Max Clarke and his brother Lestat founded Healf in 2020. It is a community-powered UK online retailer for the highest quality brands in health and wellness, which now includes Apollo Neuro. We chatted with Max to learn more about his approach to health and how he decided the Apollo ® wearable was a must-have product on his platform.
Apollo: Healf curates the highest quality health and wellness products across four pillars: Eat, Move, Mind, and Sleep. Can you explain why each of those pillars are important to you and to the brand?
Max: Health is today being made unnecessarily complicated. A healthy life involves just doing four very simple things every day: eating well, moving a little bit, looking after your mind, and getting a good night’s sleep. It doesn’t need to be complicated and by thinking about these 4 foundational pillars – Eat, Move, Mind, Sleep – everyday, our view is that you will feel healthy and start to see your life grow. That’s it.
Lestat and I discovered this through our personal experiences – Lestat suffered physical burnout from an Iron Man, amateur boxing and Jiu-Jitsu, and I was trying lots of the typical “answers” to health from the occasional green juice, spin class, or downloading a meditation app – but it was only when I bought everything together that it clicked. Health is a whole that when in sync is so much more than the sum of its individual parts.
Apollo: You say Healf is “community-powered”. What do you mean by that?
Max: The company started from a close knit community of health-obsessed yoga teachers, nutritionists, personal trainers etc online during the pandemic and we were all sharing ideas about what health is and how you can live a healthy life. This led to community being at the core of everything we do and it now powers our business through our community testing all the products on our platform and giving us real time feedback and data on what impact each product is actually having on people's lives. This gives us great insight on what products to share with our customers and help personalise customers' experience through this real time feedback loop.
Apollo: What importance do rituals play in your commitment to health?
Max: Rituals across our four pillars are the building blocks of my health. I start my day religiously at 6.30am with dry brushing and tongue scraping which I believe are 2 of the most underrated rituals to integrate into your daily routine. Then at around 7am I am on Sam Harris’ Waking Up meditation app on my meditation cushion which helps get my mind in shape for the day ahead. A new ritual I have introduced since getting to know Apollo is whatever I am doing the day I put my Apollo wearable on to help support me in whatever I am doing by changing the setting I am on. Then come evening, it’s always Iyengar yoga which I have been practising for almost 10 years and at 8pm nothing beats a bath with good quality magnesium bath salts. These rituals have built up over time to provide my body and mind the care they need on a regular basis.
Apollo: Why did you choose to offer the Apollo wearable on Healf to your community?
Max: We chose Apollo first and foremost due to the amazing real reviews we heard from real people on the impact on their lives. Some of our community had been shipping it over from America and were raving to us about the change in how it made them feel and outcomes in their different health goals. So the Apollo team shipped one out to our team to try and we all felt the change which was then confirmed by us researching and finding the science validating what we were feeling. It was then a no-brainer to work with Apollo to offer it to our community as soon as possible.
Apollo: What is your favourite way to use your Apollo?
Max: My favourite is when I’m working Focus Vibe to help not get distracted and stay focused on what needs to get done to drive our business forward.
Apollo: How does Apollo make you feel and how has it benefited you?
Max: It makes me feel whatever setting I put it on which is why I love it!
Apollo: What do you think are the biggest health challenges we are facing now as a global community? How can Healf and Apollo play a part?
Max: Prevention.
When we started the company it came from a simple idea of how we can get what we learnt about health around the four pillars to as many people as possible. This is very much in the making with the healthy products/tools we are providing to tens of thousands of people every month. However, we do not intend to stop there.
Health needs not just a retail destination but a content and service destination. We intend to fill it with the first ever complete well-being brand. In the future we see a world where you don’t have to go to your doctor as long as you are regular at Healf. Prevention always beats treatment in our eyes. This is only possible through the amazing health brands we stock such as Apollo and it is our mission to get these amazing products into as many people’s hands as possible.
