Wellness in Southwest Florida is becoming more personal and more social. Local entrepreneurs are rethinking how people approach fitness, recreation and skincare, creating experiences built around individual needs and meaningful connection. Meet the people shaping the region’s evolving wellness scene and making healthy habits easier to sustain.
Zach and Nicole Rochette
Turning the gym into a social nexus
At Zach and Nicole Rochette’s StudioFit in Naples, trainers greet members as they trickle in on a Thursday afternoon for the full-body lift class. Regulars cluster around the clean-lined foyer and workout bays, trading dinner plans and personal goals while waiting for class to begin. Many have been friends since the strength-focused studio opened three years ago—bonds built on and beyond the gym floor, through Zach’s run club, beach yoga days and the SF Games, a biannual in-house throwdown. “Historically, if you wanted to be social, you wanted to meet people, where would you go? You’d go out. You’d go drinking,” Zach says. “Now, the big catalyst is through movement.”
Today, stylish boutique gyms with sharply defined niches and robust event calendars have multiplied across the region. But when the Rochettes decided to bring their Orlando-born StudioFit to Naples in 2020, they shifted the big-box gym-dominated scene with their intimate, polished space that paired rigorous strength training with the conviviality of a social club.
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For about a year before opening the Tamiami Trail location, Zach led free boot camps at Baker Park. As the group grew, he realized people were coming for the workout but staying for the community he was building.
The Rochettes centered their programming on strength training, which has graduated from gym subculture to fitness staple as more people recognize its role in mobility, bone health and healthy aging. They designed an open floor with multifunctional workout stations. Racks, free weights and conditioning equipment come with hour-long classes and positive coaching. Each person gets a Rogue rack, allowing the group to work through the same movements at individual loads. Weight plates stack in the center of the room, sending members across the floor between sets, where fist bumps and encouragement punctuate the changeovers.
The same spirited energy runs through Sunform, the heated mat Pilates studio the couple launched last June. Members fill classes at both studios, often back-to-back from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m., while StudioFit has expanded to Tampa and added a second Orlando location. “We’re always asking ourselves, ‘How can we make the most personal, handcrafted experience?’” Nicole says. Showing up for members each day and understanding what they value is how the Rochettes turn a gym into a place where people want to return.
Michael Shinn
Putting play at the center of well-being
The rise of social wellness follows a broader shift in self-care, with healthy habits becoming central to life, not isolated obligations. While StudioFit builds its culture around shared effort, The Sanctuary Golf & Social Club, slated to open in Bonita Springs this December, brings people together through play.
In 2018, The Sanctuary founder, Michael Shinn, left a demanding vice president position in employee-benefits consulting and made a list of what he wanted more of in his life: family, golf and entertaining. With The Sanctuary’s first location in Brentwood, Tennessee, Michael created a club where different parts of life could overlap.
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The Sanctuary Golf & Social Club brings golf, pickleball and dining together in a social setting. The Bonita Springs location is slated to open this December.
When Fort Myers resident Jeremy Stakely discovered the club on a visit to Tennessee, he saw a fit for the Gulf Coast, where seasonal crowds strain favorite restaurants and golf access, while the residential sprawl across Lee and Collier Counties can make social circles diffuse. He approached Michael about partnering on the upcoming 28,000-square-foot space at Bonita’s Prado at Spring Creek. “We get to be that central hub, where everyone can come in from Fort Myers and Naples and Estero,” Michael says.
Memberships—capped at 500—grant access to nine private Trackman golf suites, with tables and steady Wi-Fi for work sprints between rounds, and space for kids to spread out during family visits. The club’s 24/7 model is for members who want to catch a round once kids are in bed or after a long day. The Bonita location adds pickleball courts (four with stadium seating) to the lineup, giving the region’s unofficial house sport a year-round, weather-proof base. With locker-room saunas, meeting spaces and chef-led dining from breakfast through dinner, a morning match can roll into lunch, a schvitz and drinks without the back-and-forth.
For Michael, the biggest payoff comes from the relationships built—new friends made through repeat run-ins and family bonds strengthened through shared activity. “Here, you’re always in the clubhouse and around people,” he says. “You don’t have 200 acres to go out and be away from everyone.”
Alexis Pfropper
Simplifying the skincare scene
The emphasis on human connection extends from the clubhouse to the spa, where personalization defines care. Looking out the riverfront windows at Ästhetik Spa & Skincare’s new Fishermen’s Village location, clients lean back for 30-minute express facials. In private treatment rooms, one guest receives a deep-tissue massage, while another consults an esthetician on her skin—what’s working, what’s not, what she can stop using altogether.
Licensed esthetician Alexis Pfropper and her mother, Jen, moved to Punta Gorda in 2019. Surveying a regional skincare market that included homegrown clean-beauty brands and practices with proprietary clinical lines, the two women identified a missing piece. “[There wasn’t] a consistent, highly personalized system connecting what happened in the treatment room with what the client used every day at home,” Alexis says.
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Ästhetik Spa & Skincare co-founder and licensed esthetician Alexis Pfropper formulates her product line—including the award-winning Liquid Gold serum—drawing on what she learns from clients in the treatment room.
The Pfroppers launched Ästhetik in 2020—first as a spa, later adding a skincare line—with an emphasis on face-to-face consultations. In the new, 2,800-square-foot location, the team takes the time to decode ingredients, best practices for product layering and how the skin changes over time. The education continues online, where Alexis maintains a skincare blog and an active social media presence espousing holistic skincare, looking at the skin as a whole and keeping things simple and consistent. “We spend a lot of time educating clients to stop doing too much,” she says.
With the spa and product line under one roof, she can refine formulas in response to what she and her team observe in the treatment room. Alexis keeps the collection curated. The roughly 20 cleansers, serums, moisturizers and sunscreens pair plant-based ingredients with targeted actives to address a range of skin needs, from common Florida issues, such as dehydration, to compromised barriers from overuse of actives.
First appointments begin with a thorough consultation and result in a tailored protocol, often with a simple, three-product regimen or an at-home routine adjustment. Ästhetik balances the pared-back, nourishing daily home care with periodic, advanced corrective treatments in the spa, including hydrodermabrasion, microcurrent sculpting and LED light therapy, depending on the client’s skin and goals. Since relocating to the larger space in July, they’ve been able to bring on more estheticians, reducing the three-to-six-month waitlist.
Alexis sees their growth as part of a broader maturation in the local market, where residents are increasingly prioritizing their well-being and seeking more honed expertise and personalized attention. “[People] can build a much more complete wellness routine close to home, whether that’s fitness, nutrition, recovery, skincare, massage therapy or holistic services,” she says. When it comes to wellness, these local entrepreneurs have learned it’s personalization and community-building that make it stick.