WESTLAKE, Ohio — In 1988, Michael Feuer helped create office supply superstore OfficeMax.
“All we did was took the stuff out of the boxes, brought it to life, let people touch it, feel it and added a sense of drama and theater,” Feuer said.
Now, the self-described “marketing, creative, writing” guy is adding a sense of drama to health and wellness products. The name of his store? Max-Wellness, of course.
Feuer, a savvy retailer who plans a national rollout for Max-Wellness, also thinks now is the right time to cash in on the $100 billion-a-year wellness industry.
A dedicated runner, Feuer has been interested in health and wellness for most of his adult life. As a trustee for University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, he has shadowed brain surgeons in the operating room and pediatricians in the neonatal intensive care unit. He has counted the cost of making people well.
What if fewer people got sick? “There’s nothing more important than the gift of health,” says Feuer, who recently donated bone marrow to his brother facing end-stage cancer. The government and employers cannot reform health care; people have to work at staying well. “If you stay well, you bring the economic benefit to yourself and the country,” he said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“Wellness lives here,” Feuer says as he holds the door for a visitor to his first Max-Wellness store in Westlake, Ohio. The 6,000-square-foot store with its 7,000 products has been open one hour and 20 minutes. Another Ohio store and two Florida stores are planned to open within four weeks.
Feuer and his associates have three goals for Max-Wellness: enhance the quality of life, prevent illness and treat illness.
“A year ago when we started thinking about this, we never expected all this excitement about wellness,” Feuer said. “I have a very simple business theory: I’d rather be lucky than good. However, when one is lucky, you have to be smart enough to know there’s an opportunity. And then you seize it.”
Feuer knows retailing. He asks customers what they want and then he listens. While doing market research for Max-Wellness, Feuer realized that people see themselves as they want to be, not as they are.
So he adorned his store with bright oranges and greens — no sedate browns and beiges here. And he pipes in scents. “We’re testing ‘clean, fresh air’ now. People need to be happy, feel good,” he says.
His store greets visitors with a “cure du jour” section, he says. In this season of New Year’s resolutions, glass display shelves of cold and flu, weight-loss and smoking-cessation products.
The Max-Wellness heart health area stocks simple blood pressure monitors to expensive automated defibrillators. “We plan to work very closely with the medical community … to provide the right product for the right need,” he says.
The electronic tablet in Feuer’s hand will help match customer needs with products. Loaded on the tablet is MaxAnwers – purchased consumer-health software to which he and his staff of wellness professionals have added a lot of information. “It’s like WebMD on steroids,” he says.
“First and foremost, we want to provide answers for healthy living,” he says, showing off shelves of sleep, exercise and hydration products.
There’s the vitamin wall, which stocks dietary supplements for the most serious of athletes to people who are trying to stay young. “Ninety-five percent of what we carry is organic,” Feuer says. “We are not competing with CVS, Walgreens or Rite Aid.” Shoppers can smell the aromatherapy section.
The back two-thirds of the store houses products that need sensitivity to sell. A footwear section offers a machine that tells you what orthotics would solve lower back pain when you run. CrocsRx footwear are a prescriptive line of the ubiquitous rubber clogs.
There is footwear, socks and support hosiery for people who have diabetes, health and wellness books that offer the latest advice, and a section dedicated to sexual wellness that offers expensive vibrators and how-to videos. “Hopefully, everything is tastefully packaged,” Feuer says.
Mobility products — scooters, wheelchairs, walkers, rollators and canes — are displayed in a brightly lit section that features an oval-shaped test track. “How do you buy a car without test driving it?” Feuer asks.
The incontinence products section offers large black plastic “sensitivity bags” meant to give buyers privacy. The bathroom safety section offers rails and bars of every sort, shower and transfer benches, and a low-threshold bathtub. An orthopedics section stocks an array of joint braces.
“The thing we keep pushing is respect, dignity,” Feuer says. Â “A third of our customers will have an issue. Do they need the added aggravation of being treated like a dog? No.”
Then, there’s the confessional — a two-sided desk behind smoked glass — where customers will be able to discretely tell their problems to staff. Feuer got the idea from the Catholic confessional, where the faithful tell their sins to a priest, often behind the anonymity of an opaque screen. Piped-in sound will mask what you’re talking about, he says.
Feuer hired some therapists and trainers to staff the store. “One of our criteria is we hire healthy people. We want people to have a passion about their work. This is all about staying well.”
A large-screen television behind the check-out counter will broadcast wellness messages and tips. An area of the store has displays that can be moved to make way for tables and chairs. “Starting next week, we’ll have daily wellness seminars,” Feuer says.
As a retailer, Feuer realizes that attractive packaging and attentive, knowledgeable staff can make sales. He’s also hoping customers will drop by at least once a month for a different reason. “Once they start to feel good, they’ll be afraid to stop coming,” he says.
Feuer expects to get more satisfaction out of selling wellness products than he did office supplies. “Here, the excitement is the products that we carry can help people have a better life.”
