With 800 employees, €59M turnover and 6.6% annual growth since 2010, Raulic is the leading independent family group in the thalassotherapy sector in France, mainly thanks to its Thermes Marins facility and its Aquatonic programme.
The Thermes Marins, an emblem of Saint Malo
The Thermes Marins facility, opposite the large beach of Le Sillon at Saint Malo, is one of the emblems of the pirate city and has become one of the most popular seawater therapy destinations.
Raulic has developed a wide range of packages and services to attract customers and expand. Its 2- to 5-star hotel packages are suitable for all budgets and can host its 36,000 customers every year.
The group’s success can be traced to its expertise in innovating and proposing different care methods, for example its “Biocéalgue*” seaweed body wrap, affusion modelling**, inclusive nutrition, etc.
The group’s positioning in a new generation thalassotherapy with an extensive, differentiated range has won over a broad clientèle: the thirty-somethings turn to seawater therapy to rest or relax, senior citizens to relieve arthritic pain, for example. It is also banking on the impeccable quality of all the services it offers its customers. It has therefore incorporated all the businesses it uses: laundry, breadmaking, pastries, chocolates and fruit pastes, etc.
The family business has also developed its own line of care products with some thirty items designed for private individuals and fifty or so for professionals. These products are marketed in France in the group’s establishments and via its online shop and internationally through its network of distributors in fifteen countries, especially Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Switzerland, Korea and Singapore.
Aquatonic urban seawater therapy centres
Serge Raulic, the founder of Thermes Marins, developed an Aquatonic programme in 1987, for which an international invention patent was lodged. Aquatonic is a series of pools with different temperatures wherever you move to bring vasoconstriction and vasodilation into play. This concept offers leg treatments with different jets, jets for the back and a jacuzzi at a higher temperature. The workshops allow people to remain in the water for three quarters of an hour, to make the most of the heat of the water and the effects of massage.
Several Aquatonic fitness centres have opened in Rennes, Nantes and Paris Val d’Europe, seeking to differentiate themselves from urban cardio-training gyms and to bring an aquatic and spa dimension. Each unit covers about 2000 m2 and normally has two pools, ten to fifteen spa cubicles and teams of forty people.
Internationally, the group has supported local investors in designing and constructing some ten centres, mainly in Bali, Japan, New Caledonia, Kuwait, Egypt and is now looking at China.
* a warm kelp cream, the most concentrated on the market, is applied to the customer lying on a heated care bed; at the end of the treatment, the cream is rinsed off with warm seawater without the customer moving from the care bed using draining manoeuvres.
** general modelling of the body, under a fine hot seawater drizzle applied by a hydrotherapist.
