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Walk through almost any strip mall or wellness district right now and you'll find one: a studio with glowing panels, an infrared bed or two, and a membership board by the door. Red light therapy has moved from a niche biohacker habit to a mainstream wellness service, and new studios are opening to meet the demand.
The demand is real. The trouble is that a lot of it shows up as a phone call that never gets answered. Someone with a question about safety, pricing, or how many sessions they'll need rings the front desk, gets voicemail, and books somewhere else by that afternoon.
A few years ago, red light panels lived mostly in dermatology offices and the homes of people who read a lot about recovery. Now they're a storefront business. The global red light therapy market was worth about $533.8 million in 2025 and is projected to roughly double to $1.13 billion by 2033, and Grand View Research notes that the business side of that market, including wellness centers, med spas, dermatology clinics, and gyms, holds the largest share.
It fits a bigger shift in how people spend. The U.S. wellness economy is now worth around $1.8 trillion, the largest in the world, according to the Global Wellness Institute. People are paying out of pocket for recovery, skin, and energy, and they're doing it on recurring memberships and session packages. That's a strong model for a studio, because one new client who signs up for a package is worth far more than a single drop-in visit.
Which is why the phone matters more than studio owners expect.
When someone is curious about a service they've never tried, they call. A BrightLocal survey found that 60% of consumers prefer to contact a local business by phone, ahead of email and walking in. For a service people don't fully understand yet, that preference runs even stronger, because the questions pile up before anyone's ready to hand over a card.
Red light therapy comes with a lot of those questions. Harvard Health describes the treatment, known medically as photobiomodulation, as something research suggests may help with fine lines, uneven pigmentation, redness, slow-healing wounds, and acne, while the dermatologist they quote points out that devices "must be used multiple times a week for four to six months" to do anything. Cleveland Clinic calls it an emerging therapy and is honest that the evidence is still thin for many of the claims people run into online.
So the person calling your studio wants to know real things. Is it safe for me? Will it help with what I've got going on? How many sessions before I notice anything? What does a package cost, and can I pause a membership? Those are booking questions. Answer them well on the first call and you often sign a member. Miss the call and you've handed a warm, high-intent lead to the studio one neighborhood over.
The problem isn't that studios don't care about the phone. It's that the people who could answer it are busy running the business. A red light studio is hands-on. Someone's wiping down a bed between clients, walking a first-timer through goggles and timing, restocking towels, closing out a sale. When the phone rings in the middle of that, it goes to voicemail.
Peak call times make it worse. Many of these calls come before work, at lunch, and in the early evening, the same windows when the studio is fullest and the front desk is furthest from the phone. Plenty of studios are also solo or two-person operations where there just isn't a spare set of hands.
Speed is the part owners underrate. Harvard Business Review's research on inbound sales leads found that most companies respond far too slowly, and that the chance of actually connecting with a lead drops off sharply within the first hour. A caller researching red light therapy is often comparing two or three nearby studios in one sitting. Whoever picks up and answers the questions usually wins the booking. Voicemail rarely gets a callback.
You don't need a full-time receptionist to fix this. You need every call answered, and every answer pointed toward a booked session. In practice that means a few things:
That last point protects you. Because the evidence on red light therapy is still developing, it's smart to describe benefits the way Harvard and Cleveland Clinic do, as things research suggests it may help with, and to steer clear of promising cures. An honest intake conversation sets the right expectations, which also means fewer refund requests and happier members down the line.
This is the gap most studios have after hours and during back-to-back sessions, and it's where an always-on answering setup pays for itself. An AI phone receptionist can pick up every call, answer the standard questions about pricing, sessions, and what to expect, and book the appointment straight into your calendar, whether the caller rings at 6 a.m. before a workout or at 9 p.m. after you've gone home. The point isn't to replace the human feel of your studio. It's to stop sending first-time callers to voicemail in the exact moments they're ready to book.
Run the numbers for your own studio. If a membership runs $150 a month and the average member stays nine months, that's over $1,300 in revenue from one person who called with a question. Miss three or four of those calls a week because the front desk was mid-session, and you're watching real money walk to a competitor every month, on top of the ad spend you used to make the phone ring in the first place.
Demand for red light therapy is clearly here, and it's growing. The studios that win the next few years won't be the ones with the fanciest panels. They'll be the ones that answer the phone, handle the questions with honesty, and turn a curious first-time caller into a member before anyone else picks up.
