East Day Spa chain gets the growth treatment

Ina Bajaj says spas are no longer seen as just for the rich. Photo / Kenny Rodger

She may own some of the country's most luxurious day spas, but Ina Bajaj insists the work is anything but glamorous.

"Look - no polish," laughs the East Day Spa director, holding out her unpainted fingers for inspection.

Her phone is on all day and night and she's had to spend entire weekends at the laundromat when a spa's washing machine has broken down.

She also mans the reception desk at her spa in Auckland's five-star Sky City Grand Hotel twice a week.

"There's no 5pm when you own a business."

The co-owner of Wellington's famous Curry Club restaurant for 10 years, Bajaj threw in the restaurant towel early this century to set up the first of her three New Zealand day spas in the capital. She's since established two in Auckland, at boutique five-star hotel Mollies and at the Sky City Grand.

Her latest project is the ultra-luxurious East Residence and Spa Bali, a five-bedroom villa 40 minutes from Denpasar Airport, with 13 staff including a private masseuse, chef, and yoga teacher, which opened last month. Using a $100,000 Trade & Enterprise New Zealand market development grant, Bajaj bought the 1ha site, an old batik factory, in 2002 when land was cheap. The purchase was an impulse buy and she was confident the market would return after the 2002 terrorist attacks.

It has: total foreign arrivals hit a record 1.97 million last year, though the Bali Tourism Authority estimates foreign visitor numbers will drop 8.6 per cent to 1.8 million this year in the wake of the global credit crunch.

The company's 155 per cent growth in annual revenue for the previous two years gave it 45th place on last year's Deloitte Fast 50 Index. Customer volume has dipped in the last six months, and there was a decline in corporate gift vouchers and groups at Christmas, but Bajaj is confident the recession won't hit the business too hard.

"People have increasingly realised that they need to look after themselves from the inside. They may be working smarter but the body's still got to cope. And they may skimp on a trip overseas but they'll still look after their body."

Expansion plans loom large for Bajaj, who is in negotiations to set up a spa in Christchurch's George Hotel. She franchised her Wellington spa last year and aims to roll out further franchises in Hawkes Bay, Nelson, Tauranga and a hotel-based spa in Queenstown. Bajaj and brother Sanj, the company's financial controller, own and manage the hotel-based spas, preferring to deal with the hotels' package offers themselves.

Also on the cards are spas in Perth and Darwin where Bajaj reckons the "captive audience" will prove an easier target than the crammed Sydney and Melbourne markets.

More Kiwis visit spas as part of their regular health and wellbeing routines - it's no longer seen as a luxury treat just for the wealthy, says Bajaj. The company's male clientele has increased since the early days and men now make up about a third of all customers, often as part of a couple.

"Body maintenance" such as hair removal (including brow threading, where tiny hairs are removed with twisted strands of cotton) and facials are the spa's bread and butter treatments, but there has been an increase in the amount of requests for deep tissue massages, Bajaj says, a fact she puts down to "today's stressful living".

And the local spa market is crowded.

"Indian restaurants were the dairies of the 1990s. Spas are the dairies of today," she laughs.

East Day Spa is run as a business and Bajaj says this is one of its points of difference from owner-operator businesses run by many therapists.

The company has a marketing manager, an operations manager and a financial controller. All 60 staff have at least three years' of massage qualifications, with a high-end spa and/or resort hotel background, and from now on will work at East Residence and Spa Bali for a six-month assessment of their skills. The company also pays for fortnightly English lessons for those who need them.

Sky City Hotels Group general manager Simon Jamieson says the group approached Bajaj looking for "more than typical spa services ... a spa destination". The hotel spa is one of the country's biggest, and Jamieson says Bajaj is a "talented spa operator complemented by well-trained staff".

Bajaj travels to find the latest in treatments but most are based on Indian ayurvedic, the ancient Hindu way of medicine, and Balinese rituals. She's now trying to combine indigenous New Zealand products with the Eastern treatments and admits it's difficult to find the Kiwi point of difference because "everyone does kiwifruit and manuka honey".

Not everything has gone according to plan. Neither yoga classes (with a trained teacher from India) nor in-office mobile massages took off. And the only time she cried in business was when the spa was soaked by a flood from the Sky City Grand. It reopened after two days of frantic mopping. "It's the only time I've cried in business."

The firm is a family affair; as well as financial controller Sanj, Bajaj's sister-in-law and niece work at reception in the Sky City Grand spa, while father Kumar project managed the Bali venture.

Tanzanian-born Bajaj moved with her family to Wellington when she was 8. When she wasn't studying sociology at Victoria University she was a manager at designer Thornton Hall or working nights on reception at the Park Royal Hotel. Aged 26, she and Sanj, then a tax accountant for Telecom, opened the Curry Club with financial help from their father, Kumar.

After a decade they tired of the long hours and general stress, and, inspired by her occasional spa treatments on Asian stopovers from chef-recruiting trips to India, Bajaj decided to go into the spa business.

At first she found the Wellington male market "a real barrier to break through", but was "well supported" by the broader-minded diplomatic community. "European men are more used to this sort of thing. For diplomats, going for a manicure or getting a massage wasn't an issue."

In 2004 the Sky City Grand invited Bajaj to set up in Auckland and last year Mollies approached with a similar offer. Mindful of a mistake she says she made with the Curry Club - not expanding when she could have - Bajaj snapped up both chances.