Why Julia Baldet Is Building Elevate Beyond The $15 Smoothie

Elevate, which recently launched in Selfridges, is positioned as a wellness brand rather than a smoothie bar concept

Elevate

There are easier places to sell an £11 ($15) smoothie in London than Bank. Not in terms of money, perhaps. The City has plenty of that. But in terms of mood, romance, and other such shorthands of wellness? Bank is not where Sweaty Betty-clad Londoners go to linger over adaptogens. It’s where Londoners answer emails while walking, make twelve calls before 10 a.m., and pretend that three flat whites and a free apple from the canteen constitute a functioning human diet.

Which is precisely why Julia Baldet opened her business there.

“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.”

Of course, London is not short of premium lunch options or businesses built around the idea that office workers will pay for something better than a limp sandwich between meetings. Brands like Farmer J have already shown how powerful that daily behaviour can be, but Baldet’s vision was was narrower: that, perhaps, a functional smoothie could become part of the same working-day economy.

Elevate, which opened its first site in Bank in June 2025, sits somewhere between smoothie bar and lunch solution. Its blends are built around protein, supplements and ingredients designed to do more than the old high-street formula of fruit, yoghurt and a sprinkle of something vaguely virtuous. The pitch is not that London has never seen healthy food for busy people before, but that the smoothie—a category often caught between gym slop and shopping-centre sugar rushes—could be made credible. Premium, even.

Still, Baldet was not the obvious founder. At 30, she was not a chef, nutritionist or hospitality lifer, but a woman working in investment banking and private equity.“Elevate came from a very personal frustration,” she says. “I was working in an incredibly demanding environment, and my health took a hit. I became much more intentional about nutrition, but I found that the genuinely healthy options available on-the-go were either inconvenient, nutritionally questionable, or just didn’t feel aspirational. That disconnect became the spark.”

The founder arc is tempting to simplify (finance burnout, wellness awakening, brand launch), but Baldet didn’t exactly leave her past life behind here. She used what it gave her, raising a reported £400k [$529k] in pre-seed funding as a first-time founder, admitting her background helped with “building the model, understanding unit economics and speaking the language of investors.”

But it didn’t come easy. “Fundraising became a form of rejection therapy,” she says. “Opening a store in central London is capital intensive, so external funding was necessary. I spoke to hundreds of investors before finding the right partners.

“Fundraising as a founder is very different from assessing businesses as an investor. You’re selling belief as much as numbers.” And, that, she did. In October 2024, less than 24 hours before a pitch day organised by Steven Bartlett’s Flight Fund, Baldet applied on a whim and secured a spot. Around 30 founders were pitching that day and, despite describing herself as an introvert, she volunteered to go first.

Elevate didn’t receive investment on the day, but another founder in the room approached Baldet and told her the concept would be perfect for Selfridges, offering to introduce her directly to the Foodhall team.

At that point, Elevate had not completed its fundraise or opened its first site, but by the time the brand launched in Selfridges’ Foodhall this April, it looked like a polished second step.

“It’s one of the most iconic retail environments in the world, and culturally it makes sense,” Baldet says. But Selfridges also gives Baldet a different customer to study. “Bank is highly repeat and commuter-led,” she says. “Selfridges introduces a more diverse mix with luxury shoppers, tourists, and stronger brand visibility. It is a good way to test how our brand resonates with a more international crowd.”

That word—test—often comes up when Baldet talks about the business. Elevate may sit inside wellness, a category often wrapped in certainty and soft-focus promises, but her own language is more iterative. The first months in Bank taught her, she says, “the importance of constant iteration.”

“Feedback is data and it is key to try things and iterate fast,” she says. “We have changed so many small things operationally since opening that made the biggest difference when it comes to the customer experience.”

That is where her finance background becomes more than biographical colour, too. Baldet didn’t arrive in hospitality with a romantic attachment to restaurants, but a model, a thesis and enough self-awareness to realise neither would survive contact with the floor unchanged.

After leaving private equity, Baldet took a barista job for two months to understand the basics, and once Elevate opened, she worked behind the counter every day 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. Every operational improvement we’ve made, every piece of customer feedback we’ve actioned quickly, that all traces back to those first six months on the floor.

“Finance is a bubble where everyone speaks the same language and lives on the same deadlines,” she says. “Operating a business is completely different. Customers don’t behave like forecast assumptions, suppliers miss deliveries, equipment breaks, staffing issues happen. You learn quickly that execution matters more than theory.”

Asked what she has had to learn fastest about margins, consistency and supply chain, Baldet’s answer is simple: “How unforgiving hospitality is.”

“Small changes in waste, labour efficiency, supplier pricing or throughput materially affect performance,” she says. “Discipline matters every day.”

That discipline is also why Elevate’s product development sounds less mystical than much of the wellness industry. Baldet is not talking about vibes or transformation, but whether people want to buy a smoothie more than once.

The hardest part, 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.

“We work backwards from a functional objective,” she says, “but no one buys something repeatedly because the ingredient list looks good. It has to actually taste great.”

That is also where the £11 price point becomes more interesting. Elevate is not cheap, and Baldet doesn’t pretend otherwise. “We’re not trying to be everything for everyone,” she says. “We use high-quality functional ingredients and don’t compromise on quality. The question for us is not ‘how cheap can this be?’ but whether the product genuinely delivers enough value to justify its place in someone’s routine.”

It’s fair to say routine is doing a lot of work here. A premium smoothie can get attention because it’s expensive, photogenic, or attached to the wider cultural cachet (here’s looking at you), but attention is not the same as behaviour. What cotninues to matter, commercially, is whether customers come back when the novelty has worn off.

“What’s been most surprising is how quickly customers build habits around the products,” Baldet says. “You might expect trial to be driven by curiosity or aesthetics, but what’s actually powerful is repeat behaviour. Some of our most loyal customers come every day, if not twice a day.”

It’s here that the inevitable Erewhon comparison can no longer be ignored. Important, too, as the Los Angeles grocer made the expensive functional smoothie globally legible as a status object.

Baldet is diplomatic about the comparison. “It’s flattering given they are the reference for smoothies,” she says, “but London is a completely different market. LA has a very performative wellness culture. London consumers are more understated, and generally more sceptical, so the brand has to translate differently.”

With that, she’s clear that the ambition is not just to open more smoothie bars. “The long-term goal is building a modern wellness brand,” she says. “Physical retail matters because it builds brand and customer connection, and we definitely plan on expanding, but partnerships and product expansion are definitely part of the bigger vision.

In five years, Baldet says success would mean Elevate becoming “a genuinely category-defining modern lifestyle brand, one that people trust, love, and engage with across multiple touchpoints.”

The test now is whether Elevate can grow beyond its initial spaces without losing the thing that makes it work in both: not the fantasy of wellness, but the much less glamorous business of being useful.