Herbalife picks pickleball to launch Philippines wellness campaign

Herbalife chose pickleball, not celebrity spectacle, to launch its Better Every Day campaign in the Philippines, and that decision signaled how far the sport has moved beyond club recreation. At Tela Park in Las Piñas, the company staged open play, games and wellness activities with Leander Lazaro and Sarah Jane Lim as the faces of the event, using two of the country’s best-known players to connect a consumer brand with a sport that now carries real market weight.

That matters because Herbalife is not treating pickleball as a one-off photo opportunity. The company said the campaign will roll out community-led activities and digital programmes built around healthier habits, including nutrition clubs, pop-up wellness sessions and run clubs. It is also looking at bigger activations ahead, including fun runs, pickleball clinics and leagues, a clear sign that the brand sees long-term value in the sport’s reach rather than a short burst of visibility.

The most telling piece of the plan is a 21-day dedicated wellness programme designed to cover physical activity, proper nutrition, and mental and social well-being. That framework pushes pickleball into the center of daily life and habit-building, not just competition. Lim’s role reinforced that message, with the campaign leaning into consistency, body awareness and the support systems that help people stay active over time. For marketers, that is the new appeal of pickleball: it is social, easy to enter and naturally tied to routine wellness.

The Philippines now gives that strategy a meaningful base. The Philippine Pickleball Federation says the sport first arrived through a clinic in Cebu in February 2016, before the Philippine Pickleball Sports Association was established on April 15, 2019. The federation says pickleball is now played daily by thousands of Filipinos nationwide, and its website lists more than 250 member clubs and 17,000 registered players. That kind of grassroots scale gives brands a ready-made participation network, not just an audience.

The infrastructure story is moving just as quickly. Robinsons Land said in July 2025 that it was building Asia’s first tournament-level pickleball center at Bridgetowne Estate in Pasig City, a Helios Pickleball Center project backed by an investment of up to P1 billion and targeted for completion by 2027. Against that backdrop, Herbalife’s campaign fits a bigger commercial pattern: pickleball is becoming a credible wellness platform for everyday consumers, and brands are starting to invest as if the sport is here to stay.

Herbalife’s own history also explains the fit. The company says it has been supporting wellness journeys since 1980 and operates in 95 markets, and its #ImWithYou healthy active lifestyle campaign launched in September 2023 as a year-long global push across those same markets. In the Philippines, pickleball now sits squarely inside that broader playbook, where sport, health and consumer habit are increasingly the same business story.