If you’ve ever been to Sense Of Self, Collingwood, you’ll be familiar with the tranquility that washes over you as you step inside the urban oasis.
It’s not hard to imagine that speaking with founder Freya Berwick, despite her busy schedule across both business and family, radiates a similar energy of pure clarity and calm.
It’s quite striking, really. How her palpably clear energy scoops you up and draws you in. A quality that all too unironically, reflects an incredibly assured sense of self.
I know, I know. We laughed a lot about how this turn of phrase peppered itself into our chat in both namesake and personal contexts throughout this interview.
Together, we traced why and how Berwick decided to build this “anti wellness bullshit,” contemporary haven of bliss in Melbourne’s trendy inner north, and where she plans to take the business next.
This interview led me to believe that the energy Berwick possesses is inextricably linked to the ethereal calm that Sense of Self emits.
When you leave Sense of Self, you leave feeling lighter. And after this chat with this undeniably successful and self-assured founder, I practically floated out of the building.
Finding Sense of Self
Berwick was inspired to launch Sense of Self (SOS) partly by her international travels to countries wherein communal bathing and sauna use is a cultural mainstay.
She explains that the embedded culture of bathing as a wellness tool overseas differed greatly to that of metropolitan Melbourne. When Berwick opened SOS in 2021, this wasn’t merely the opening of your average day spa, but rather marked an introduction of an entirely new category to market. et.
“I’ve spent a lot of time in different bath houses and spas in different parts of the world, and I think the key difference in places that have established bathing culture is exactly that – it’s a part of the culture,” she says.
She believes the uniting thread between unique bathing cultures in places like Rome, Japan, Finland, Greece and Morocco, as opposed to that of Australia, is their adoption of ‘third spaces.’
Spaces like these, invented for the community to convene, yet aren’t actively built to be inherently social, aren’t commonplace in Australia.
In launching SOS, Bewrick was careful in how she wanted to respectfully bring over the unique practices and rituals she’d experienced within these other bathing cultures; while developing a new array of offerings tailored to the people of Melbourne.
“It’s probably not quite right to just bring [for example], Japanese bathing to Australia,” she explains.
“I thought the most appropriate thing to do was to interpret the juicy, meaningful parts of all of these places and these experiences, and [find] what can be done in Melbourne in an authentic way, so that is not appropriation and is its own thing.”
But outside of this travel inspiration, it was Berwick’s transformative relationship between nature and her journey to body acceptance – something honed during three years spent living in Norway – that called her to eventually create Sense Of Self.
“Scandinavia has this really interesting intersection between their wellness and nature, which for me was probably the biggest lesson,” she shares.
“I spent a lot of time running and getting really hot, or using the sauna in the hotel where I worked, and then diving into freezing bodies of water which I really loved.”
These intensely present, physical experiences helped Berwick overcome what she describes to be “a pretty fraught relationship with food and [her] body” in her twenties.
“I really [learned] a hard lesson in body trust, outsourcing your self worth and your self love based on what someone might value in you, and that understanding the foundation of all of your relationships with people, food, places, things, comes from the strength of your relationship with yourself,” she says.
“So my pathway into communal bathing was not so much that I spent all this time in bath houses, and had an epiphany. It was understanding the importance of your self connection, particularly in this environment, in this day and age with social media and pace of life.”
So what is it about communal bathing that helps Berwick drop into that deep and imperative connection to self?
To the founder, it’s all about the humanising perspective an experience such as bathing at SOS can provide. That is, in the SOS bathhouse, you’re at once completely different from the person wading or sitting next to you, but a kinship can be drawn through the shared act of intentional being.
“You’re occupying space together, and you realise that you’re one among many,” Freya says.
“It’s not fanciful, and you don’t have to present in any way, you don’t have to be good at it. You just do it. It’s the same as walking along the river on a Saturday morning. There’s just other people going about their lives.
“Bathing is really unique because of the disrobing part of it, and you’re also doing these things that gently push. Like [when] doing a sauna, you’re pushing your body, and it’s not physical as in strenuous, but it’s your body in space and in elements, and it’s very present.”
Spaces like SOS strike a unique balance of being both public and communal in nature.
The result of being partially disrobed, gently pushing your body through resistance and sharing space together with other beings is a joint sense of belonging, a feeling of openness, and ultimately, a move towards body acceptance. This concoction of positive feelings was the motivation that ultimately drove Berwick to allow Melbournians to access through opening SOS.
All are welcome in the space, which intentionally chooses the non-prescriptive approach of steering away from labelling itself exclusively as a ‘day spa’ or a ‘recovery centre’ – ensuring all kinds of users are granted free reign to enjoy the many functions of the space and define the experience for themselves.
“We really genuinely see a really diverse mix of people come through the doors as a consequence of that, which is the intention and is a truer reflection of the community, and what you want a space like this to be,” she says
“People come for all different reasons, and that’s okay. We want to facilitate that.”
Cultivating a category
Berrwick took a mixed bag approach to raising capital for SOS. She drew from what she knew about the range of different ways to start a business she was familiar with and jammed them together to fund her idea for an all-new bathhouse and spa hybrid in Melbourne.
“Ultimately, the capital mix in the end, for Sense of Self, Collingwood was bank funding, a small amount of equity, and then putting in our own money,” she explains.
“It was about $2 million and we just scraped it all together. And it wasn’t like we could raise a pool of capital to roll out three. We’re sort of paving a category, so you have to be a bit slow. You can’t just iterate versions, you know. You have to build it and then iterate.”
Berwick shares that one of the greater challenges of this process, of not only launching the first SOS site, but paving a new category, was proving to investors and her potential market that a brick and mortar business like SOS would indeed pay off.
“There was this massive resistance to it, [because] you can’t prove it until you’ve spent all the money,” she says.
“It’s not like a piece of technology that you start to test. So we just needed to find people that understood that – and communicating what Sense Of Self is before it existed and before there was a bathing market was super hard… it still remains hard, because you have to experience it to really feel it.”
Berwick explains that the architectural design choices of SOS were imperative in building and communicating what the space would offer. Her intentional use of Mediterranean-inspired colour palettes in combination with large, brutalist structures is a physical manifestation of SOS’s ethos.
“We want to hold people and make them feel really safe, but we want to challenge them at the same time,” she says.
“And so that’s where I basically mashed together Mediterranean and brutalism in that Mediterranean has this softness, this soft curve, soft colours, [a use of] really natural materials, and it’s familiar and nostalgic. And then brutalism is this, kind of confronting, demanding type of space with monolithic forms, blocks, big things, unexpected things. That’s kind of the balance that we try to seek.”
Works to bring SOS to Sydney are well underway. It’s taken a long time to get here, but prioritizing where to open each SOS venue is a time consuming, yet crucial part of Berwick’s business model.
“I’s taken us years to find the building that we want, but I care a lot about the spaces that we occupy, so I think it’s worth the wait.”
She tells me about the “kooky” non-negotiable for every SOS bathhouse: no new developments.
“Building in existing buildings is an important thing for me, which takes a really long time to find, and then you respond to that in your design. You don’t just like put something that doesn’t fit,” she explains.
“I think there’s really something to be said about something being there for a while, [whereas] in a new development, largely, all that new material… is new, it’s not familiar, it’s not grounded. I just see these businesses in new developments, and they’re like Tumbleweed type territory.
As she looks to open SOS’s first Sydney site, a mammoth project that will open in late 2025, Berwick reflects on the self trust required to build, deliver and expand her business.
“You’ve got to make customers believe you, staff believe you, investors believe you. And you can’t do that in a consistent way if you don’t believe you,” she advises.
“That’s what the journey has been for me as a founder at least… you can’t rely on other people to tell you that you’re right, or that it’s going to be okay, because that’s a very wobbly foundation.
“You’re going to be challenged. You’re going to have customers that don’t like you, you’re going to have staff to tell you you’re doing a bad job, you’re gonna have investors that might say that you should do it like this, or this is your market. And if you are just swaying with all of those [opinions] and chasing those tangents, you’re not doing the thing that you’re supposed to be doing.”
