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Running an agency is its own kind of endurance sport. And honestly, being an employee isn't much easier. The pressure of deadlines, clients, life outside of work. It all stacks up in ways that don't always show on a Monday morning Slack message.

Which is why one of the things I've been most intentional about since founding Lento is building wellness into how we actually work. Not as a perk on a slide deck, but as a genuine space to connect and reset. Always optional, but that's kind of the point. This week our head of wellness Jair Lucena hosted a remote breath work session for the team and some of our freelancers. Thirty minutes. The difference afterwards was immediate. There's something almost annoying about how simple it is. You have this tool available at literally zero cost, any time, and most of us forget it exists.

Sardinians don't do cold plunges. They don't track macros or pay for longevity clinics. They just argue with the same friends they've had for sixty years and somehow live to 100. This week we get into what the wellness industry took from communities, stripped out, repackaged, and sold back at a premium — who gets priced out, and where the real opportunity is hiding.

PS. If you're a subscriber and keen to join a future session, just reply WELLNESS to this email and we'll add you to the list.

In today’s issue:

— Tom Mackay, Founder & Editor

Picture a small room in south India. Summer hits hard, fans don't work, nobody stops. People bend forward, stretch back, hold postures on the floor. No mats, just a small carpet each. Every person in that room practicing toward one aim: moving closer to God, to ego annihilation, to what the tradition called enlightenment or Nirvana. Yoga, as originally conceived, had nothing to do with flexibility, fitness, or fashion. It was a technology for dissolving the self.

That was less than a hundred years ago.

Walk into a yoga studio now. Infrared heaters, $120 leggings, insulated water bottles lined up beside a curated wall of supplements. The practice kept its name. Everything else got swapped out. What happened to yoga happened to Ayurveda, to breathing techniques, to sound healing — the same pattern, repeated consistently enough that it's worth understanding as a structural shift rather than a string of coincidences.

The global wellness economy hit $6.8 trillion in 2024, growing at nearly double the pace of global GDP. The US slice alone was around $2.1 trillion — roughly 30-35% of the total. By 2029, the industry's own projections put it at $9.8 trillion. What's worth sitting with: this market is expanding fastest precisely when, by most available measures, people are least well.

Global wellbeing scores declined across multiple indicators during the same period the industry posted record growth. A worsening problem and an accelerating market, moving in opposite directions at the same time. That tells you something about the structure of what's actually being sold.

👉 Read the full piece

Blake Lively occupied a very precise cultural space for a long time: aspirational without being unreachable, fun without being chaotic, powerful without being threatening. The woman who descended the Met Gala steps in a dress that transformed in real time, conjuring the Statue of Liberty. That moment was perfect because it was exactly what her brand promised — grand and accessible at once.

That kind of image is also the most fragile. It depends on every element staying aligned. When one slips, the whole scaffolding shakes.

It's not a single blow. It's erosion. Every week, a new headline. Every month, a reframe. Until the character you spent years building starts to look less like you — and more like a distorted version someone else manufactured. Or that you helped create without quite realising it.

👉 Read the full piece

We've reached the point where perfect looks suspicious. A polished gradient, a seamless render, a colour palette that makes too much sense — these are the tells of something made without hands. And suddenly, the tremor in a brushstroke, the uneven baseline of a typeface, the raw texture of kraft paper feel like proof of life.

This month's Nice Things all orbit the same question: how do you make something feel real when the default is now fake?

👉 Real or Fake?

While brands pay millions for stadium rights and thirty-second broadcast slots during the group stages, Lay's decided the more interesting brief is your living room. The World Cup returning to North America for the first time since 1994 is the kind of moment that makes sponsors lose their minds — logos on jerseys, naming rights, pitch-side boards blurring past in 4K for ninety minutes. Lay's is doing some of that. But the campaign they actually care about involves Messi, Beckham, Thierry Henry, Alexia Putellas, and Steve Carell standing in a supermarket car park in southern Florida checking strangers' grocery bags.

Why it matters: "No Lay's, No Game" has run for four years without the core idea wearing thin. The stunt changes, the markets multiply, the brief doesn't move. And underneath the car park stunt is something more useful than a campaign — ten million people who chose to be in a WhatsApp group with Lay's before a ball's been kicked. When the final's done and the media spend stops, that channel is still there.

👉 Watch the campaign