What We Learned at Women's WELLfest 2026

by Christian Barmen, co-founder, AriHelder — March 2026

We came to Women's WELLfest expecting a crowd. We left with something better: fifty genuine conversations, six devices running all day for two days straight, and a handful of relationships with people who might actually put Helder 2 into clinics and therapy rooms across Thailand.

Here's what actually happened.

The venue

The Grand Chaiyapruek Nimman Hotel. A beautiful setting — and a smaller event than the name suggested. Attendance was more intimate than we'd planned for.

Arjen's talk was originally scheduled for a large conference room. When it became clear the room would be mostly empty chairs, we made a call: move it to our showroom floor. What could have been an embarrassing echo chamber became the best thing that happened all weekend.

About a dozen women gathered close. Arjen talked. They interrupted with questions. He answered honestly — including the parts where science is still uncertain, and the parts where he said we don't make claims because we don't think that's our job. The format forced a conversation instead of a presentation, and the feedback afterward was genuinely warm.

Lesson one: intimate beats impressive.

The sessions

Six Helder 2 devices. Lights running from open to close, both days.

By our count, we gave around fifty sessions. Some women tried it once and moved on. Others came back — once or twice more during the show — to use it again on a different area, or to sit quietly for ten minutes in the middle of a busy event day.

That second visit is the one that matters. Nobody comes back because they felt nothing.

We didn't ask what they noticed. We never do. The sessions speak for themselves.

The price question

฿5,990. We said it clearly, it was on the table, and the reaction from almost everyone was the same: that's cheaper than I expected.

These are women who have bought LED face masks. Some had spent ฿8,000–15,000 on masks that do one thing — illuminate a face. When they picked up the Helder 2, felt the build quality, understood the output specs, and heard the price, the response was closer to suspicion than enthusiasm. Why is it this cheap?

The answer is simple: we manufacture in Chiang Mai. We don't have a marketing budget. We don't pay for celebrity endorsements or shelf space in wellness boutiques. We make a device and sell it directly.

That explanation landed well every single time.

The No Claims question

Every booth at an event like this makes promises. Tighter skin. More energy. Better sleep. The language of wellness marketing is essentially an arms race of increasingly confident claims.

We don't do that. We tell people what wavelengths come out of the device, how much power, at what distance — and then we stop. If they ask what it does, we say: we don't make therapeutic claims. We share what users experience. What do you want to try it on?

The reaction was consistently positive — and specifically, women said it felt honest. Not weak. Not evasive. Honest. In a room full of promises, not making one was a differentiator.

A few women pushed back — they wanted a claim, something to hold onto. We understood. It's unfamiliar. But the pushback never lasted long. The moment someone sat down and used the device for ten minutes, the conversation shifted from what it's supposed to do to what they actually noticed.

That's the trade we're making. We give up the easy sale to build something that doesn't need to be defended later.

The arm

The articulating arm was — broadly — a hit.

Women understood it immediately. The idea of a device that holds itself in position, adjustable, hands-free, so you can actually relax during a session instead of holding something against your neck for ten minutes: that landed. Several women said it was the feature that made them take the product seriously.

Two pieces of honest feedback we heard more than once:

Where do I clamp this? The arm needs a surface. At the show we had table clamps and free-standing bases, but in a home context — a desk, a bedside table, a bathroom counter — the placement question is real. We need to show people more clearly what a real-world setup looks like. More photos. More context. More this is how it sits in an actual room.

It felt a little flimsy. Not many said this, but enough that we noted it. The arm is light — intentionally — but light can read as cheap. This is a perception problem as much as an engineering one, and it's worth taking seriously. The device itself felt solid in people's hands. The arm needs to communicate the same confidence.

Who was in the room

A mix. Thai women and expats. Younger and older. Some had been using red light for years — face masks, clinic sessions, devices they'd bought online. Most had heard of it but didn't know the details: wavelengths, output power, the difference between a 650nm and 850nm LED, why NIR penetrates differently than red.

Almost nobody had encountered a device focused on the body rather than the face. The face mask category has trained people to think of red light as a beauty tool. The moment we talked about using it on a shoulder, a lower back, a postpartum recovery area — that was new information for most of the room.

That gap is an opportunity. There's a whole population of women who already believe in red light, already use it on their faces, and have never considered pointing it anywhere else.

The conversations that matter long-term

The smaller-than-expected crowd meant we spent real time with exhibitors and vendors who were also there. Clinics. Physiotherapists. A postpartum recovery specialist based in Bangkok. A spa owner looking for device partnerships.

These aren't impulse purchases. They're relationships. A clinic that adds Helder 2 to their offering doesn't buy one device — they buy several, and they bring their clients to it, and those clients potentially buy their own. The retail and professional channel is slow to build but worth building.

We have follow-ups to make. We'll make them.

What we're taking back to the workshop

A few things to address before the April launch:

Show the arm in context. Real rooms. Real surfaces. Show exactly where the clamp goes and what the setup looks like on a desk, on a bedside table, next to a couch. The arm is a feature — we need to sell it visually.

Build the postpartum conversation. We heard this more than once — women who had C-sections, difficult recoveries, bodies that had been through a lot. They weren't asking for promises. They were asking if this was for them. We need user stories from that space.

Lean into the face-to-body bridge. Women who already use LED masks are the warmest audience we have. They believe in the technology. They just haven't thought about using it below the neck. That's a content gap we can fill.

The price surprise is a story. Almost everyone assumed it would cost more. That reaction — why is it this cheap? — is content. The answer to that question is the whole AriHelder story.

Final note

Fifty sessions. Two full days. Lights on from morning to close.

Not one person asked for their ten minutes back.

That's enough for us.

AriHelder makes the Helder 2 — a red and near-infrared light device designed and manufactured in Chiang Mai, Thailand. No therapeutic claims. Just light. Lots of it.

฿5,990 · arihelder.com