mornin’ merrymakers 🌵 🧘‍♀️ 🧖‍♀️ 🏜️ 💆‍♀️ ,

the summer after i graduated college, i stumbled upon a month long stay at esalen. they called it a work study, but it was really what they now call a wellness retreat. i just had to work in the kitchen every few days.

those 30 days were magical.

some of which can be credited to esalen & big sur, but a lot of was also the experience of being on what’s now called a wellness retreat. there’s something extra special about leaving your regular life at the gate & letting somebody else decide what you eat & when you move. surrounded by abundant, beautiful nature & minimal tech.

so when it came time to plan my bachelorette, i was immediately drawn to canyon ranch tucson. i’d heard about it for years & lots more recently as it was one of five hotels in the world nominated for the inaugural MICHELIN wellness award. the only one in the americas.

coincidentally, last week in fort worth, i drove past a canyon ranch spa i didn't know existed. & in less than a month canyon ranch opens outside of austin.

a brand i'd always filed under “arizona, someday” is becoming a texas brand.

so i went looking for why.

canyon ranch opened in tucson in 1979 under the name “double u ranch.” mel zuckerman was in his fifties, about forty pounds heavier than he wanted to be, & grieving his father. he went to what people then called a fat farm, came back changed, & decided to build a better version of it with his wife enid.

the thing that made it stick wasn't the desert or the architecture.

it was the staffing.

canyon ranch put physicians, nutritionists, exercise physiologists & behavioral therapists on the same menu as the massage therapists. one rate covered your room, all your meals, & forty-plus classes a day. no tipping. no upsells at the front desk.

(for the curious, they’ve held on to most of this, except for the no upsells…)

that combination normalized a lot of things that now read as obvious. yoga, meditation, plant-forward menus, integrative medicine. canyon ranch was selling all of it to american executives a good two decades before anyone called it a category & before gwyneth went goop.

lenox, massachusetts followed in 1989. a 134,000 sq ft day spa inside the venetian in las vegas came in 1999. for most of forty years, that was the business.

a small number of enormous places you visited once in a while.

mel died in march 2023, at 94. by then he & enid had spent decades moving canyon ranch money into public health. in 1997 they endowed $10 million to the university of arizona, the largest gift in the school's history at that point. it became the mel & enid zuckerman college of public health, named in 2002, arizona's first accredited college of public health. more than 5,500 people have graduated from it. the family foundation is still giving.

hold onto that, because it's the hinge of this whole story.

the zuckermans sold the company. they did not sell the mission. it just moved into a college & a foundation instead of a resort.

here's the part that explains texas.

john goff is a fort worth real estate investor. he co-founded crescent real estate, took it public, sold it, bought it back. crescent had been invested in canyon ranch since 1996, & in december 2017 goff became the principal owner & moved headquarters to fort worth.

mark rivers, a resort developer by background, became ceo in 2023.

so canyon ranch is no longer a tucson wellness company that happens to have investors. it's a real estate company's wellness brand, run out of texas, by people who think in square footage, land, & dollar signs.

which explains a lot about the footprint.

the last decade of canyon ranch has been a lot of subtraction.

what they let go:

what they let stay:

destination wellness has always had the same structural problem: you go once a year. maybe every five years. goff has said as much about his own resorts.

that's a lovely business & a hard one to grow, because your only levers are more guests, higher rates, or more resorts. all three are slow.

so read canyon ranch's last three years as one continuous attempt to buy frequency.

wellness is not a hot category because people want massages. it's hot because it turned out to be one of the few consumer categories where a recurring-revenue model doesn't feel like a trick. nobody resents a monthly membership to the place that manages their sleep & their bloodwork.

the money agrees. the global wellness institute put wellness real estate at $584 billion in 2024, on the way to $1.1 trillion by 2029. a publicly traded REIT, vici properties, has committed roughly half a billion dollars to canyon ranch specifically. institutional capital does not show up for vibes. it shows up for predictable good business.

which brings me to the one part of this i can't make sense of.

canyon ranch's own branded product line is ten items. shampoo, conditioner, body wash, a pillow mist, a robe. the store's own filters credit them to outside suppliers.

that same store carries 44 biologique recherche products. 43 environ. 32 omorovicza.

so the most trusted wellness name in america, the one that sits you down with a physician & a nutritionist & runs 200 biomarkers on your blood, sends you home with somebody else's serum.

product is the cheapest frequency that exists.

no lease, no staffing ratio, no seasonality. a $24 body wash reorders every six weeks. & canyon ranch is one of the only retailers on earth that meets a customer after the need has been diagnosed instead of before.

canyon ranch has deeper expertise than anyone in the category,

& almost nothing on the shelf to show for it….

as you're reading this i'm in tucson, most likely horizontal in the ammortal chamber. this letter was very much prescheduled.

here’s where my thinking lands on all this land grabbing.

canyon ranch is buying frequency the most expensive way there is. land, permits, clinicians, one city at a time.

which makes more sense once you remember who owns it.

goff is a real estate man. real estate men solve problems with buildings. the strategy isn't wrong so much as it's shaped like its owner.

i'm not sure texas is the answer either.

wellness is growing here fast, but here it's something some people schedule. many texans pride themselves on being anti-wellness & no woo woo.

canyon ranch spent 47 years building something that feels like magic to the thousands of people a year who get to tucson or lenox. everything happening in texas is a bet that magic can scale and go mainstream.

more people will come.

i just don't know if it'll still feel like magic when they do.