Healf Turned Wellbeing Data Into a Trust Advantage
Most wellbeing brands have a data problem they cannot see. Their customers are trying harder than ever, tracking sleep, testing blood, buying supplements by the box, and still getting nowhere close to the results they were promised.
That is the paradox Healf built its second act on. Awareness is not the wellbeing industry’s problem any more; nearly everyone is engaged with it. The problem is that engagement rarely translates into outcomes, because no one has connected the dots between what a customer buys, what their blood work says, and what their wearable is recording.
At Pulse eCommerce Summit ’26, Hamza Waheed, Director of Growth and Product at Healf, sat down with George Kapernaros, Founder and CEO of YOCTO, a Klaviyo Elite Partner agency, in a session that traced Healf’s path from a founder’s living room in 2023 to what Waheed calls “wellbeing intelligence.”
Healf has run close to 10,000 full blood tests on its customers, and 99.3 percent came back with at least one key biomarker out of range. These are people already doing more than most: buying supplements, following protocols, paying attention. The results say the effort was never the issue.
The issue, in Waheed’s telling, is fragmentation. Blood results sit in a clinical PDF. Wearable data sits in a separate app. Purchase history sits somewhere else again, and nobody connects the three. Waheed compared the result to using YouTube with no algorithm and no categories: infinite content, no guidance.
Healf sits in a different spot from companies like Whoop, Function, and the wellness tools now built into ChatGPT. Those companies compete from the measurement layer, building better ways to track the metrics. Waheed argues that layer sits upstream from where the real value is created: the action layer, where a customer decides what to buy and do next.
Healf already owns that layer, because customers arrive once they have decided they want to improve something specific. Getting there took years spent building trust as a neutral curator rather than a manufacturer. “Customers trust us because we’re a curator,” Waheed said.
“We don’t own any of these products that we stock, we simply focus on putting the best things in front of them, so they trust our judgment, our taste, our expertise in this domain.”
Combine that trust with the biomarker and behavioural data Healf now holds, and the company can see something competitors cannot: the full loop between what a customer does and how their body responds. A retailer sees the purchase. A measurement company sees a narrow slice of the biology. Only Healf, on Waheed’s account, sees both sides of that equation and how one drives the other.
In practice, that means catching duplicate supplements, flagging a form of magnesium that will not absorb properly, or adjusting a subscription box ahead of Black Friday once cortisol and sleep data signal rising stress. It also means spotting early markers of a dip in immunity during marathon training and sending vitamin C and zinc before a customer gets ill, rather than after.
New hires receive a document in their offer email titled “reasons you shouldn’t join,” listing the pace, the flat structure, and the expectation of direct feedback in plain terms. Anyone visibly drained by the pitch is not a fit; anyone energised by it usually is.
Once inside, the culture keeps getting reinforced. Five commandments sit where every new starter sees them on day one, including “we work harder than anyone else” and “obsession beats talent.” Waheed has let go of senior hires with strong technical skills who did not bring that intensity.
“Killers don’t like working with non-killers,” he said.
Waheed’s explanation for the timing borrowed from how YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify each replaced an older format by understanding the user rather than improving the shelf. Wellbeing intelligence, in his view, sits at the same inflection point: blood tests that once cost hundreds of pounds now cost a fraction of that, wearables have got cheaper, and AI can finally make sense of the combined data set.
Healf built its advantage by owning the point where research turns into action, then earning enough trust to be believed once it got there. For any brand sitting on customer data it has not yet connected, the lesson from this session is that joining up the data matters less than earning the right to act on it.
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