Recently having had a special opportunity to try out the experience at NYC's first Othership location in the Flatiron neighborhood, I had to chat with founder Robbie Bent to hear about how this incredible experience came to be. Described as a 7,000 square wellness sanctuary with unique programming centered around sauna and ice bath experiences, all soundtracked (extremely well) with an incredible soundsystem throughout the space, Othership has truly created a much needed mental escape and a place for resetting in the heart of the madness of Manhattan.
Through an unlimited assortment of obstacles, coupled with an insanely high bar for excellence, I can say firsthand that the Othership team have created a space that is unlike anything I've ever taken part in as it relates to health and emotional and physical wellness.
At the end of this interview, claim your free pass to try out Othership yourself. And by reading Robbie and his team's story, you'll have the perfect context for the love and hard work that went into bringing this space to New Yorkers, who as Robbie explains, couldn't be a more perfect audience for what Othership can bring to people's lives.
Now, let's get to it:
Let’s start with a hard-hitter. Who are you? What are some of the relevant parts of your origin story as it relates to you now being the leader behind this wellness movement?
My name is Robbie Bent. I'm the CEO of Othership in terms of my origin story.
Community has always been important to me. I used to find that through drugs and alcohol and social environments. I loved parties and connecting with other people. Now I'm trying to create spaces where people can find connection in a healthy way both to others and themselves. The sauna and ice bath is the best way I know how. It was my first date with my wife, we went to bathhouses every week for 8 years across dozens of countries, and would organize social events weekly. The hot and cold helped me to stay sober. I also used meditation and therapy as a way to change my prior behaviours and became obsessed with meditation, dark retreats, Hoffman and other personal development practices, but there was a lot of friction for most people to try these things, so I was always tinkering with better ways to help people process their emotions to feel better and make behavioural change. The Othership classes were really created as a way to make feeling your emotions a group event + more accessible and also fun.
My whole life has just really been about this idea of connecting others and also creating experiences to process emotions.
Give us a little background on the origin story for Othership as a business. I personally love how it started out in such scrappy fashion and evolved into what it is today.
Othership started in a my backyard with my wife and four best friends. It really was just a horse trough we filled with ice. It was free and so you could come and use the ice bath anytime of day if you were in the neighborhood. You would just open the gate and come on in - there were always towels, an ice bath and a fire going at night. One of the five of us would be there guiding people through. The backyard developed into a 300 person WhatsApp group, then as it got colder, we retrofitted my garage, converted it into a sauna + ice bath and tea room, unpermitted, and it was sort of by donation to the neighborhood. That space grew to over 1,000 members, and it's in that space that we started to experiment with the idea of classes in the hot + cold - specifically emotional wellness classes, just sort of through guessing and testing every day. One of the first classes was on Valentine's Day. There was three couples and we would go and ice bath together while eyegazing, warm up with a hug and then move to the sauna where we’d share stories about our first dates and what inspired between us and our partners.
Everyone was crying, it was amazing. This idea that you could use a sauna and ice bath for more than health benefits. There are no phones and people really let their guards down and get vulnerable. It's the perfect environment for socializing and opening up. People in that garage started dating, new friend groups formed, and it was really mind blowing how quickly the community came together. It gave us the courage to sign a lease during Covid for a larger test space with a 50 person sauna and 4 ice baths. That is how Othership was born.
What sets the Othership experience apart from other wellness-focused experiential spaces?
I think the classes are what really sets Othership apart. We are the first in the world to create large scale classes in a sauna and ice bath environment. We now host 64 person classes in our Flatiron space. We designed all 28 classes ourselves, each taking more than 100 hours to create. Each one is like a mini piece art or theatrical experience. The entire experience is built around processing emotions, connecting with yourself and connecting with others in the sauna and ice bath.
The classes we've created fall into three categories, up, down and all around.
Up classes are energizing with dance parties - silly connection games that allow you to meet strangers in a low stakes, comfortable environment – there are question prompts, multiple ice baths, loud music, dancing, cheering, snowball throwing and all kinds of little games. It might feel a bit silly, but it helps to break social barriers.
Down’s are very introspective. You might have a sound immersion where a guide is playing five instruments and performing music. A deep stretch class for post run, a pure presence class with guided meditation, a senses class in the dark where you work on feeling your body, or an unwind class with tai chi and chinese medicine practices. Sometimes we have live cello and journalling groups in the space.
Our signature classes are a bit deeper on the emotions side with themes like anger release, gratitude, confidence, loving kindness and acceptance. These classes are like a Cirque De Soleil meets optional group therapy. They aren’t for everybody, but lots of people substitute their talk therapy with our all around sessions. These have the deepest impact.
So there's really something for everybody in the classes and we’ve spent tens of thousands of hours creating them, and then built a 200 hour guided training program to make sure every journey is meaningful. We really are the best in the world at emotional classes in a sauna and cold plunge environment.
What’s your overall goal with the brand?
The overall goal with the brand is to create a community space in all major cities that gets people into their emotions in a new, cool way. It’s accessible to all and over time, these spaces change the social fabric of a city. People have a healthy, sober place to connect and they become happier, less lonely and more fulfilled.
We want to take things that are happening in entertainment and make them healthy while maintaining the excitement. We'll have comedy and magic nights, live music, DJ’d parties and move them into a container that's super healthy so people can make friends in a new way. I’d love that when people move to NYC, they know they can meet a new community at Othership and Othership is the place for them that feels like home.
I’d also like to create a world in which it's “cool”, “normal”, and “fun” to do emotional work weekly. To make emotional work something people are proud of in the same way they brag about fitness. I think an immersive space like Othership could be the key to making this a reality.
What gets you most energized every day? What is personally motivating you to build this brand?
The shares I see during the Othership classes. Every class has a moment for an optional group share where we open the floor in the sauna and ask what came up. The other day during the group share, a mother said she had come to Toronto to donate an organ to her son. There was a 99% chance her son was going to die, and she’d found out a week earlier that she could donate an organ and she was there for the operation the next day. She shared with the class and people were crying and so inspired to see human beings sharing human being stuff and supporting each other.
And for me, seeing people share as human beings, not Instagramable stuff, like fake stuff, people share really vulnerable parts of themselves. I love to just see people feeling what it's like to be a human being. Even if you don’t ever want to share (which is most people), its nice to see others share their reality in a unfiltered way. It makes me feel better about humanity every time.
What’s your experience been like opening up a space in NYC, relative to the experience you had opening the first two locations in Toronto?
New York has been a complete nightmare. The code is completely different than Toronto. We've made so many mistakes. We had a co-ed change room in Toronto, which was illegal in New York per Bathhouse code. And we'd already signed the lease, so it totally messed up the layout and our spacing because we needed way more change room space. We ended up having to lease out the basement and cut into the flooring to suspend the ice baths into the basement and put all our equipment downstairs, which ended up almost doubling the budget from Toronto.
The permitting complexity had just been a nightmare. I had to personally go into the Department of Buildings myself a number of times, get a letter of hardship and really push to get the permits. There's like 15 permits that you need to get open and they took months longer than we expected, so we moved down to NYC way too early.
Our whole team lives in a house together in Brooklyn with my 2 year old son, our dog, our grandma, our 5 cofounders and people from the Toronto team that come in for a week at at time. It’s been wild, but we're super passionate about delivering an amazing experience and are in the space everyday.
Now that we're open though, the demand is insane. We're seeing 300, 400, 500 people a day in the first couple of weeks being open. It took us years to build that community in Toronto and it's happening in New York organically within weeks. People in New York are here for it. It’s more of a struggle to survive here. People are more social, more lonely, more outgoing, more willing to do things in the sauna, like Scream in the Dark. New Yorkers really go for it, and so we feel Othership has been built specifically for the New York audience and it shows. The parties we’ve been hosting have been crazy – saxophones, live bands, fire dancers, magicians - it’s wild. There are 70 year olds attending and dancing and smiling. It’s been amazing to see.
Building a business is extremely hard, mentally and emotionally - how do you avoid burnout and keep a consistent momentum with yourself personally and for the business as a whole?
I don't have any tricks for avoiding burnout. I’m burnt out. We just keep going. I'll have days where I just cry in my bed, especially opening New York being over budget and behind our deadlines. We had to switch our construction team a couple of times and there were times when I thought, maybe we're just not going to make it. Over the last five years I've gotten less and less healthy habits. I'm also a dad of a two-year-old and so there just isn’t time. Something is always breaking. The only thing that I rely on is just to use Othership over and over and over. I'll go 3-4x a week - I'll go to the socials, I'll go to the classes, and when I'm feeling down I go in and look at the customer's faces and listen to them share and that's the only thing I know how to do to not burn out. To just watch what we're creating and to be a part of it and to like really love the offering and care about the customers, because brick and mortar is relentless. The amount of complaints, dealing with hundreds of employees, and thousands of customers per day, it is just relentless and stressful and the only option is seeing the result of people happy and smiling, getting over drug and alcohol use, connecting with others and making friends. Changing the social fabric of a city is totally worth it, but most days it feels like the sacrifice is a lot.
Do you have a personal philosophy or value set that guides your decision-making and how you operate in the world? What is it if so?
No detail is too small and always make everything better. Everything is in the details and it’s never good enough. We care about the details, we make our own incense by hand in our spaces to deliver a custom smell. We make every piece of the experience custom – the body wash, body cream for after, deodorant, our sauna hats, the complimentary tea, the programming for each class and social. We care so much. You know, the towels are custom made to a certain size to cover your body so people feel comfortable. The lighting in the space - we tested hundreds of lighting pallets to find one that specifically feels comfortable and warm. There are minimal sight lines, again, to increase a feeling of safety and comfort. The AV system is insane - subwoofers are built into the sauna benches, the lights and music are all synced together perfectly in each class.
No detail is too small. We strive for excellence always. Our customer experience and brand is more important than anything. And that's how we think about our product. Every single touch point, even the automated emails we send out are custom branded. Every touch point is about creating space for transformation and how the customer will feel. How do we make it special and magic? That's why we spend so much time creating these epic experiences - a new type of New Year's party, couples classes, grief and letting go classes, bring your parents for free classes, just things that like really create a meaningful experience.
Finish this sentence. Othership is for anyone who_______.
Othership is for anyone who wants to be themselves, wants to find their authentic self from childhood, that feeling of magic and joy. And do that in a group of others where everybody is being themselves. Its a community space free from judgment where people can feel safe enough to go into these emotions and feel them together with support from a community
--
Thank you to Robbie and the whole Othership team & as a gift to our loyal B-Mail readers, enjoy a free pass to Othership using this link.
