Great lifestyle choice
THINGS only get better when customers visit Dorota’s Lifestyle Studio, a business shaped by independent entrepreneur Dorota Zelazny and her belief in self-improvement’s power to help people lead happier lives.
From sports injury therapies to weight loss and anti-ageing boosters, the Studio’s fitness and beauty treatments have turned it into “a destination for women and men at a crossroads, often feeling pretty low perhaps through personal loss or a divorce.We do our very best to make them feel good about themselves. From there they can go on to achieve much more,” explains Zelazny.
For the former Wormwood Scrubs prison officer, it’s the realisation of a dream to run her own business.
Based in Chiswick, west London, “our clients must come in person, something they value more than ever,” adds Zelazny, the ultimate self-starter showing what women can achieve.
Developing the business has taken £150,000 of her own investment, but the company expects growth to double and to be turning over £300,000 and to have opened a second studio by 2024.
After leaving Poland for the capital two decades ago, she worked for HM Prison Service helping inmates with detox and rehabilitation. Then in 2017 she made the break.
“Prison work taught me a lot about resilience and facing up to unpredictability,” she says.
Starting with £70,000 of her own savings to buy her first equipment she opened a small shop offering HYPOXI, a stubborn fat reduction fitness treatment creating firmer, smoother skin that she had found successful after gaining weight.
“This gave me the business opening I’d been searching for,” says Zelazny. Today HYPOXI remains the Studio’s most popular therapy.
From there the business expanded into a two-floor space with the focus on innovative, non-invasive treatments. Rising star however is the Studio’s new Nano CellCare treatment, an application of intensive moisturiser that the skin absorbs, triggering cell rejuvenation.
“It plumps up places in the body that shrink with age such as postmenopause,” Zelazny explains. “It has also brought us male clients from outside London. For one it has helped his knee problem. He has just completed a 100-mile charity cycle ride.”
She is also lining up a new service, a vibrating chair that strengthens pelvic muscles and combats incontinence, for example after childbirth.
No fan of outside investment and leasing equipment, Zelazny prefers to wait until she can pay outright. “I favour organic growth, security and being in control,” she explains.
A chandelier made of 300 different glass butterflies, that Zelazny scoured the country for, lights up the Studio.
She explains: “It symbolises us spreading our wings, working with our customers so they can change and become what they want.”
‘Self-starter showing what women can achieve’