Descend aboard an escalator into the bowels of a nondescript office building in Toronto’s tony Yorkville area and you’ll reach an elegant wood-finned facade with what appears to be a spaceship stamped on the door. Inside, the scent of cedar wafts through the air and buff, towel-clad men sporting horned Viking hats flank the welcome desk. This is the new location of Othership: a spa-meets-private-members-club that promises to improve the physical and emotional well-being of its patrons through a guided breathwork, hot sauna and cold plunge experience.  

The class begins with breathing exercises as one of two guides slams a snowball infused with rose essential oil onto heated rocks, wielding towels like nunchucks to diffuse the hot, perfumed air across the room. After several rounds of scented snowballs and deep breaths, the class reaches its emotional apex as a gong sends a hurtling vibration through the room. Then comes the cold plunge. For two minutes, I submerge myself halfway in a bathtub filled with 4 C water, which stings my skin and leaves me gasping for air. I admittedly feel more energized, alert and limber.

Founded in 2019, Othership began as a miniature sauna in CEO and co-founder Robbie Bent’s garage. Struggling with the twin demons of addiction and burnout, he found that challenging himself through cold plunges was the only thing that kept him sober. A community grew around this backyard sauna and alongside artist Harrison Taylor, former model Amanda Laine, restaurateur Myles Farmer and breathwork expert Emily Hunter, Bent—who previously worked at Ethereum Foundation—pooled $2 million to self-fund a space on Adelaide Street in downtown Toronto. While the pandemic stymied their opening plans, they built a breathwork app which they claim has 100,000 downloads, before opening the space in early 2022.

With burnout on the rise, thanks in part to stressors like economic uncertainty and the lingering impact of the pandemic, the US$1.5-trillion global wellness market is expected to climb between five to 10 per cent annually. The never-ending quest towards self-optimization has garnered devotees from tech CEOs exploring cryotherapy to teens storing rose-quartz gua sha in the fridge. Othership’s clientele fall somewhere in between, using the experience as a reset button to temporarily escape from whatever may come their way at work or in life. 

“Our projections were 60 people a day, but after three months we were cracking 250 and it just never stopped,” says co-founder Laine. The group had already raised US$1.3 million in a seed round when one month after opening, their main investor, Vine Ventures, a wellness-themed fund that invests heavily in psychedelic medicine, suggested that between the business’s high profit margins and glowing customer reviews, they should consider expanding quickly. Within two months, it was turning a profit. Now they’re planning to expand further, and have already raised US$8 million in Series A funding to open two more locations in New York City by the end of 2024. Shawn Mendes and SoulCycle co-founder Elizabeth Cutler are investors, as is Breyer Capital, an early backer of meditation app Headspace.

Cold plunge evangelists, such as Andrew Huberman (a neuroscientist) and Joe Rogan (definitely not a neuroscientist), often claim the icy bath practice can increase longevity, promote mental clarity, reduce depression and improve cardiovascular health. A 2022 study found that repeated voluntary exposure to cold water—a tradition in Nordic cultures that’s also been repackaged by a Dutch motivational speaker as the “Wim Hof method”—can reduce adipose tissue (fat), while more research is required to verify the other claims. 

Othership adds an emotional element to the self-care ritual, offering classes in loving kindness and tapping into one’s personal power inspired by some of the founders’ experiences at Burning Man. “It really is meant to be a therapy session and a Cirque du Soleil performance in one,” says Bent.

The company’s mission is to offer a place to de-stress without phones, socialize without alcohol and hopefully have an emotional breakthrough or two. “This idea that you could give people emotional wellness at 20 per cent of the cost of a therapy session was a huge unlock [for investors],” says Bent, referring to Othership’s classes that begin at $55. “That’s the big vision: emotional wellness for everyone in a new accessible way.” 

The hashtag grindset that Othership seeks to provide an antidote to is exactly what propels their success. Bent says everyone on the company’s founding team regularly puts in 70-hour weeks. He also describes himself as “pretty intense about networking,” and one of his guerilla marketing campaigns involved providing a link to a free class with a Shopify employee, who then shared it in the e-commerce company’s Slack. (Fully 175 people took them up on the offer.) While cold plunges have become a trendy networking venue for executives, Othership holds social nights for founders and hosts private events for tech professionals through organizations like TechTO and conferences such as Collision. 

“Founders have a lot of things in common. They’re often very interested in risk and they’re also often overwhelmed and stressed, so when you have a new experience like an ice bath that is quite intense, they really gravitate towards it,” says Bent. 

Susanna Kislenko, a researcher at Oxford University who studies founder behaviour, isn’t surprised that many of Othership’s “journeyers” work in tech. “To be a founder comes with the expectation that you’re always optimizing,” she says. “You’re visionary, and you think beyond what’s possible.” Othership’s branding plays well into the trope of space exploration often used by startups. “The premise is, ‘We can do anything, we can surpass this reality,’” she says. 

 Those who don’t vibe with Othership’s alternative wellness image have taken to calling it a cult—a designation Bent takes as a compliment. “As a consumer brand, you want people to feel very passionately about your product. [We like] the idea that people are so bought in, it causes others outside the community to have a visceral emotional reaction.”

The idea, though, is to make Othership available to working professionals all over the world. “Over a 10-year period, the vision is to have 100 ‘ships,’” says Bent, referring to the company in short form. Between its first downtown location and its breathwork app, Bent says the firm is profitable and suggests a total of 10 locations will be enough to fund the business indefinitely.

Bent has another goal. He shared his vision for an annual event bringing together Othership die-hards from all over the world that combines personal development workshops with a substance-free music festival. “It’s a mixture,” he said, “of Tony Robbins meets Coachella.”