How The Cofounders Of HigherDOSE Are Creating An Empire Of Wellness Products

When Lauren Berlingeri and Katie Kaps joined forces and launched HigherDOSE in 2016, it was conceptualized as a sauna experience like no other, featuring state-of-the-art infrared saunas. What originally started as an activation at The Alchemist's Kitchen in New York City’s Lower East Side and pop-ups at hotels and retailers, has expanded into a flagship location in Williamsburg, a permanent spot at the 11 Howard hotel in SoHo, and a wellness empire built on the notion of bringing the benefits of nature, indoors, with the help of technology.

The high-tech nature of HigherDOSE can be found in the name: the “DOSE” in caps stands for dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins (also known as the happy hormones our bodies release from getting exercise and sunlight).

More than five years since arriving on the scene, HigherDOSE is more than a wellness brand: it’s a wellness lifestyle based on biohacking, creating rituals that upgrade wellbeing, and optimizing one’s way to better health and overall performance.

HigherDOSE’s journey has evolved from a brick and mortar, IRL focus — at one point they had 11 retail locations between New York City and Los Angeles — to bringing the benefits of infrared technology to the masses with the help of an expanded range of products that can now be used at home.

But don’t call this a pivot: HigherDOSE had created its now-famous sauna blanket before the pandemic forced brands to rethink their business models and turn their products into at-home experiences.

The circumstances of the pandemic accelerated the demand and interest in the blankets, but it wasn’t the driving force behind why they developed them.

While HigherDOSE was already making a name for itself in the infrared sauna space, the idea for launching the sauna blanket sparked organically, thanks to pop-up events the brand was invited to do, within its first two years in business. Rather than lug around an actual sauna, Kaps and Berlingeri got creative: “We worked with our partners at Clearlight to source the best blankets to bring to events. It was truly a ‘bottom-up’ approach, where we brought the blankets to pop-ups and our customers started asking if they could buy them from us. So we looked at each other and said, We better start placing orders!” Kaps continues: “Rather than people in a boardroom masterminding this product, this was a very authentic evolution of our brand.”

Initially, they were selling the sauna blankets to their email database.

The HigherDOSE cofounders had considered doubling down on the sauna blankets and range of at-home products before Covid hit.

The pandemic allowed Berlingeri and Kaps to focus on the at-home part of the business, leaning into its range of products rather than its physical locations (they were at nine locations when the pandemic started).

“By 2019, we looked at our sales and most of the growth was in the products, whereas the locations weren’t growing as much,” Kaps shares. “So we made the decision internally to shift more towards product and consolidate the locations. And then when the pandemic hit, we shut down all of our locations, and overnight, the demand for the blanket increased 300%. So we spent last year trying to keep up with that demand.”

The pandemic did force the cofounders’ skillset to pivot: they went from managing physical sauna locations and essentially honing their expertise in the service industry, to becoming experts in a direct-to-consumer brand — and continuously learning and improving along the way.

The cofounders had already experienced career shifts before becoming entrepreneurs: Berlingeri is a former international model, who later went on to star in her own show, Women vs. Workout and flexed her wellness muscle as a holistic nutritionist and certified health coach (she got her certification at The Institute of Integrative Nutrition). Berlingeri then ventured into the health and wellness startup spectrum as one of the first creative minds at Aloha.com, doing product development, leading the brand ambassador program, and brand partnerships.

Kaps is a former consumer/retail investment banker at Merrill Lynch who lent her marketing and business skills to the San Francisco Marathon. She also focused on strategy, new business development and international expansion at Tough Mudder, and helped grow the business from $10 million to $150 million in revenue.

While they both had strong career backgrounds, the cofounders’ business model took a sharp turn as a result of their shift from a service-based brand, to an e-commerce company.

“All of a sudden, Lauren and I, as entrepreneurs, we've had to go through this steep learning curve surrounding what our company looks like now and how we need to operate,” Kaps shares.

Even understanding and getting to know all the different marketing channels has been a learning process.

The transition from the physical locations to focusing on at-home products has also been accompanied by a change in HigherDOSE’s branding.

Kaps and Berlingeri moved away from the healthclub-meets-nightclub vibe of the physical locations and rebranded to a more fashion-meets-wellness narrative that emphasizes the mission of bringing nature indoors to ‘turn you on (to your own alchemy), tune you in (to your body and mind), and deliver a healthy ‘DOSE’. The brand’s offerings are inspired by earthy elements (the sun, earth and sea), powered by advanced technologies, and designed to ignite your best body and mind.

HigherDOSE’s rebrand can already be seen in many of its touchpoints, as it went from a playful and bolder color palette, to a more serene and sophisticated logo and overall look.

(HigherDOSE partnered with two agencies to bring its rebrand and repositioning to life: Wade and Leta, and Office of Oneness.)

Listening to customers has also been critical to the HigherDOSE brand: Berlingeri and Kaps knew they were on to something when they received over 1,500 customer reviews for the blanket — which has served as real-time input.

While the sauna blanket was waitlisted for months during the pandemic, which highlighted that they struck gold with the right product, the cofounders know that customer feedback is worth its weight in gold — as a result, they are constantly reiterating the sauna blanket to improve the user experience, from a design perspective. (Version four, which is designed with a more seamless way to get in and out of the blanket — with a zipper as opposed to Velcro — will be ready for release in early 2022.)

It’s also about dedicating a lot of time and resources to innovation.

“We do see ourselves primarily as direct-to-consumer, e-commerce focused now,” Kaps shares. “But even as an e-commerce brand, you need to have experiential pop-ups and physical places for people to try things. So that's still going to be important to us going forward. And we're focusing more on partnerships with hotels and spas that can essentially serve as showrooms for the brand, but then it also gives them a place for customers to try out our products. It's a win-win all around.”

Berlingeri adds: “We were leaning so heavily on experience initially for the first four years, knowing the importance of those touchpoints and how the customer journey is so important, especially nowadays, when trying to build trust and become an authority within the space — and having people fall in love with the brand and the products as much as you do. For us, it's really important to educate on igniting vitality in a different way — releasing happy chemicals, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins, and then bringing in those aspects of fashion, music and biohacking into one experience.”

Part of aligning with the right brand partners and emphasizing the HigherDOSE lifestyle, is outfitting the offices of the companies who live and breathe the HigherDOSE life: the brand has decked out the headquarters of The Class, Sakara Life and Melissa Wood Health, with everything from full-size HigherDOSE saunas to Infrared PEMF Go Mats, to be enjoyed on team members’ chairs.

(Pulsed Electromagnetic Magnetic Frequency, or PEMF, produces a grounding frequency similar to what's generated by the earth; both the Infrared Sauna Blanket and Infrared PEMF Mat utilize crystal, negative ion, and infrared technologies.)

Other recent items that launched: HigherDose Body Oil, a Supercharge Copper Body Brush (features ion-charged bristles that wake up the body, exfoliate the skin, and promote relaxation, best used before a sauna or PEMF session), and a red light face mask. To celebrate the release of the red light mask, HigherDose partnered with Sicile-based Furtuna skincare, highlighting the goal of aligning with brands that complement the HigherDOSE experience, at home.

HigherDOSE has added even more extensions to its product assortment and business strategy by adding wholesale as a distribution channel (its saunas will be available for purchase at Best Buy), and creating a line of magnesium products (body care and ingestible line), arriving to market end of Q1 / beginning of Q2.

On the education and content front, Berlingeri and Kaps are also launching a web series called Biohack-hers, “a female-led exploration of the biohacking revolution,” which will launch with the new website and the complete brand refresh in January 2022. (This is also a nod to Berlingeri’s earlier days as a web TV host.)

“Katie and I always considered ourselves to be female biohackers,” Berlingeri explains. “And we always wondered why there’s such a negative connotation around it, for women. We think it's because there's not enough female voices out there. Women have been biohacking forever — we've had to tune into our body and know what works and what doesn't.”