Government thought it was a brothel but she built a $200M spa franchisee anyway.

This is a story about innovation, grit and resilience.  

It's about a woman who started when everything in the world was wrong. She kept showing up even when it was embarrassing, illegal, heartbreaking, and sometimes involved educating the government that she isn’t running a brothel.

Melanie Gleeson grew up on Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, attending Woodleigh School, a school with an unusually prescient philosophy for its era. 

It had only three rules: Respect for yourself, respect for others, and respect for the environment (we don’t see this too often in schools).

Those three rules became the lifeline of a $200 million business.

She went on her first yoga retreat when she was 10 with her mom at an ashram in Daylesford. Imagine what introducing mindfulness can do to kids early on. 

It planted a worldview of stillness, nature, mind-body connection that would later become Endota's brand identity. 

After school, she worked as an au pair, then moved into managing one of Victoria's first day spas. She firsthand saw women coming out of the spa transformed. It was that transformation that she realised the real word connection of mind and body.

How she found a $5,000 credit loan from the family and a Co-founder?

In 2000, Melanie connected with a school friend Belinda Fraser at a barbeque gathering. Belinda was on track to be an economics graduate.

Melanie was managing one of Victoria's first day spas and wanted to start a day spa business of her own. While Belinda wanted to start a business she could grow into a national entity.

They quickly realised they could pull those two ideas together and literally started planning it the very next week.

Note: Not waiting for perfection or the perfect moment. Just start somewhere.

Their complementary skills worked beautifully. Belinda was armoured with a degree in economics and experience as a licensed real estate agent.

A perfect combination to manage the real estate, financial and economic aspects.

While Melanie, a qualified hair and makeup artist, had in-depth industry knowledge.

They invested $5000 dollars from their credit cards, took a loan from her then boyfriend now husband) Paul and some extra from her family.

This capital was enough to bootstrap her first business.

In 2000, Australia had no meaningful day spa industry. There were traditional beauty salons and massage clinics, but nothing combining the two.

Spa’s were seen as luxury, because it was sold as luxury. She wanted to make it accessible for everyone. She believed that wellness was a necessity, not a luxury for the rich.

But being young and female was a challenge. Not having any capital was another challenge. Just telling people what a day spa was itself a challenge.

The first Endota spa opened in late 2000 in Mount Martha on the Mornington Peninsula. It wasn’t a shopfront in a commercial lane, but a converted residential space.

Their first head office was in an old bookstore in Red Hill, literally a tin shed with a cool room where twelve or so people worked without heat in winter or air conditioning in summer.

In one of her interviews Melanie said “It took a lot of education in the first few years just for people to understand what they were. There were probably about four spas at the time, and they were within hotels.”

They nearly failed because the services advertised – massage, facials, body treatments which led the council to believe they were going to open a brothel.

Notice after notice just to prove that they were running a legitimate business.

But they stayed resilient and it took a lot of education to prove what they were building.

The next big challenge was finding customers who believed nothing shady was going on.

Their customer acquisition strategy was entirely grassroots. Gleeson did a lot of networking and letterbox drops to get word of mouth out about the spa and it grew from there.

The Mornington Peninsula worked in their favour. It was a tight-knit, affluent coastal community where reputation travels fast and women talk to each other a lot (gracious women).

As word of mouth spread around the Peninsula, Melanie and Belinda recognised an opportunity for growth. The right early customers became unpaid advocates.

They had four spas by 2002, two of which were their franchisees.

The franchise model wasn't a strategic choice as much as a survival mechanism.

They wanted multiple locations, and franchising made sense because it meant the people running each business were seriously and personally invested in seeing it succeed. 

And it would enable them to expand the brand much more quickly than if they had to secure finance themselves every time they wanted to open a new location.

Very early on, they were putting any money they earned into setting up the legal contracts and structures for a franchise system. They opened the first Endota spa in late 2000 and sold the first two spas in 2002. By that time they already had four locations, which they sold quickly.

The timing was strategic. From 2002–2006, day spas enjoyed increasing popularity and they seized that opportunity, resulting in strong growth for the brand and its eventual domination of the category.

The franchise model had three structural advantages that made it unusually effective:

On franchisee selection: Franchisees needed sound business and spa operating skills but not beauty or massage therapy.

They found that some therapists in this position tend to work in the business rather than on the business, which was not their preference.

On cost discipline: "Many new Australian spa operators fall into the trap of following the US example: costly fit-outs in expensive rental locations. By contrast, the endota fit-out keeps costs down and aesthetic appeal up."

Despite near-daily reports of Australia's retail sector woes in earlier years, revenue in endota spas continued to grow every month since the franchise system's inception in 2003 according to Professional Beauty magazine.

Melanie understood that spas stand alone can become stagnant until new models of revenue are introduced.

So instead of staying in just one lane, Melanie built four interconnected revenue verticals:

1. Spa network (service) : Retail spa sales accounted for around 25% of the business, a figure almost unheard of for service-led wellness businesses.

2. Skincare (product): They used their own products in the spa and people loved the quality. The first skincare was created in about 2006. They're all Australian-made (high-quality), with about 257 SKUs across different categories.

Products, once available only through their spas, are now stocked in David Jones which has travel retail outlet and health food stores across the globe.

Their skincare line now reaches people in over 60 countries. Here’s the link for you to explore.

3. Education (training pipeline): She also established The Endota Wellness College, a registered Training Organisation offering nationally recognised training in Beauty Therapy, Remedial Massage, and Salon Management.

If students don't join Endota after completion, they place them with people they know in the industry (talent acquisition and finding jobs is a huge problem in this industry).

4. Digital/Online: During COVID, Endota pivoted quickly during lockdowns, launching online yoga, meditation, sound healing, and Pilates programs to complement its physical retreats.

If you go to their website, Endota Spa has a huge library of on-demand videos that are linked to Endota membership now.

Public sources document Belinda Fraser as co-founder through roughly 2014–2015.

By 2019 onwards, every interview, company statement, and announcement refers to Gleeson alone as Founder and CEO.

Gleeson is the single largest shareholder, with a small group of investors who help guide her and the senior executive team in meeting their goals.

The partnership quietly unwound, with Gleeson consolidating ownership and control. There is no public account of the circumstances.

She operates from Mornington Peninsula. She is married to Pete and has two sons. Pete left his career and became a primary stay-at-home parent to help Melanie focus on building her thing.

Vogue gave an inside view of their home.

She is a mother who is also a business woman. Her mornings involve getting the kids ready for school and her husband helps significantly just like any other household with young kids.

Most VC’s wouldn’t have funded her, but that didn’t stop her and she started anyway.

The majority of people at Endota's head office are women, and kids are often in the office during school holidays because they're all in the same boat.

Since 2025 Endota started offering high-performance treatments such as LED, EMT, microdermabrasion, Laser Genesis. They now account for 50% of endota's service mix alongside traditional spa treatments.

People are more educated about ingredients and formulations. Endota's therapists are qualified professionals who can speak to customers who aren't just buying off a counter.

T”here are definitely more competitors, but they come and they go”, she says.

“Because we're Mornington Peninsula-based and we don't look too closely at what others are doing, we're driven more by what our customers tell us they want and that has allowed us to just slowly chip away."

The biggest structural risk to her model is labour crises but they have handled it beautifully.

Their biggest challenge as an industry is labour and finding people that want to join and stay in our industry.

Endota sits at the intersection of commendable execution, focus on human values, a great franchisee model and brand-building principles.

Founder-market fit: Melanie wasn't a business strategist who spotted a market gap. She was an industry insider who understood the product viscerally before she understood the business. She knew the mechanics and translated it into business.

Franchising as capital-light scaling: The choice to own it all or a part of it was essentially made due to lack of capital and people coming to them asking to open a franchisee early on.

When you’re new to business, you don’t have a 10 year plan. You’re also learning on the go and if an opportunity like that strikes twice, you know you’re on to something.

Both owner and operators have skin in the game, growth doesn't require central capital, and the network effect of gift vouchers redeemable anywhere creates national brand awareness and this compounds with each location.

Revenue in Endota spas continued to grow every month since the franchise system's inception in 2003.

1. Values: Shared values are non-negotiable and one of their most significant moat. The brand's values — intent, connect, truth, balance run through the entire franchise network and the product production.

This creates genuine consistency at scale, which is the hardest thing to replicate in a service business.

2. Vertical integration as defensibility: The spa → skincare → education flywheel means Endota isn't just a franchise network. It's a supply chain, a talent pipeline, and a retail brand simultaneously. Each vertical reinforces the others.

3. Contrarian timing: Launching a wellness business in Australia in 2000 when the category barely existed, when the council thought they were running a brothel, meant Gleeson had 3–5 years of compound growth before any meaningful competition arrived.

Melanie's most strategic move was to change the positioning. The luxury positioning of spas at the time was a psychological barrier. 

Melanie systematically made the experience more accessible in price, in design, in vocabulary. The language shifted from "luxury" to "healthy habit."

The name itself was intentional positioning.

While Endota does not operate in remote Indigenous tribal communities, the company is deeply tied to these communities through meaningful partnerships and cultural respect.

Melanie Gleeson built a $200 million business from a $5,000 credit card, in an industry that didn't exist, in a country where no one knew what a day spa was.

She didn't have any investor capital. She didn’t have the right network. She didn’t have the right connections.

Just an intuition that she did it by watching women walk into a spa stressed and walk out changed. She knew this was something the world needed more of that at a price ordinary women could afford.

Twenty-five years later, she's still running it. No matter how things were. She Started Anyway.

The question she leaves with every woman reading this:

What is you core value that is non-negotiable? Because that is what actually keeps you going.

Next week: Another woman. Another story. Same stubborn fire. Can you guess the country?

xoxo,

Chakshu Vats