Stuff meets… Dr Jason Wersland from Therabody
Looking back at Therabody's growth and how it's about more than just the products
While wellness tech sometimes gets a bad name, Therabody is taking a different approach. The brand is focused on showing you the products work, educating you as to why they work, and then wanting you to do it all for yourself. It encourages a real sense of taking your health and wellbeing into the home. And that’s just the attitude we got from founder Dr Jason Wersland when chatting to him before a masterclass in breathwork.
Of all the solutions they had, none of them worked
I’m a chiropractor, and in 2007, I was in a motorcycle accident in Los Angeles, and I was in a ton of pain. And I was looking for something that would relieve the pain from my neck. I was splitting traffic and a car cut me off, and I T-boned this car. It messed me up pretty good – mostly my head and neck. And as a chiropractor, I was looking for things in my practice that I could use on myself to take the pain away. There really wasn’t anything in my practice because I don’t deal with acute injuries. You go to a hospital for those things.
So I started reaching out to different people in my world (like medical doctors, physiatrists people that can help me with the pain) and all the solutions they had, none of them worked. I’d have to get surgery and I have to wait six weeks. And it was just like, no, I need something now. And as a chiropractor, I knew what I needed, but I wasn’t able to find it. So I’d ask a medical doctor and say, I can write a prescription for you. And I’m like, I don’t want pain pills. And to be honest, the pain pills really didn’t help. They don’t help nerve pain. So all of these things were being offered to me, but they just weren’t working for me.
I just wanted something to take my pain away
Being in the chiropractic medical space, and also coming from a place in my life where I’ve just been resourceful, I think all of that culminated. I had this accident, and I was looking for a solution. I didn’t care what it was. I didn’t care what it sounded like. I didn’t care what you called it, I didn’t care, I just wanted something to take my pain away.
And I learned how through an experience in my room, in my clinic, working with a table. That vibration actually triggers a different response in a nervous system. So, what if I made something that was actually bigger than vibration? I made something for myself in January 2008 and started using it on myself. I saw that between January and July, I went through these different phases pain relief, tension relief and then recovery. So the recovery was just the ability to move fluid through the body faster. I was learning this in real time. Never in a million years did I know that we were going to make a company.
He’s not going to get better in the traditional sense
So I went back to practice. Several months later, a patient came in who’d been in a head-on bus collision. He was the bus driver and went through his windshield into the other windshield. It messed him up bad, but he wasn’t cut up. He actually had the same injury that I had. And now I was looking at this guy in my paperwork, and I’m like, he’s not gonna get better in the traditional sense. If I don’t do what I did, he won’t get better – so I need to give him this Theragun that I made.
It was a rough looking reciprocating jigsaw tool with a soft pad over it. So I convinced him to let me show him what this does. The minute I put it on him, he was like, the pain is melting away. That was 100% off the record – I was like, “Listen, I don’t know if this is gonna help you, but it helped me”. So I just started using it on him and I showed him how to use it at the end of his care.
He, actually, was the one that said, “Doc, you need to figure this out”. And I sat there and I was like, he’s really right. I need to figure this out because it changed my life, and it changed his. And that story, still to this day, is really the essence of who we are as a company. I was helping someone help themselves, and that’s what we’re trying to do as a brand. I’m trying to educate you, to help you take care of yourself.
We have something to help you understand what’s going on with your body
And then Covid hit. Everyone in the world was asking themselves, “Am I healthy?” You can’t see a physio, you can’t see a massage therapist. So you start asking yourself if you are healthy. Well guess what, we have something we’re gonna give you to help you understand what’s going on with your body. All of this stuff happened at the right time along the way, and with success. Timing is everything, I think the timing was right.
I have three things I take people through, whether it’s a patient or a sale. I think there’s our brand. You experience this, we build a relationship with trust, and you and I can do that here over a beer, you know what I mean? We could sit here in this talk and suddenly you’re like, ah, this guy’s trustworthy, I kind of like him. Then we support you. How do I support you? Whether it’s a footballer or a cyclist or just a regular person, a patient. How can I support you when you’re not with me? My patient that I told you about, I would give it to him and take it home. But then the next thing that comes next is education. I had to teach him what was happening.
I’m not selling him anything… I’m teaching him what he needs
That’s what we do as a brand. We have Therabody University which teaches you about all of our different products. It’s not just me. We have other people that are teaching you about how to use it for sleep or how to use it for pain. So as a brand, we create a relationship of trust. And then we support, like, “How can we support you?” And then education is always the follow-up.
If I educate the physio for Man City I’m not selling him anything. I’m just teaching him what he needs to have and then he decides. That’s really the process we’ve gone through. It’s different than other brands or product companies. They’re selling you a price. We’re selling you solutions. And you have to make money, so there’s a price of course. But the price becomes negligible when you realise the outcomes – it’s a lot cheaper than a medical bill. So you’re like, “Oh, this is 200 bucks? I’ll take three of them!”
When people experience it, they think of someone they care about
One of the most special things about our brand is that when people experience it for the first time, they think of someone they care about. “Does this help my mom? My mom has knee pain”. “Does this work on horses or my dog has back problems?” “Can I put it on my dog’s hips?” People immediately think of someone they care about. And I think that’s a special thing, it wasn’t part of our plan – it just happened.
In the early days, I realised when I was holding the Theragun, in a certain way, my hand and wrist would get tired. So I was thinking, “How can I make that stop?” It’s got to be balanced. So we’re just constantly looking for solutions. The price isn’t the first thing. Because when I asked them to put a red light on a Theragun, they said that it’s thousands of dollars. That’s lots and lots of money.
So it wasn’t the price that drove that. I was like, “If we do that, what’s it going to do? Is it going to help people?” So that’s kind of the way we’ve gone through those changes of evolving as a company. And we’ve got a lot of different products in the range these days.
How do I bring it away from a locker room, so those guys’ mums are using it?
In addition to the guns, you’ve got the skincare stuff with the masks. So how did that one come about? It’s 2019, and you couldn’t bend red light or make things concave to the body. You had to stand against the light. We started bending light, and I’m like, “Wait a minute, we’re working on something that we could actually put light in.” So that’s where it started.
And then we start realizing, wow, it has all of these benefits. What if we put it in something like a mask? We’re looking for ways to deliver that science to the masses. That’s what we do special as a company. I think, “How can I take it from a locker room, a training room and bring it out so that all of those guys (and their mums) are using it?”
And if we talk about the future of Therabody, it’s based on what people need. Think back to the mask. We didn’t think, “Let’s make a mask and sell thousands, thousands of it.” We actually did a 12-week study. So we got the mask, and we did this study on a broad spectrum of people from different skin tones, different ages, so that we could actually put a protocol together. And it worked, so we pursued the mask.
So, our mask has a 9-minute process you do every day. We wanted to take this really cool tech and apply it in a simple way. But I have guys, especially guys, asking, “What if I leave it on for 30 minutes?” It’s not going to make it any better. Just do that protocol. Because it works. And people that work on other people love our product because it helps. It saves their hands, it’s not so hard on their body. It does what we say it does, and I think that’s what makes it special. If I sat here and told you it was going to change your life and it didn’t, what would be the point?
Connor Jewiss
