Wellness Reimagined: Katie Klencheski Of SMAKK On 5 Things That Should Be Done To Improve and Reform The Health & Wellness Industry
An Interview With Maria Angelova
Sustainability needs to be integrated into any conversation about health and wellness. From micro plastics, to climate change, food instability, and wildfire smoke, the climate effects on human health are happening now and we can’t solve just one side of this equation.
In our world of constant change, and with life moving faster than ever, topics such as mental health, self-care, and prevention have become popular buzzwords. People are looking to live healthier lives, and there is superb care out there that is being offered. At the same time, there are misconceptions about the meaning of self-care and exercise. Many opt for quick solutions — surgery, pills — to dull the problem without adequately addressing the underlying cause. Meanwhile, many parts of the industry are unregulated and oversaturated. People with years of training are competing with people with weekend training. Many providers are overworked, overwhelmed, and underpaid. The general public is not educated about asking the right questions when selecting a wellness provider. In the face of all this, what can be done to correct the status quo? In this interview series, we are seeking to hear from a variety of leaders in the health and wellness industries who agree that the wellness industry is in need of an overhaul and offer suggestions about what can be done moving forward. As a part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Katie Klencheski.
Katie Klencheski is the Founder and CEO of SMAKK, a branding and marketing agency focused on wellbeing. Drawing from a background that included stints championing climate causes with Al Gore, curating art shows and building brands for Cartier, Amex, and Sony, she started SMAKK to uplift brands that are better for people and the planet. She has worked with everyone from industry giants like Walmart, Shiseido and Kao (Bioré, John Frieda) to a variety of nimble disruptive beauty, fashion, wellness, and lifestyle brands, including The Lip Bar, Burt’s Bees, The Honey Pot Company, Harry’s Razors, and more.
Thank you so much for doing this interview. It is an honor. Our readers would love to learn more about you and your personal background. Can you please share your personal backstory? What has brought you to this point in your life?
Even as far back as elementary school, I had an interest in the environment. As a kid, my science projects were always about things like exploring our town’s water cycle or repurposing trash to make sculptures. I happened to live in a community that was big into the conservation of wild areas and thinking about the ecosystem. I was also always a creative kid, but didn’t know until much later that I could make a career out of merging my love of creativity and activism.
I went to school for studio art, then moved to New York City. After a series of unexpected early career jumps, I joined a mid-sized, luxury-focused advertising agency. There I worked as an art director on accounts including Cartier, American Express and eventually the Trump Hotel Collection.
Initially, I didn’t think much about how the work I was doing for Trump Hotels conflicted with my personal values. This was all happening during the financial crisis of 2008, when Occupy Wall Street was in the headlines. I wanted to be a part of the political movement that was sweeping the country, not perpetuating celebrity culture and consumption. Eventually I decided to leave the job and found my own agency with my personal values as a guiding principle.
What is your “why” behind the work that you do? What fuels you?
Based on my past experiences, I founded SMAKK as a branding and marketing agency focused on wellbeing. More than just working with wellness companies across beauty, health and beyond, that means helping companies that are better for people and the planet. By crafting the brand positioning, visual identities, messaging platforms, launch strategies, ecommerce websites, campaigns, and growth marketing strategies, we can influence meaningful change across sourcing and labor, sustainability, inclusion and production, resulting in better and healthier products.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting new projects you are working on now?
We’ve been working more and more with brands who are creating products for audiences who are often forgotten by marketers. Gender non-binary people, humans going through menopause, Black men, people with health conditions that have left them excluded from beauty conversations, the list goes on. We love these projects because it allows us to bring inclusion into the work we do on a very personal level. At worst, brands are just shilling products. But at best, they can drive conversations forward that change societal norms for the good. We believe in being a part of the latter in the work we do.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Too many to list. Too, too many. But I completely agree that mistakes are where we grow. With every project when we bump up against something that isn’t working, we bring that into the larger agency conversation. I try to create a culture at SMAKK where there’s no finger pointing, but when we do need to find a new solution or have a new challenge we can learn from, we circulate what happened to the whole team and talk together about how this will change what we do in the future. I let new team members know when they start, it’s absolutely fine to make mistakes, just don’t make the same one twice if you can help it.
One mistake does stick out though. For one client, we had to do a photoshoot on a sailboat. To get the shot we wanted with the coastline in the background, we had to aim the boat straight into white cap waves. The ship’s crew warned us that this shot on this particular day would be tough and maybe even dangerous, but the client wanted/needed the shoot to go on. The photo crew and I had our backs to the front of the ship, so we had no idea when we would get knocked around by the chop and so we were stumbling and falling when the boat crashed over the tops of each wave. The models watched us falling all over the place, laughing so hard they started taking photos of us. Two people in the crew ended up spending the shoot throwing up over the side of the boat and the photographer and I were lying on our stomachs, clinging to the deck to get the shots. It was miserable. In the end we didn’t get the video footage we needed because the videographer was too sick and the client was mad we didn’t hit the whole shot list. Lesson learned — listen to the experts and have a backup plan when Mother Nature is involved. Also the client isn’t always right.
OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the core focus of our interview. From where you stand, why are you passionate about the topic of Reimagining The Health and Wellness industries? Can you explain what you mean with a story or an example?
I had a beloved family member die of ovarian cancer after a lifetime of using a personal care product that contained ingredients that were known to cause that cancer. The company behind this product was later found to have known about the risks for years and continued to sell and market the product. When I became aware of the link between unsafe products and human health — and the role that branding and marketing has in bringing these products into people’s lives — I realized that we have a responsibility on the agency side to use our talent to uplift brands that are doing better. We’ve been working with brands that have been pushing higher standards in industries like beauty and wellness since our inception at SMAKK and I’ve been really happy to see how clean and sustainable brands have been driving large scale industry change that you can see everywhere now.
When I talk about Reimagining the Wellness industry, I am talking about reimagining it from the perspective of the providers as well as from the perspective of the recipients and patients. Can you share a few reasons why the status quo is not working for both providers and patients?
At SMAKK, we don’t work with patients and providers in traditional healthcare, but my personal opinion is that the “wellness industry” sits next to the healthcare system but plays by an entirely different set of rules — and sometimes none at all. Patients are consumers and are increasingly looking outside of traditional healthcare for holistic solutions. Here’s the problem: the wellness industry has received quite a bit of criticism. One of the main concerns is that many wellness practices and products don’t have solid scientific evidence to back up their claims. Some of the things they promote aren’t supported by proper research, so it can be misleading for consumers.
Another issue is that there’s a lot of pseudoscience and misinformation floating around in the wellness industry. Some practices are based on personal stories or alternative medicine theories that haven’t been scientifically proven. This can be risky because it means people might be wasting their time or even trying things that could be harmful.
The industry also tends to use aggressive marketing tactics, preying on people’s insecurities and promising quick fixes. This can create unrealistic expectations and put a strain on people’s wallets.
One of the big problems is that the wellness industry isn’t well-regulated. That means there’s a wide range of products and practices out there, and it’s hard to tell which ones are legitimate and safe. It can be a bit of a Wild West situation.
Another issue is that some sectors of the wellness industry promote body shaming and unrealistic beauty standards. They focus too much on how people look instead of their overall well-being. This can make people feel bad about themselves and lead to unhealthy behaviors.
Accessibility is a problem too. The wellness industry tends to cater to a certain group of people and can be quite expensive. That leaves a lot of folks unable to access the benefits of certain wellness practices or products.
Why do you think there is a good opportunity now to improve and reform the health and wellness industry?
Consumers are smarter than ever and demanding more from brands. And there is also a growing awareness that while the global supply chains are getting great at delivering almost anything we want to our front door in a matter of days, quality and accountability have taken a big hit. Which is to say, you can order almost anything, but there’s little policing or regulation that can authenticate the safety or veracity of what’s inside the skincare or supplement products you ordered.
Some retailers like Target and Sephora are instituting their own standards (like “Clean at Sephora”) and entire retail concepts like Credo exist to create bubbles where everything the consumer sees on shelf is “safe” according to their standards. The problem is that these aren’t consistent definitions of safe or clean. Also the fact that it’s perfectly legal to sell quite a bit in the US that is potentially unsafe doesn’t exactly inspire consumer confidence. We need larger industry change and regulation towards consistent standards.
Can you please share your “5 Things That Should Be Done To Improve and Reform The Health & Wellness Industry”?
We need to redefine wellness to a broader category of well-being. We’ve seen the definition of wellness move from just the absence of disease to proactive health optimization in recent years — people trying to make their bodies fitter, better nourished, and more resilient. But the next conversation needs to be about how we are also happier and improving the world around us. This life is not just about being productive and fit, it’s also about the connection we have to others, feeling accepted, and fostering the health of the ecosystems that allow us to thrive.
We also need fewer, better products. The hard truth is that making more things, and making consumers feel like they need more and more products to be healthy, is taking its toll on the planet. We need a large-scale shift from brands trying to sell more single-use products with virgin plastics to products that are more effective, use less, and embrace circularity in packaging. We need a second version of the consumer products landscape that looks entirely different than the shelves of Target and Whole Foods do now and much closer to the Package Free stores that are starting to pop up.
Sustainability needs to be integrated into any conversation about health and wellness. From micro plastics, to climate change, food instability, and wildfire smoke, the climate effects on human health are happening now and we can’t solve just one side of this equation.
We also need less emphasis on data and numbers as markers of wellness. Mental health and human connection are more important than how many steps you take in a day.
Weight, exercise, and health need to be understood and approached as 3 separate things. With the rise of Ozempic and the pharmaceutical ability to change bodies to thinner sizes, but at the cost of their health, we’re seeing people trade wellness for aesthetic results. The idea that thinness is a virtue and larger bodies are unhealthy is slowly being debunked, but size inclusivity and severing the relationship between weight and wellness needs to happen now.
Lastly — we need government regulation for supplements and personal care products in the US. Both in monitoring quality and safe ingredients, as well as marketing claims. As someone who has worked with brands in this category for over a decade, I can unequivocally say that social media, the rise of D2C, and influencer marketing has changed the landscape so dramatically that the current rules are completely ineffective in weeding out bogus product claims.
There’s a reason that brands selling wellness related products are having a boom right now. The digital landscape has allowed brands to sidestep the rules that were made for broadcast and OOH advertising in addition to FDA regulations for retail packaging that created (some) protection for consumers decades ago. Now the things that aren’t allowed on packaging can be integrated into the consumer journey by 3rd party sources.
For instance: want to “cure” your eczema? Regulatory bodies would never allow you to claim that in a TV ad or on your packaging without scientific proof. However, an influencer could say that, or a customer review can use that language and it’s technically allowed. To a consumer, that’s powerful and tempting messaging. Even when there are no clinical or medical backings to that information. The brands with a conscience — and brands with robust legal counsel — don’t use this playbook, but there are so many companies right now that don’t hold themselves to high standards and rely on anecdotes and correlative science to back their claims.
From the recipient and patient side of the industry, can you please share a few ways that patients and recipients should reimagine what the wellness and healthcare industry should provide?
While we don’t work with patients, wellness customers can help push brands the right direction by demanding more regulatory standards and transparency in both claims and advertising as well as ingredients, sourcing, and formulations.
What do you think are the biggest roadblocks to reforming the industry? What can be done to address those hurdles?
The biggest roadblocks I’ve seen are media / social media’s addiction to the next shiny thing and how that drives the wellness industry to embrace fads and the next product that’s “going to change your life.” Also, lack of resourcing ability and lack of appetite from the regulation side to crack down on misinformation and fraud. Then there’s the availability of cheap products and fast delivery from sources like Amazon and how this has changed consumer expectations.
That said, it’s probably up to brands, the government and consumers themselves to address these shortcomings through better oversight, greater attention to wellness’s mission to actually improve people’s lives, and less focus on chasing profits at the expense of people’s quality of life.
I’m very passionate about the topic of proactive versus reactive self-care and healthcare. What do you think can be done to shift the industries towards a proactive healthcare approach? How can we shift the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike?
I think we’re there on the consumer side, healthcare, doctors and pharma, seem to be lagging. That’s why young consumers go to TikTok for health advice and not their doctor.
Thank you for all that great insight! Let’s start wrapping up. Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?
“How can I meet this with kindness, and what does this situation have to teach me?”
This forces me to change my mindset when things don’t go the way I’d like — moving from anger to empathy, and distress to thinking about how I’ll turn things into a positive for the future.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)
Amy Griffin, Founding Partner of G9 Ventures
Jeffrey Hollender, Co-founder of Seventh Generation
Rob Keen, Chief Executive of Weleda North America
Rebecca Marmot, Chief Sustainability Officer at Unilever
Samuel Prado, Senior Innovation Manager, Unilever
Nancy Mahon, Chief Sustainability Officer, Estée Lauder
Shana Randhava, Global Head of Venture Investments and Incubation, Estée Lauder
Alexandra Palt, Global Chief Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability Officer, L’Oreal
Virginie Helias, Chief Sustainability Officer, Procter & Gamble
Many of these big names in sustainability and innovation have the most potential to reshape the CPG landscape through their efforts to prioritize well-being and sustainability. In particular, Amy Griffin has some of the most interesting up-and-coming consumer brands in her portfolio.
I appreciate your time and valuable contribution. One last question, how can people reach or follow you?
https://www.linkedin.com/company/sm&kk-studios/
https://www.instagram.com/smakk_studios/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/katie-klencheski-b461834/
https://www.instagram.com/katie__k/
Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success.
About The Interviewer: Maria Angelova, MBA is a disruptor, author, motivational speaker, body-mind expert, Pilates teacher and founder and CEO of Rebellious Intl. As a disruptor, Maria is on a mission to change the face of the wellness industry by shifting the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike. As a mind-body coach, Maria’s superpower is alignment which helps clients create a strong body and a calm mind so they can live a life of freedom, happiness and fulfillment. Prior to founding Rebellious Intl, Maria was a Finance Director and a professional with 17+ years of progressive corporate experience in the Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance industries. Born in Bulgaria, Maria moved to the United States in 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from both Georgia State University (MBA, Finance) and the University of Georgia (BBA, Finance). Maria’s favorite job is being a mom. Maria enjoys learning, coaching, creating authentic connections, working out, Latin dancing, traveling, and spending time with her tribe. To contact Maria, email her at angelova@rebellious-intl.com. To schedule a free consultation, click here.
