Black Owned Wellness Brands
To be well is to be free. Free to think clearly, to rest without guilt, to move through the world without the weight of an unattended mind or an exhausted body. Wellness is not about perfection or green juices or a particular kind of quiet. It is about having enough of yourself left at the end of the day to actually live your life. That matters for everyone. The safety and the resources to heal matters in ways that go deeper still.
The wellness world is a trillion dollar industry, and Black ownership in the space is being built brick by brick. Mainstream wellness, from yoga studios to meditation retreats, are dominated by a particular kind of body, a particular kind of experience, and a particular kind of peace. For Black people those spaces often offer the opposite of rest and reset. It becomes another room to code-switch in, another environment that mirrors the entire reason you need self-preservation.
Black owned wellness spaces are being established on the basic understanding that healing cannot happen in a room that was never built for you. But now most of us can access dedicated retreats, community spaces and culturally rooted practices designed to do what the mainstream doesn’t cater to: safety, collective healing and care that honours the culture and complexity of Black life. Some are rooted in African traditions, some are about shared experience and some are just about being in a room of people that look like you. Here are a few physical and online spaces that can offer you the R&R and wellness experience you deserve.
OYA Retreats
Founded by certified yoga instructor and life coach Dr Stacie CC Graham, OYA was born out of personal experience of micro-aggressions and exclusion in mainstream wellness spaces. Her retreats, held across England and beyond, blend yoga, mindfulness, meditation and circle work in intimate settings where, as she puts it, women arrive to "leave behind the code-switching, the daily burdens, the conformities, all of it." They laugh, cry and, in her words, emancipate.
Mars Lord
Mars believes that birth wisdom lives in ancestral memory, passed down through mothers and grandmothers across generations. She has spent nearly two decades giving Black women a truly positive birthing process, centred on their wellbeing and their baby’s. A triple award-winning doula, mentor and educator, Mars credits herself as the first Black owned doula training course in the UK. Childbirth, for Black women, has been scarred by decades of systemic neglect, unconscious bias and institutional failure. She has made it her life's work to change that, training a new generation of culturally competent doulas while fighting for reproductive justice at the highest levels.
Ubuntu Spirit
Founded by Alicia Chasteau and Taron-i Sylvester, is a London-based collective whose mission is to make wellness financially accessible and genuinely inclusive. Ubuntu, the southern African philosophy meaning I am because we are, is the DNA of everything they do. Their retreats and community events bring people together across yoga, sound healing and movement.
Mandem on the Mat
Black men in the UK and US face unique and compounding challenges that affect their wellbeing deeply, from disproportionate underrepresentation in the workplace to systemic inequalities in mental health services. And yet wellness spaces have largely ignored them. Mandem on the Mat is changing that. Founded by Louis Walcott, a fitness professional and yoga teacher, it is a safe, culturally relevant space for Black men to explore yoga, meditation and sound healing together. The philosophy is simple and powerful: that the expansion of consciousness in mind, body and spirit is the key to building a community of men grounded in self-confidence, self-love and self-respect.
OMNoire
When founder Christina Rice looked around at the luxury wellness retreat industry and saw an almost total absence of Black women, she was compelled to make space for them. What started as a gathering in Grenada in 2017, has grown into a global community of intentional wellness experiences, from Bali to Ghana, designed entirely for women of colour. The mission: to create sacred spaces to pause, heal and expand. Joy, rest, beauty and belonging.
And if a retreat or a studio isn't accessible right now, there’s always a conversation you can tune into for guidance, whenever you need it, wherever you are.
The Melanin Wellness Podcast
hosted by trauma-informed wellness coach Cori Dunn, explores nervous system care, hormone health, generational healing and fitness without burnout. She does this all through a culturally grounded perspective, for Black women navigating life and emotional health in real time.
Reimagining Black Health
brought to you by the Council on Black Health, is dedicated to advancing Black health equity by exploring critical health topics through the eight dimensions of wellbeing: emotional, physical, occupational, social, spiritual, intellectual, environmental and financial.
