In 2026 We are starting our chapters around the World.

We have identified our key markets, and in these chapters we will be hosting local meetups, events and they will be key for how we connect our community worldwide

Meetups & Events

After seniority, health stops being a personal optimisation topic and becomes a capacity constraint. Leaders are no longer experimenting to feel marginally better. They are managing clarity, emotional regulation, and endurance under prolonged responsibility. Yet much of the public discourse around wellness and biohacking remains framed for early-career curiosity rather than senior accountability.

This is why the session with Laura Fullerton mattered.

Laura is the founder of Monk, a cold exposure and recovery company operating at the intersection of biohacking, hardware, and behaviour change. Her background spans creative disciplines, brand building, and multiple founder journeys with prior exits. She is not positioning cold exposure as a lifestyle trend, but as a resilience system that must be safe, repeatable, and governed as it scales.

For senior professionals navigating advisory, board, or portfolio roles, the relevance was clear.

This session was not about ice baths as products. It was about what happens when practices designed for individuals begin to scale across users, markets, and cultures. At that point, resilience stops being personal and starts becoming infrastructural.

Laura was explicit about the design principle behind Monk.

she said.

This framing directly challenges how much of the wellness industry has evolved, optimising for frictionless consumption rather than durable change.

Her own entry into cold exposure was accidental rather than ideological. “I honestly remember thinking a few hours later, why do I feel so good?” she recalled after her first ice bath during a period of founder stress. The value was not transformation or performance hype, but a reset of mental clarity. For senior leaders, this distinction matters. Practices are retained not for novelty, but for their ability to stabilise decision-making under pressure.

This aligns with broader market evolution. The global biohacking market, which includes cold exposure, wearables, diagnostics, and personalised health systems, was estimated at approximately USD 24–25 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at 15–19 percent CAGR into the early 2030s, according to Grand View Research (2024) and Fortune Business Insights (2024). Importantly, recent analysis shows a shift away from isolated gadgets toward integrated systems focused on resilience, recovery, and prevention.

Category creation emerged as another core theme. Monk did not exist because cold exposure was new. It existed because existing solutions failed structurally. “Why is it so hard to do something so good for my health?” Laura asked. She described how early options were either prohibitively expensive, physically impractical, or unsafe.

The discovery of a fast-growing DIY community repurposing chest freezers into ice baths, which grew from roughly 6,000 to over 80,000 people, signalled unmet demand long before formal market validation.

For senior operators, this pattern is familiar. Durable markets often surface through workaround behaviour rather than polished demand signals. The insight is not about cold exposure, but about recognising persistence under inconvenience as a signal of structural need.

Laura also highlighted the responsibility gap that appears once practices scale. “If someone is using cold exposure for mental health and someone else for muscle recovery, they should be using it in totally different ways,” she explained. “But there’s no way to educate people on that.” This reframes smart functionality not as differentiation, but as safety infrastructure. As adoption widens, misuse risk grows faster than understanding.

Gender-specific insights reinforced this point. Laura explained that women’s optimal cold exposure varies across menstrual cycles, noting that ovulation supports longer or colder sessions, while later phases require tapering. “There’s no need to go colder for longer,” she said. “You get the benefits at higher temperatures.” This reflects a broader shift in health research, where one-size-fits-all protocols are increasingly challenged. For senior leaders, it highlights the risk of oversimplified narratives when biological variance is ignored.

Geography surfaced as a structural driver. Laura explained why Monk is prioritising the Middle East. According to Ken Research (2025), the Middle East biohacking and health optimisation market is growing at over 20 percent annually, driven by climate, wealth concentration, and state-backed health initiatives. Unlike the United States, where the category is fragmented, the Middle East lacks a dominant cold exposure leader, creating white space for category definition.

Finally, Laura spoke candidly about hardware. “Hardware exposes every weak assumption. It’s relentless.” Integration challenges between hardware and firmware forced earlier internalisation of technical expertise at significant cost. The lesson was not speed, but survivability. Reflecting on advice from the founder of Whoop, she noted that the purpose of a first-generation product is often “just to buy you time to build the second.”

This session is worth preserving because it captured a line senior leaders cross quietly.

Laura did not frame resilience as something to optimise or adopt. She framed it as something that must be designed and constrained once it is offered to others. Her reflections on misuse, safety, biological variance, and hardware responsibility revealed a shift from personal experimentation to system accountability.

That distinction matters because it rarely appears in public narratives around wellness or biohacking. Those conversations tend to end at personal benefit. What surfaced here was what comes next: what happens when a practice is repeated daily, adopted at scale, misunderstood, or applied to bodies with different constraints.

EVOLVE exists to retain this kind of reasoning in its original form. Not as advice, and not as promotion, but as a record of how experienced operators think when they are no longer protected by novelty or intent. This session adds a specific reference point to that archive: resilience, once scaled, stops being a lifestyle choice and becomes a design and responsibility question.

Curated. Personable. Global.
That is EVOLVE

The E-commerce Berlin Expo is the largest pure-play B2B ecommerce event in Germany, gathering operators, brands and technology leaders from across Europe. Their tenth edition takes place on February 17 and 18, 2026 at Messe Berlin and is expected to welcome more than fourteen thousand attendees.

If you’d like to learn more how to partner with us during 2026 please email us at [email protected] or [email protected]

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