WelleCome to New York: Elle Macpherson exports wellness

Elle Macpherson’s wellness brand WelleCo is to open its first international store in New York in September.

Elle Macpherson and Andrea Horwood at their WelleCo store in SoHo, New York, to open next month. Picture: David Joshua Ford

After just four years in business, the Australian wellness brand co-founded by Elle Macpherson and Andrea Horwood is taking on the world.

WelleCo will open its first international store in New York’s SoHo on September 21, a strategic move given the take-up in the US market of the Perth-based brand.

“We have such a strong following in the US,” Horwood told The Weekend Australian. “We started to notice it quite early on, but in the last year to 18 months, over half of global sales are going ­directly to the US without us promoting or having any presence or stockists there.

“Our customers were finding us. And 75 per cent of our US sales go into four cities — New York, LA, Miami and Houston. So we’re going where we’re seeing a need for direct contact with consumers.”

While most sales are from its website, the brand is sold in 93 countries and stocked by 160 retailers worldwide, including David Jones, Net-a-Porter, Harrods and Selfridges; from ­October it will enter US beauty chain Sephora.

Its first product, The Super Elixir, is a plant-based “alkalising greens” supplement developed by London-based nutritionist Sim­one Laubscher, who originally created it to help Macpherson with concerns including fatigue, dry skin and poor sleep patterns.

“This (business) is completely led by personal experience,” Macpherson told The Weekend Australian. “It wasn’t like we said, ‘Let’s jump on the bandwagon and get into wellness.’ I was feeling unwell and looking unwell and looking for a solution and found a solution.”

Horwood added: “We helped create the ingestible beauty ­category. I could see there was a profound consumer shift, not just a trend.”

Macpherson and Horwood had worked together long before they launched WelleCo in 2014. They met in the early 2000s when Horwood published independent magazine Australian Style and put Macpherson on the cover of its Icons edition.

Horwood’s next project was to develop Invisible Zinc sunscreen, for which Macpherson was the face for four years.

“Elle said, ‘The next business you do I want to be a partner, not just the face of the campaign,’ ” Horwood recalled.

The company is based in beachside Cottesloe, where it has a shopfront, and a team of 40. The New York store will house a US office and basement storage facility to fill local online orders with a same-day service.

To help with the global expansion, Horwood and Macpherson recently sold a 25 per cent stake in the company to The Foundry, an Australian-based private equity firm led by former Swisse chief financial officer Michael Da Gama.

“We spent most of last year looking for the right partner — from New York, London, Paris — and ended up finding them in Australia,” Horwood said.