💫 Dr. Vali, The Pioneer of Luxury Biohacking
This week we dive into Dr. Vali’s 360-degree approach to wellness and learn how luxury brands like La Mer are transforming wellness experiences.
Hello Tech Powered Luxury listener, and now reader!
🎙️ This week, we are thrilled to bring you an exclusive interview with Dr. Vali, a pioneer in the luxury wellness space and the visionary behind the Dr. Vali 360 Experiential Center at Selfridges. With over two decades of experience, Dr. Vali is at the forefront of biohacking and holistic health optimization.
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✨ I’m Beatriz Barros and I’m very excited to have you reading us today!
👀 TL;DR
Dr. Vali is a leading figure in luxury wellness, known for her innovative approach that combines extensive medical expertise with cutting-edge biohacking techniques. What glues it all together? Her integrity.
Biohacking is the practice of making lifestyle changes to enhance health and performance, ranging from simple diet modifications to advanced medical techniques. The global biohacking market is growing rapidly, reflecting a rising consumer demand for personalized wellness solutions.
Luxury brands like La Mer are already exploring this space by offering exclusive wellness experiences for their top clients. These activations not only enhance customer loyalty but also significantly increase sales, creating new opportunities for luxury brands to expand their reach into wellness.
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💡 Our exclusive question:
Who’s your most unexpected mentor, and what did they teach you?
“I think my most inspiring mentors to date, have actually been my patients.
I continue to learn from them, be challenged by them, be advised by them in terms of their own life learnings, their own psychosocial context of different conditions, different experiences. I call them BDV family because they've seen me evolve from a one man show to having several brands which they're proud of and which they continue to mentor me through, as I've also seen them through evolution of their own changes in their personal and professional lives. So I'm blessed in the fact that I have so many different types of mentors, in my BDV family. I'm exposed to all experiences of life and mentorship.”
🧖🏽♀️ Biohacking as a holistic approach to wellness
Dr. Vali is a seasoned practitioner with over two decades of experience, and has been making waves in the wellness industry with her holistic, 360-degree approach to health. Trained in the NHS and armed with multiple degrees, she initially started her career offering conventional treatments but soon recognized a gap in the market for a more integrated, patient-centered approach to health and beauty.
“There's no point in me fixing you on the outside if the inside is a mess. We always look at your mood, your energy, your sleep, your libido, your gut health, your fertility, your immune system, the inside, as well as the outside, your face, your skin lab, your face lab, your body lab, your hair lab, your wellness lab.”
She is one of the pioneers of a movement that comes as a result of observing and understanding the collateral effects of the times we live in: how we interact with other people, with technology, and the massive increase of societal expectations we are facing to be everything, everywhere, all at once.
It’s not only a matter of facing hard-to-reach beauty standards, because ever since we understand the concept of beauty, we have its ideal and its opposite. It’s rather how bombarded we constantly are through social media and how we don’t give ourselves the time to create a healthy, spectator distance from it. External beauty standards, being communicated and pushed towards people at a very young age, cause psychological distress to levels that before did not exist - because the means to convey these messages were restricted to limited channels and to more mature age groups.
“Mental health is so popular post-Instagram. Digital media and digital platforms are creating some kind of anxiety for us, or overthinking in terms of the roles in society - we're actually holding so many roles in society now. We're pushing ourselves to be a CEO, to code, to have a business before we're at university. The pressure on the younger generation is so much that it’s affecting our systems in terms of our mood, our sleep, our concentration, our performance.”
Dr. Vali’s approach goes beyond treating symptoms: it involves a deep understanding of the root causes of health issues, which often stem from the pressures and complexities of modern life. She believes in a tailored, phased approach to wellness that starts from the inside out. Each patient’s journey begins with an extensive consultation that examines not just physical health, but emotional and psychological well-being, ensuring a personalized treatment plan that addresses the individual holistically.
“It is important for me as a doctor to really understand the psychosocial aspect of you as a patient and to win your trust. I can give you a solution, but if I’m not gonna get you onboarded on that solution, then you're not gonna comply and the outcome won't be what you want.”
For her, biohacking is about empowering patients to optimize their own health by leveraging the body’s natural capabilities. Whether it’s meditation, at-home self-care techniques, managing stress through personalized supplementation, improving sleep quality with innovative therapies, or enhancing cellular health with advanced techniques like IV NAD+ therapy or hyperbaric oxygen therapy, Dr. Vali is committed to using the most effective, evidence-based methods to help her clients achieve true, lasting wellness.
"I’m not trained to sell you stuff. I’m trained to empower you and educate you," she asserts. "We never want to distort your natural anatomy, heritage, culture, or gender. We make sure that when you walk into a room, you have the perfect bone structure for you without anyone knowing you’ve had anything done."
Dr. Vali’s work aims to empower her clients by giving them control over their health journey. Her approach has created a loyal following, driven by referrals and genuine results.
💫 The Rise of Luxury Biohacking
The concept of luxury biohacking is gaining traction as people seek more holistic and sustainable ways to maintain their health and wellness. Biohacking, broadly defined, involves making small, incremental changes to one's lifestyle or biology to enhance health, performance, and overall well-being.
These practices range from simple lifestyle modifications, such as diet and exercise changes, to more experimental approaches like wearable technology, supplements, and advanced medical techniques.
The global biohacking market was valued at USD 20.94 billion in 2023, and is projected to grow to approximately USD 69.11 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 18.6%, according to research conducted by Grand View.
Luxury brands have for a long time explored the wellness space, with global brands offering exclusive experiences in partnership with resorts and spas. La Mer in 2023 had a series of pop ups in spas & resorts, and offered complimentary beauty treatments to their VIC (very important clients) in major multibrand partner stores.
In an interview to Vogue Business, Kendal Ascher, the Estée Lauder Companies’s senior vice president of luxury brands for North America and general manager of La Mer and Darphin Paris says that these activations bring a 30% increase in sales for top clients, beyond strengthening a loyal relationship between high spenders and the brand.
Beauty and fragrance were always treated as an entry-level category to luxury brands, due to lower price points and high margins. A shift in consumer behavior, especially post-pandemic, has created demand for verticalized luxury wellness brands and experiences, signalling a blue ocean of opportunity for non-specialized brands to explore with new services and partnerships that cater to the very few clients that correspond to a big chunck of a brand’s revenue.
Experiential services help build on brand equity, placing brands as top-of-mind for high networth consumers on categories beyond their core offering. Who will be the next luxury brand to tap into this opportunity in your opinion?
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Thank you for reading.
See you next week,
💫 Who are we and what led us here today?
🎙️ Launched as a podcast on November 1st 2022 by Ashley McDonnell, Tech Powered Luxury has since nurtured a vibrant community of experts passionate about the evolving synergy between technology and luxury. We have reached over 20 million people through the podcast, social platforms and media, and have hit +500K downloads.
🪄 Our weekly newsletter is curated by Beatriz Barros, a seasoned expert in luxury and technology based in Milan, Italy. A dedicated collaborator of Tech Powered Luxury, Beatriz applies her expertise as a Fashion & Luxury Business Consultant at Retex—Italy's forefront company known for integrating strategic acumen with operational excellence to solve complex retail-oriented projects for fashion & luxury brands. Additionally, she educates aspiring professionals at Polimoda, renowned for its focus on Fashion Design & Business in the vibrant city of Florence, Italy - also where she first met Ashley during one of her lectures on the future of luxury: a match made in academic heaven. 🌈