The following is an excerpt from the Glow Journal Podcast. You can listen to the full interview now on iTunes and Spotify.
For Endota Spa founder and CEO Melanie Gleeson, the environment has always proved a source of inspiration.
“The school that I went to on the Mornington Peninsula had three rules that covered everything,” Melanie tells me. “Respect for yourself, others, and the environment. That’s where my appreciation for nature was formed. Nature is a great teacher and it shows you that we’re all connected. Once I started in the beauty industry, I could see the connection. I could see that when people slowed down and took time, whether it be in nature or during a treatment, they changed. They change physically from being in stress, but emotionally they change as well.”
Inspired by that very change, Melanie endeavoured to open her own spa in the year 2000. “I had worked for someone else for what I thought was a long time. I thought ‘I really want to be able to do this for myself.’ I was also travelling about an hour each way to work every day so that was a great motivator. I wanted something closer to home- I love the Mornington Peninsula and I feel very blessed to live here, so I wanted to bring what I’d learnt back here.
I often look back- being 26, I hadn’t had children and I wasn’t married, so I felt a bit invincible in that I didn’t have a lot to lose. I was brought up in a really loving, caring family, so I knew that if I had a crack at something and it didn’t work out, I would still be loved. I had a very good foundation on which to give something a go.”
So what really gave Melanie the confidence to start her own business? “It was a lot of things- naivety, bravery, and just a love of making people feel better. We’re blessed if we can do something that we love and make a difference.”
While a good foundation was already in place for Melanie, what wasn’t in place was a wellness industry- in fact, the industry simply did not exist. “The very first spa that I opened, I had to write for a permit. I had to write what services we did, so I wrote massages, facials, body treatments… the local council received 14 objections because they thought it was going to be a brothel. It [wellness spas] was that foreign of a concept. I flash forward 18 years and people are Instagramming their smoothies and everyone is in activewear. There’s been massive changes. We now have a wellness industry.”
Having finally convinced the local government that she was indeed opening a day spa as opposed to a brothel, Melanie found herself an Endota location- a tin shed in the Mornington Peninsula hinterland. “We were in the shed and back then it wasn’t developed- there was no heating or cooling, we were in the elements,” Melanie laughs. “It was all fun though, and we got through it. It was all part of learning!”
Climate control aside, Melanie readily admits that she faced challenges beyond heating a tin shed. “Being young and female was a challenge,” she tells me. “Not having any capital was another challenge, and the education around the industry- just telling people what a day spa was was a challenge. There were maybe four or five [day spas] in the entire country, and they were all in luxury hotels. There were massage clinics and there were beauty salons, but the two hadn’t merged. We brought the crossover into a space where you could experience everything.”
Melanie took each and every challenge in her stride until, after only a few short years in operation, the business began to grow beyond what she could image. “People started calling and asking ‘Are you a franchise? Can we start one in our area?’ In the beginning we ran a couple on our own to test the model. When people that we didn’t know started calling, that was probably the moment when I thought ‘Oh wow, this has got some traction.’ That took around four years.
It was really about sharing the vision for the brand and what it could be. A lot of people who joined the network are women who have worked in corporate environments in amazing, often executive roles, who have got to a point where they either want a family or they want more time. The corporate world still demands a lot of time and energy, but having your own business, although it’s demanding and stressful at times, you still have a lot flexibility. You’re the the master of your own destiny.”
Melanie notes that, while there have been many changes in the beauty and wellness space since Endota’s inception, one thing that hasn’t changed is the appeal of Endota to new staff- 95% of which are women. “It’s partly because this industry [beauty] is still predominantly women,” Melanie explains. “I just think women are amazing and we get so much done. I love their passion and their energy, and I love the care and empathy they bring. A great thing for me was that I never worked in corporate, so I never worked in male dominated industries and I never had to fight against whatever that might be. I spent a lot of time at Endota so, for me, bringing in a yoga room or having energy workers come in or tarot card readers or having lunch on a Tuesday, I do that because that’s what I want. I don’t have time to do that outside of work, so we bring it in. Once a quarter we have a market- everything is handmade, and we have it here [at Endota HQ]. We have ceramicists, we have artists. They set up in the courtyard and we have all the arts and crafts- it’s everything that everyone has made.”
What Melanie does ensure she has time for outside of work is her family. “I have an amazing support crew,” she tells me. “My husband made the decision a couple of years ago, we did together, that he would become the home carer. That’s been an amazing journey for him and the boys have really flourished. We’ve got an amazing support team as well here at Endota, and I’m not afraid to ask for help.”
I sit with Melanie in the Endota Spa support office’s yoga room- something that, in itself, sets this company apart from those within the same field. Another element that sees Endota maintain its position as an innovator is the choice to work with women of all ages, sizes and ethnicities in their campaigns- a movement so few beauty brands have elected to take part in.
“For us, beauty is within everything,” Melanie explains of the choice to represent all women in their collateral. “We’re very aware that beauty is from within. Here, we have an understanding of beauty beyond the physical. We’ve used our own head office team in photo shoots. We have women of all ages, all nationalities. Old, mainstream beauty, I don’t know… it was a bit ‘same same.’ We just go with what we like. There’s a lot of amazing women out there and we all should be celebrating them- everything about them, not just how they look.”
In celebrating everything about women, Melanie and the Endota team have chosen to work with a collective of ambassadors each with their own creative skills- not just a group of nameless models. While Melanie admits that “it has been tempting,” to use models and influencers with a large following in order to get their product in front of a larger audience, Melanie concedes that “as with everything with Endota, it feels like we’ve taken the long road- the longer, harder road- but although the road has been long, what it has done amongst our clients is build trust and credibility. They look to us for that, and I believe that’s because of all the time and effort that goes into everything behind the scenes.”
Another strenuous process has been that of product development. “In the beginning, we started with services,” Melanie explains. “We didn’t make products for the first five or six years. The product was born out of our clients and therapists saying “Please create something.” We could have just created any old run of the mill product in a bottle, but we thought ‘Let’s do organic.’ No one was doing organic at the time. There were very few manufacturers and chemists who could do organic. The road has been longer and harder at every turn, but it’s just how we are. The treatment modalities that we choose, the research that goes into them, there’s so much behind the scenes before it actually hits.”
Passionate about inclusivity across all facets of the business, Endota Spa have entered into a partnership with the Indigenous community in the Northern Territory in recent years. “A girlfriend and I took a trip to Darwin to the Indigenous Art Fair up there, and we met a group of amazing ladies from the Fitzroy Crossing,” Melanie tells me of the origins of the partnership. “After the art fair we kept in contact, and I was lucky enough to go and stay with the ladies. They have created a healing space- art therapy. They have a studio and a workshop, and people can go and create art. We went and spent some time with the girls at Fitzroy Crossing, and we met the artists and they took us out and showed us how they collected and made the dyes. We built up a really great friendship, so we talking about working with them on a larger scale through Endota. They have designed the inside of the colour packaging. They’ve created a business for themselves.” Today, the artists working in Marnin Studio, the Indigenous art therapy studio operating out of the Marninwarntikura Women’s Resource Centre, earn a percentage of the sales of the Endota Colour collection.
Today, nearly 20 years after opening the first Endota Spa, the company continues to charge on the frontline of the wellness movement. “In the very beginning we were doing meditation while we were doing facials- we were a bit ahead of our time and it didn’t catch on,” Melanie tells me. “Now it’s reoccurring, so we’re really just bringing it all back. Now we’ve got a Live Well range, we’ve got diffusers, we’ve got smudge sticks. It’s just about reintroducing those things. Over time, the consciousness has changed, and people are more willing now to spend time on themselves and not feel guilty about it. There’s a real movement around self care.
People are realising that if they want to sustain the pace and the way that they are living, they need down time. You cannot run and run and run and not rest, because your body breaks down and you are out of harmony and disease is what comes from that. We need to look to nature, we need to understand cycles and we need to slow down when we need to, all so we can be more productive and creative, and have a better output for our families, our communities and ourselves.”
