The scene is Bank, London’s Square Mile, at the hour when the pavements run with people answering emails mid-stride: not the obvious postcode for a wellness brand, which is exactly the point. Julia Baldet opened Elevate, a premium functional smoothie counter, at the Royal Exchange in June 2025, selling an £8.90 ($11.80) cup that her own press rounds to a $12 headline, in the district where workers knock back three flat whites and call it lunch. “I initially thought we’d open in somewhere more traditionally wellness-coded, like Notting Hill or Chelsea,” she says. “But finding the right site was difficult. When I visited the Bank location, I was struck by the footfall and realised there was a real gap for the exact customer I used to be: busy professionals who care about health but don’t have time to compromise.”
Her route in was the analyst’s desk, not the kitchen. Baldet, now 30 and born in Nice, started as an investment banking analyst before private equity work on consumer businesses, and the business was born of her own burnout: “Elevate came from a very personal frustration,” she says. “I was working in an incredibly demanding environment, and my health took a hit.” She raised a reported £400k ($529k) pre-seed as a first-time founder, crediting the old career with “building the model, understanding unit economics and speaking the language of investors.” The money did not come easy. “Fundraising became a form of rejection therapy,” she says of speaking to hundreds of investors, and “You’re selling belief as much as numbers.” The break had a slapstick edge: in October 2024, less than a day before a Flight Fund pitch event, she applied on a whim, went first among roughly 30 founders, won no money that day, and left with something better, an introduction that landed Elevate in Selfridges’ Foodhall this April.
On the ground, the founder did the floor. After private equity she spent two months working as a barista to learn basics, then worked her own counter daily for the first six months. “None of that is glamorous,” she says, “but it’s the reason I understand the business at the level I do. You can’t fix what you haven’t done.” The finance years still shape the operating lens: “Finance is a bubble where everyone speaks the same language and lives on the same deadlines,” while a shop floor is a place where suppliers miss deliveries and equipment breaks. Her one-line education on margins and supply chains is “How unforgiving hospitality is.” and the discipline that follows: “Small changes in waste, labour efficiency, supplier pricing or throughput materially affect performance,” she says. Iteration is the stated religion; the first Bank months taught her “the importance of constant iteration.”
The product argument is unusually unsentimental for wellness. The hardest part so far, she says, has been “balancing functionality with craveability.” “A product can have the best ingredient profile in the world,” she says, “but if people don’t genuinely want to drink it repeatedly, it fails.” That balance took hundreds of iterations, on a team that “We work backwards from a functional objective,” though “no one buys something repeatedly because the ingredient list looks good.” On price she is unapologetic: “We’re not trying to be everything for everyone,” and the question is whether the cup earns “its place in someone’s routine.” The early data she cites is habit, not hype: “What’s been most surprising is how quickly customers build habits around the products,” and “Some of our most loyal customers come every day, if not twice a day.” The inevitable Erewhon comparison she meets with diplomacy: “It’s flattering given they are the reference for smoothies,” though “LA has a very performative wellness culture. London consumers are more understated, and generally more sceptical, so the brand has to translate differently.”
The human details round out the founder. Her motto is “One per cent better every day”; her own order is the Lean Berries with extra collagen; her proudest moment was watching customers queue at the Royal Exchange for something that had lived only in her head; her most memorable business lunch was a 45-minute coffee with an angel investor that ran four hours and produced her first yes. The advice she keeps is “If you’re waiting to feel certain, you’ll wait forever.” The warning she ignored: “Don’t do hospitality, the margins are brutal.” Five years out, success in her words means becoming “a genuinely category-defining modern lifestyle brand, one that people trust, love, and engage with across multiple touchpoints.” By then the test will be old news: whether the £8.90 cup survived contact with the routine it was built for, one per cent at a time, in the least romantic postcode in London.
Sources
- Why Julia Baldet Is Building Elevate Beyond The $12 Smoothie
- Elevate founder: Hospitality is brutal, but I don't regret leaving finance
