Take a moment to think about the amenities your living and working spaces provide you. Do you have a fitness center? A spa? Dry cleaning? Candy room? Café or bookable private chef?
Amenities in the built world are evolving – quickly. But only in the last few years has this change started to happen in corporate real estate. We recently interviewed Colleen Werner, founder of LulaFit, a company that runs wellness amenities in residential, commercial and corporate environments, about how corporate amenities are rapidly catching up to the modern needs of real estate clients.
Werner has an unconventional background. After studying ballet and kinesiology at the University of Michigan, she worked as a professional ballet dancer in New York City. In early 2014, she founded LulaFit, working in high-end wellness concierge services, offering personalized health and wellness services to luxury residential buildings.
Then, she began to notice something.
“I was offering a much more holistic view of how buildings could offer amenities to their end users. In 2017, I realized that the amenity boom that has taken hold in residential projects hadn’t really taken off the same way in commercial buildings. I began to look at why that is, and what that space currently looked like at the time. Through that exploration, we found that only 20-25% of people in a commercial building will use the gym.
“Today, wellness is a necessity for every single employer to attract and retain. We’re not just looking at fitness centers, conference rooms and a lounge. Amenities need to speak successfully to the mental and social wellbeing of the people who will use them, or they won’t work. We’re part of the team that creates a proper facility structure to help support a holistic path to wellbeing.”
Perhaps the biggest change in this demand for a different way of doing amenities is the generational shift happening in our workforce, Werner notes.
“Millennials are a group that works incredibly hard; but, if you want them to give you 80% of their life to dedicate to their jobs, they’re going to require a lot in return. They want balance in their life, and they are willing to sacrifice traditional benefits to get it.”
According to LulaFit’s website: “LulaFit’s Corporate Wellness programming allows organizations to build cultures of health that impact core priorities such as improved employee morale, talent attraction and retention, enhanced customer loyalty, reduced absenteeism, greater employee engagement and productivity, and demonstrable competitive advantage. Our wellness programs address every aspect of wellbeing and create touch points from theory to practicality.”
Examples of LulaFit’s services for corporate clients include wellness experiences and events, seminars and workshops, private fitness classes, wellness consulting, strategic communication (including developing and managing a web portal that provides access to resources, an events calendar, and signups for fitness classes and events), and all kinds of services like personal training, nutrition counseling, massage therapy, wellness coaching and beauty services. LulaFit clients include Walgreens, PepsiCo, Uber, Ferrara Candy, CBRE, and many more.
In Chicago, we’ve really seen the trends in lifestyle amenities explode in residential spaces,” said Werner. “Because of that, office and other commercial buildings have struggled to attract people to their amenities.”
Because residential builds already offer their users amenities, and those people are already paying for and using those amenities where they live, they don’t have a need for them at their place of work.
“It really goes back to the end users in this war for amenities.”
Companies of the last 25 years have consistently offered more traditional amenities, such as basic concierge services along with fitness center management, Werner notes. Think towel service, and maybe a trainer thrown in on the floor.
“Now, people want and need more – lifestyle, wellness and social interaction. They want these things more because they get less of all of them in their jobs, often sitting in front of computer screen or taking part in partial work-from-home situations.”
“7-8 years ago, it was revolutionary for corporate environments to start offering fitness classes like yoga and boot camp. Now, we’ve moved way beyond that. Happy hours, wellness retreats, gourmet coffee and snack bars, running clubs.”
LulaFit recently developed the amenities program for the newly restored Old Post Office building in Chicago. The project is a pinnacle example of lifestyle, wellness and social amenity integration. The Old Post Office in Chicago sat empty for 50 years, and it’s the largest adaptive reuse project in the country.
“There was so much space to work with, and we worked with many different partners to figure out how to align the tenants with the amenities they would really want and need.”
What does the next 25 years look like?
“Office buildings of the future will have to help their tenants attract and retain talent. We believe that it shouldn’t solely be the company’s responsibility to achieve that; we think it’s part of the real estate company’s bill of services. We believe that amenities will become a direct part of impacting corporate clients’ bottom lines. We, and our clients, will be asking, ‘How do we develop spaces that support the productivity of end users in these buildings?’”
“The challenge for us at LulaFit is that there is no playbook for us. When you’re trying to innovate – not disrupt, as we don’t see ourselves as a ‘disruptor’ – you’re constantly pushing up against that innovative barrier. The challenge in that is finding the right partners, and sometimes that means saying no to potential partners who aren’t a good fit. In the beginning, it was very tough to find partners who were really open to innovating – in pushing the boundary and trying new things. It’s become very important for us to ask the right questions.”
This combination of innovation and strategic restraint has fared well for Werner’s company. With offices in Chicago and New York LulaFit now employs 105 people, working on projects across the Midwest and Northeastern United States.
The company has grown on average about 250% every year since its inception – built on the profitable idea that amenities in corporate environments can be holistic, impactful to employees’ lives, and crucial to a company’s bottom line.