A New Way to Care: The Well
November 22, 2022
By Meghann Naveau
The Well founder April Kline got her start in business because she knew there was a better way to care for women – and she set out to create it. A serial entrepreneur, Kline established The Well in August 2022. Together with a curated collective of diverse-but-like-minded practitioners, April supports women and families through major life transitions, births, deaths and diagnoses. Launch Dayton caught up with April after her recent participation in the Startup Week Pitch Competition.
Launch Dayton: Tell us about The Well, April. What gave you the idea to build a new way of caring for women?
April: I have a deep belief that our bodies are built to be healthy. If something is off, hurts, or simply doesn’t feel “right,” it’s a body telling us that something needs to be different. At The Well, we do a lot of listening to what our clients’ bodies are telling them and really caring for people as they are and determining what they need.
I was a massage therapist prior to the birth of my first child, and that delivery was a turning point for me. It was rough and traumatic, and I didn’t want other people to have that same experience. So, I became a doula, then a midwife. I found there was so much trauma work in walking alongside other mothers. It was a lot of helping people make peace with the experience they’d had and recovering from that to move forward.
Along the way, I found other women’s health practitioners – pelvic floor therapists, massage therapists, birth and cancer doulas, lactation consultants, and more – who used a similar approach of care. Our clients were thriving, and I had a strong desire to bring those complementary services together in one place.
How did you choose the name for your business?
I’ve run businesses my whole adult life, and I spent a lot of time with my dad during his cancer journey brainstorming what this space could be. We would sit and dream, and it was a way to help him focus on something else for a bit. After he passed away and I went through his notes, I found where he had written The Well and underlined it five times…and it just felt right.
The Well is housed in my dad’s former business building, and we envisioned this space as a place for women to fill their cup, to receive whole-person and holistic care that allowed them to be healthy and be active, powerful people in their communities. We built The Well to be that cup-filling, soul-filling place.
What words would you offer to other business founders?
Start small. So often, people believe they have to do things big, that there is only a growing and bigger and bigger mindset. That can be paralyzing for people. They feel like they don’t have the energy to do something that big.
To me, a lack of energy comes from doing too much of what doesn’t feed our souls. Find the thing that energizes you and do it small to start. Humans are amazing, and we forget that sometimes.
