About
The short version
Rachel Branson is the founder of Haywood Media and Editor-in-Chief of Wellbeing Magazine. A journalist, entrepreneur, speaker and podcaster, she has spent almost three decades creating publications, businesses and platforms around emerging ideas.
Her experience spans publishing, nutrition, fashion, communications and social housing, including senior communications work at Town & Country Housing. Today she writes about wellbeing, wellness travel, founders and the future of homes and neighbourhoods. She co-hosts Well, That's Awkward with broadcaster Susan Osman and has recently completed her first fiction novel.
Chapter one
I began my career in publishing, working within international B2B titles before launching Haywood Media in 1998. What started as a curiosity about independent journalism became a career defined by asking questions that mainstream media wasn't yet asking.
Chapter two
Since Haywood Media I have created publications, products, platforms and consumer brands — including work in nutrition (Zingology, 2013), fashion and digital media. I have taken businesses from earliest concept through branding, launch, growth, repositioning and exit.
Chapter three
Wellbeing Magazine began as an independent publication and grew into an editorial platform. Nearly two decades on, it remains the anchor around which everything else I do orbits: journalism, interviews, retreats reviewed, founders profiled and honest conversations recorded.
Chapter four
Between 2014 and 2020 I led senior communications work at Town & Country Housing, including the See the Person campaign (2016) challenging assumptions about people living in social housing, and the organisational change surrounding the merger with Peabody. These experiences now shape a new strand of my journalism.
Chapter five
I grew up around property. That inheritance — combined with social housing experience and wellbeing journalism — is why homes, neighbourhoods and the way places help or hinder us feels like the natural next question for my work.
Chapter six
I have completed my first work of fiction, due to be published later this year. It explores time, technology, nature and what happens when people lose touch with the ancient rhythms that once governed human life.
Finding the connection
Publishing, wellness, nutrition, fashion, housing and fiction are all concerned with people: how we express ourselves, how we make choices, how we respond to change and how our environments influence who we are able to become.
Whether I am interviewing a founder, visiting a wellness retreat, considering the design of a new community or writing a novel, I am looking for the human story beneath the surface. That curiosity continues to shape everything I create.
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