Jay Faires

Jay Faires founded and runs The Wellness Agency, which helps wellness brands, founders, and chief executives scale globally through a single suite of services. The work runs in two directions at once: he helps Chinese brands come to America, and he helps American brands enter China and the wider Asian market.

The clearest illustration of what that produces is Health-Ade. Jay and TWA leveraged their relationship with Ryan Seacrest — an iHeartMedia host who had joined the brand as an investor and ambassador earlier that year — and worked his platform at iHeart to bring the two parties together. The result was iHeartMedia taking an investment position in the brand alongside a media partnership. [9] iHeartMedia's President of Influencer Network has publicly credited TWA with building out the programme and connecting iHeart to Health-Ade, a partnership that reached, in iHeartMedia's own words, nine out of ten Americans every month. [10] In July 2025 Health-Ade sold for $500 million. [8] TWA did not sell the company — it was sold by First Bev and Manna Tree Partners — but for an agency of its size to put the largest audio company in America behind a kombucha brand is punching well above its weight class, and the mainstream awareness that followed is what an exit of that size gets priced on.

TWA sources world-class production, distribution, and manufacturing, and runs executive search, marketing, and talent partnerships. Those services are deliberately built to sit atop the differing high-growth verticals inside wellness rather than to specialise in one, which is why the client base spans hospitality, fast casual, biopharma, transportation, and beverage.

The agency steps in where it knows it can add value to the outcome — where it can help a founder accelerate and reach a version of their vision they would not have reached alone. That test, rather than sector or stage, is what determines whether an engagement happens at all.

China is arguably the home of wellness. Traditional Chinese Medicine carries traditions and practices that modern science is now producing the evidence for, validating much of what those traditions long asserted. Treating the country as a manufacturing base while ignoring it as a wellness culture is, in his view, a category error.

The chapter started personally rather than strategically. Through a Chinese girlfriend who worked as a vegan chef, he fell first for the people, the history, the culture, and the food — and only then realised how great a need there was to bridge the gap between East and West for wellness company founders. A need, and an opportunity.

He now spends on average a hundred days a year across China and, more broadly, Asia. Over the last decade and more that has produced deep and ever-growing relationships with private equity firms, founders, company chief executives, and prominent family offices — the kind of access that cannot be assembled from a distance or bought on arrival.

He looks at founders the way he looked at musicians. Do they have what it takes to go the distance? The passion, the persistence, the ability to actually pull it off. It is partly a gut read as much as it is about the data, and after three decades of making that call he trusts the combination more than either signal alone.

That instinct was formed signing bands, not reviewing cap tables — which is the through-line between what he did then and what he does now. It also explains why the roster stays small: the agency only takes an engagement where the judgement is that it can change the outcome.

All of it traces back to an early obsession with music. As a kid that passion became Mammoth Records, the label he founded in the late 1980s and ran out of a North Carolina apartment before building it into one of the most credible independents in America. [3] Its roster included Squirrel Nut Zippers, Juliana Hatfield, Joe Henry, Victoria Williams, Jason & the Scorchers, The Melvins, and Fu Manchu. [4] By his account it was the first independent label to produce two platinum albums.

In July 1997 The Walt Disney Company acquired Mammoth — a deal Jay puts at a 65× return on the cash invested. [1] He had turned down offers from Bertelsmann and from PolyGram's A&M and Mercury divisions to take it, and The New York Times covered the bidding as a corporate courtship. [1] [2] Disney's own archive records him staying on under a long-term contract to keep running the label. [5]

He held C-Suite roles at Warner Music, Disney, and Lionsgate — senior vice president of A&R at Atlantic Records, then President of Music and Publishing at Lionsgate, where he oversaw music across Mad Men, Weeds, Californication, and the Best Picture winner Crash, and where the value of the company's music publishing asset doubled. [3] [4]

What that left is more durable than a CV: decades-long friendships across the media landscape, including several of the world's most prominent musicians, and standing relationships across the C-suites of American media. Those relationships are why TWA operates on direct access rather than cold introductions.

Time in market surfaced a second, larger opportunity moving in the opposite direction. Chinese companies want to come West, and particularly to the United States, and most of them are not equipped for the part that matters. Mammoth China Outbound was created to address that gap: narrative, storytelling, credibility, and nuance.

The structural problem, as Jay describes it, is generational. On his reading this is the first cohort of Chinese chief executives in fifty years with a mandate to take their businesses West who did not themselves study at Stanford, Harvard, or MIT. They have the product and the capital. What they lack is the instinct for how a brand earns trust in an American cultural context.

Independent analysis describes the same barriers. Coverage of Cannes Lions 2026 identified three persistent obstacles to premium global positioning for Chinese outbound brands: a lack of deep local market knowledge, a lingering “Made in China” trust deficit, and an over-reliance on promotional pricing that erodes brand equity. [6] Chinese overseas investment and M&A activity, meanwhile, surged 45 percent year on year. [7]

Jay's read is that the cultural door is already open. The same analysis documents “China Maxing” as a genuine organic phenomenon on Western social media — young people filming themselves drinking hot water from thermoses, wearing traditional slippers, practising Tai Chi — with no corporate or state campaign behind it. [6] He sees the K-culture precedent directly: K-beauty, K-pop, and K-drama were an insider's game long before they crossed over. Chinese brands once dismissed as cheap and poorly built are now, in many categories, better and cooler as well as less expensive. They make better cars for half the price.

Executing on that requires American media fluency and Chinese market depth in the same room. To provide the second half, Jay has partnered with a former chief executive of WPP's Wavemaker agency in China.