. Serious companies have a real point of view, a credible foundation, and a model that can survive beyond a moment of social attention. Trend-driven brands lead with visibility. Serious ones lead with substance.

The other tell is whether they're building around outcomes and education, or just aesthetics and hype. Trust compounds over time. People might come in out of curiosity, but they stay because the business feels credible and consistent.

Social media has accelerated the growth of wellness. But it has also created a lot of noise. How should founders think about credibility?

Visibility and credibility are not the same thing, and I think some founders confuse them. You can blow up on social media and still be a business people stop trusting the moment they look more closely.

In this category, where people are making real decisions about their health, credibility is vital. Being precise about what you do. Not making exaggerated claims. Making sure what you promise and what you deliver are the same thing. The founders who build something lasting are usually the ones who resist the urge to say everything and promise anything.

What are the most common mistakes you see founders make when building wellness brands?

Confusing early excitement with business durability. A brand can generate real interest and still have nothing underneath it, no retention, no unit economics, no real organisational structure. People get caught up in the moment of traction and don't build the foundation that would let them actually scale.

Another thing is that a lot of founders underestimate how personal this category is. People are inviting a brand into really intimate parts of their lives. That requires more than good design. It requires consistency over time.

Why the industry needs new voices

If the shift from hype to health means anything, it has to mean accuracy. And one of the places the industry has been least accurate, l east honest, even, is in assuming that what works for one body works for all bodies. Much of the research that underpins mainstream longevity protocols was built around a single biological model. The implications of that, for half the population, are only beginning to be reckoned with.

A lot of longevity research has historically focused on male biology. What does that mean in practice?

It matters enormously. A man's biological cycle is 24 hours. A woman's is 30 days. Something like a cold plunge might be genuinely beneficial at one point in that cycle and actively counterproductive at another, it can trigger stress hormones when your body is in a completely different phase. A lot of the foundational research on sauna, cold exposure, and similar treatments was conducted on male subjects.

So many frameworks that get presented as universal simply aren't. Women have been navigating health and performance systems that weren't fully designed with their biology in mind. In a category that's fundamentally about long-term optimisation, that's a real problem, and a real opening.

Bryan Johnson has become one of the most visible figures in longevity. Why do you think the industry still lacks strong female voices at that level?

I don't think the industry entirely lacks female voices, there are many women doing serious work in this space. But Bryan Johnson is at a completely different level of visibility, and a big part of that is because of how extreme his approach is. That extremism drives media coverage. And when you compare against that, yes, there's a gap.

The industry would benefit from a female Bryan Johnson. Someone operating at that level of influence, but bringing a different perspective on what optimisation actually means, from a female biology standpoint.

What would a more female-driven approach to longevity look like?

More holistic, more life-stage aware, less focused on extreme optimisation and more on sustainable function. More emphasis on recovery, hormonal health, mental resilience, and stress regulation. Less about individual hacks and more about how health actually works across a whole life.

Scaling longevity businesses

Strong demand is not the same as a scalable business. In longevity, that gap is where most companies quietly break. The category rewards early momentum generously, and punishes weak foundations slowly, then all at once.

Many wellness businesses struggle to scale despite being in a growing market. Why?

Because you can be in a great market and still have inconsistent economics, unclear positioning, and an experience that doesn't translate into a repeatable model. This category is particularly complex because you're combining science, service, education, brand, and consumer trust simultaneously. That creates real opportunity, but it means execution matters enormously.

The businesses that struggle usually expand too fast before the foundation is solid. The ones that actually scale understand what's core to their model, what can be standardised, and where trust gets built inside the customer journey.

Longevity is often seen as a premium category today. Do you think it will remain that way?

In the short term, mostly yes. But as demand grows and more players come in, pricing will move toward something more accessible. That's just how maturing categories work. The question is how quickly the industry can deliver credible offerings at different price points.

What does a successful longevity business actually look like behind the scenes?

Much more operationally disciplined than most people expect. Clear strategic position, deep understanding of the customer, a model built around repeat engagement rather than one-time curiosity. And real alignment between what it promises and what it consistently delivers , which sounds obvious but is genuinely one of the hardest things to maintain as a company grows.

The businesses that last aren't just creating demand. They're building trust, internal structure, and organisational capacity at the same time.

Building businesses that last

The irony of the longevity industry is that it preaches long-term thinking while often operating on short-term logic, chasing attention, overpromising outcomes, scaling before the foundation is solid. What Lisa describes as the founder playbook is really just the industry's own values applied to how businesses are built: evidence over image, consistency over momentum, structure over story.

Which, it turns out, is harder than it sounds.

If someone wanted to build a longevity company today, where should they start?

With the problem, not the trend. The question isn't 'how do I get into longevity', lt's 'what real need am I solving, and why am I the right person to solve it credibly?' That framing changes everything.

From there, I'd look at three things: whether the offering has actual scientific or functional grounding, whether there's real consumer behaviour behind it, and whether the business architecture can actually scale. Founders often go deep on concept and branding early, which makes sense, but the structural work is where long-term advantage actually comes from.

What separates longevity companies that succeed from those that disappear?

The ones that make it are building for long-term vision instead of attention. They understand that momentum in a hot category can open the door, but it can't carry a weak business forever. They know who they are, they stay focused, and their operating model can evolve as the market does.

The ones that don't make it usually mistake early relevance for long-term defensibility. In a fast-moving space, that's an expensive mistake.

If you had to give founders three principles for building a wellness or longevity business, what would they be?

Build on credibility, not just visibility. Trust is genuinely one of the most valuable things you can create in this space, and one of the hardest to rebuild once it's gone.

Design for long-term behaviour, not short-term excitement. The strongest businesses are built around repeat value, not the moment of discovery.

Think structurally from day one. Positioning, economics, team, scalability. Good concepts are common. Good strategic architecture is what makes something last.

How do you think the longevity industry will evolve over the next decade?

It's going to grow immensely. More capital is already moving in, and it's becoming a genuinely established market across all generations.

On an individual level, I think people will shift from focusing on the external to the internal. Less about how things look, more about actually functioning on the inside. The conversation around longevity will mature too, less about extreme biohacking and more about sustainable function. Less about image and more about systems. The businesses that shape that shift will be the ones that combine real scientific credibility with strategic clarity, and stay honest about what they can actually deliver.

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The longevity industry will keep growing. That's already settled.

What's less settled is whether it grows into something genuinely different from what came before, or simply repackages the same hype in the language of biomarkers and data.

Lisa's argument, made quietly but consistently throughout our conversation, is that the market is already starting to sort this out. Consumers are getting more sophisticated. Capital is getting more discerning. The gap between what a brand claims and what it delivers is getting harder to hide.

The shift from aesthetic wellness to measurable health was never going to be clean or fast. But it is, by most signals, already underway. The question for anyone building in this space is simple, and not particularly forgiving:

Are you part of the shift, or are you still selling the feeling?

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Hi I'm Paula, founder of H&F,  and I work with wellness and beauty founders in a creative partnership that sits somewhere between strategy, storytelling, and art direction. It’s not consulting in the traditional sense, and it’s not built for speed. It’s for founders who are thinking in years, not launches, and who care as much about coherence as they do about growth.

If this way of building resonates, you can learn more about how I work here.

And if you’d rather stay in the conversation, Hunter & Florence is where these ideas continue, through monthly founder conversations and reflections on building brands that refuse to be forgettable. Subscribe to stay up to date.