Health and wellness represents a potential white space for many media companies, and iMedia Brands is seeking to leverage this burgeoning area of consumer interest with a new home-shopping network under its ShopHQ brand.

Tim Peterman, the CEO of iMedia Brands, discussed this subject on a conference call with investors - and suggested that health and wellness is a significant opportunity.

“We see the health and wellness category as something very underserved in television retailing and in media in general,” he said. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: iMedia Brands mixes demographics and psychographics to drive home-shopping growth.)

“And we think our strength in beauty and health today can give the independent status to a 24/7 network that we just are launching.”

While the ShopHQ home-shopping network includes this category in its wider product mix, Peterman believes a more focused approach can meaningfully enhance its current proposition.

“When we think about our airtime mix, we do think beauty and health is something that we’ve done well for a while,” he said.

“We are dedicating an entire channel to the beauty and health category because we think not only are we able to serve it well on ShopHQ today, but we’re not able to really capture the full extent of the opportunity.”

Rising interest in health and wellness is a long-term shift, and one that has spiked due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As many consumers are also watching more TV than ever, the potential is significant.

The ShopHQ Health network, in fact, is launching in early September 2020 in 15 million homes across the United States, from New York to Los Angeles.

And it will draw on established ShopHQ brands - such as Safe Living with Dr. Terry Dubrow, Medic Therapeutics and Consult - to provide a 24/7 home-shopping experience based around health.

Peterman suggested that iMedia Brands has significant ambitions for its latest brand extension in the short term, but also for the much longer term.

“We expect ShopHQ Health to be as big, or bigger, than ShopHQ one day, just because of the category, and the type of programming, and the type of services that we see that could accompany that network,” he said.

Sourced from WARC