Beyond traditional healthcare: Marshfield’s wellness revolution takes hold

MARSHFIELD – Despite being behind the curve of larger cities in wellness-oriented trends, Marshfield and its businesses are showing that wellness services are already here.

For their 2025 vendor market, The 715 decided to try something new: rather than hold a more traditional vendor services fair, at which shoppers could prepare for their holiday gift-giving, The 715 brought together the city’s expanding wellness community, showcasing the numerous health-centered businesses that already call Marshfield home.

The Glitz & Glow Up Holiday Market shone a spotlight on the growing network of self-care, health and wellness providers who have been quietly building their roots in Marshfield during the past few years.

Eleven different service vendors attended the event, many of which were founded and operated by female entrepreneurs.

Promoting their services, each vendor sold gift certificates and healthcare products, in addition to offering samples of their services, including live botox injections, flash tattoos and piercings, facial waxings, massage therapies and makeup services.

“We wanted to showcase what [these businesses] do and help people realize what’s already here,” said Marsha Bushman, founder of The Coven and one of the event’s organizers. “A lot of these businesses are small; they’re just trying to get their foothold. Offering this space gives them the chance to be seen.”

The organizers’ decision to hold a wellness-focused event reflects Marshfield’s own growing adoption of health and self-care services.

Explaining this recent surge in interest, Marsha, who herself has over 25 years of experience in the healthcare industry, said, “In the Midwest, we tend to be slower adopters. Functional medicine, integrative medicine, med-spa services—they’re not new concepts. But the availability we have now in Marshfield is entirely new.”

To Marsha, several forces are driving this growth: a fractured national healthcare system, practitioners burnt out after COVID seeking more personalized work and technological advances that make wellness products and services more accessible to communities.

With these social changes, consumers are changing too. “People are getting savvier,” Marsha said. “We’re all thinking about health and wellness at every age and asking how it fits into our lives beyond the traditional healthcare system.”

The holiday market highlighted just how diverse healthcare services—and the definition of wellness—can be. Wellness involves mental health, physical care, hormone balance, lifestyle changes, and even “frivolous” acts of pampering.

“Some services seem frivolous, like nail art, but they genuinely support mental health,” Marsha said. “Wellness is physical, mental, hormonal—all of it….People just don’t even realize that those services are available even outside of our traditional health care system.

“Certainly none of these services are trying to replace what traditional medicine provides, but there are ways to augment and to help people feel supported in that wellness journey.”

With more awareness of the self-care alternatives outside of traditional healthcare systems, the Marshfield public can begin to take the first steps on their own wellness journeys—journeys that the growing number of wellness-centered businesses in the city have been arduously paving the way for.

Continued next week