The business of living better
By BRANDVOICE
BRANDVOICE
Livia Wang, a vegan and plant-based entrepreneur, is passionate about the well-being of human beings. She founded Access Corporate in 2017 to propel wellness brands into international markets. More than 50 success stories later, she now invests in, owns, and leads 15 wellness businesses.
Livia Wang will be speaking at the Forbes Australia Business Summit on November 19. Click here to secure your tickets.
When serial entrepreneur and passionate vegan Livia Wang founded Access Corporate seven years ago, in 2017, she never imagined it would bring leading wellness brands to more than 10 million consumers across the globe.
In fact, Wang launched Access Corporate after years in marketing and PR across the fashion and hospitality industries – and a stint running a café – to find her purpose.
“I wanted to build a meaningful business – one for the greater good,” Wang says. “Access cannot act alone. This is a business that everyone needs to get involved in.”
At inception, the company’s core mission was ‘Everyday Better Life’. It began with Wang using her marketing experience to catapult Australian wellness brands into international markets, namely China. She’d develop extensive marketing strategies for brands like ingestible beauty company Vida Glow, founded by Anna Lahey, and coach them into global expansion. Wang’s support took Vida Glow from selling 500 units to being number one in China in ingestible beauty selling five million units. Three years after the launch, the mission had remained, but the execution had changed slightly.
“I switched my thinking from finding companies that had budget to utilise me as
a marketing consultant to finding the right product first and getting it into the hands of consumers,” Wang says.
“I had to build a business that had a much higher success rate to help businesses get from zero to hero.”
Power of the consumer
At that stage, Wang was beginning to realise the power of social media and the growing presence of influencers and user-generated content. But she says her approach to social commerce was ahead of the curve: Wang would trust the power of influence and real feedback from consumers and turn that into a commercial opportunity for brands.
“You think you’re using influencers to achieve your goals? I think differently. They are playing a role as your distributor, independently,” Wang says.
“They’re your users, but they also have the right to recommend your product, and they deserve to be paid. I built up a platform to engage with our current consumers, let them test our product, and if they truly like it, they can recommend it and be paid a referral fee on an ongoing basis. We call them consumerchants – consumers, and merchants.”
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Nowadays, Access Corporate doesn’t just consult with brands on its marketing strategies – it uses this network to boost brand awareness. It facilitates brand sales via omnichannel retail distributions and cross-border e-commerce platforms.
The company’s re-sellers network has grown to more than 100,000 individuals, and her portfolio of brands has reached more than 10 million customers.
Wang’s social commerce strategy was instrumental in taking close to 50 brands to international markets. As a result, she’d developed the blueprint to build budding international brands of her own. Today, Access invests in, owns and leads more than 15 brands, including Australia’s first tribiotic supplement, TheroNomic, plant-based nutrition supplement, eimele and makeup juggernaut Napoleon Perdis.
Growing need
But despite the wellness industry taking off in a business sense – the global consumer wellness industry was valued at US$5.6 trillion in 2022 and is projected to surpass US$8.9 trillion by 2032 – Wang says she isn’t driven by financial gain, but rather by her customers’ feedback and needs – as well as deep care about wellness and how important it is “for everyone to act together”.
“Customers generate the ideas for us,” she says. “Then we will prioritise the solutions. Sometimes, technology isn’t ready to solve these problems, and some products are more urgent than others.”
Wang believes the wellness industry will only become more critical as people live longer.
“We’ve got five times greater population and we are living more than 30 years longer from 1900 to now, yet cancer rates are rising.”
Livia Wang
Life expectancy in Australia has improved dramatically for both sexes in the last century. Compared with their counterparts in 1891–1900, boys and girls born in 2019–2021 can expect to live around 30 years longer, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
The World Health Organization predicts there will be more than 35 million new cases of cancer in 2050, a significant rise from around 20 million in 2022, partly driven by population ageing and growth, as well as exposure to risk factors such as tobacco and alcohol.
Livia knows first hand how stressful being a founder, CEO and mum of two can be, hence the importance of prioritising wellness in personal and business life.
“An entrepreneur needs to be healthy and balanced,” she says.
Once Wang lands on a product, Access Corporate, which has more than 600 employees worldwide, engages its large team of researchers and scientists to develop it.
And, with a full suite of end-to-end operational capabilities, from in-house branding and creative to global logistics and sales expertise, Wang propels her Access brands into international markets, too. For example, eimele’s core product, Calibrate Reds, sold out globally, with 100,000 units trading within an hour of launch.
Looking ahead, Wang is passionate about re-investing into other entrepreneurs who want to build wellness brands grounded in science.
Over the next 12 months, the company, which recently expanded to Singapore and Malaysia, has plans to enter more global markets.
At the moment, it’s on the hunt for influencers, premium health, beauty and wellness experts, and retail partners to help it scale globally. That’s important because cross-border trade can be complex, and it helps to have local partners, Wang says.
Access Corporate also recently launched the Wellness Access Institute to aid its mission, which works like a wellness innovation incubator. WAI has identified key wellness trends that Access Corporate plans to capitalise on, like personalised diets tailored to gender and DNA, longevity and water quality.
“It’s about bringing science to the shopper.”
Livia Wang
“We want to get humans from ill beings to well beings, and as entrepreneurs, we have to answer those questions. We can’t just view the business as, ‘How do I get more value for money?’ It has to be bigger than that.”
