FAB medispa brings health and beauty to Minges Creek Athletic Club

Angela Duckworth Brannen wants her clients to look and feel their best.

So when it came time for the nurse practitioner to find a brick-and-mortar location for her startup medispa, she looked to the Minges Creek Athletic Club. 

Tucked in Battle Creek’s busiest commercial corridor at 21 Minges Creek Place, the 57,000-square-foot facility is home to several independent and locally owned businesses that focus on health, wellness and beauty. That now includes Brannen’s FAB Face and Body, an aesthetics practice that offers botox, dermal fillers, microneedling (collagen induction), B12 shots and teeth whitening.

“I had this vision of a med spa or a vibe of people that were working on what makes them happy,” Brannen said. “…We put a lot into the renovation because we wanted a great space. This is my passion and I’m putting everything I’ve got into this… This is a nice friendly, comfortable environment.”

Brannan, a married mother of two, founded FAB Face and Body as a traveling business in 2020, opening the location at Minges Creek Athletic Club on February 11. There, she’s joined by aesthetic consultant and operations director Kristine Sibley, esthetician Sarah McGill and a collaborating physician.

Sibley said the response from the community has so far been “overwhelming.”

“We’ve had great community support since opening,” she said. “It can be looked at as a vanity-based business. The aesthetic industry does have a bad rap about it, being a ‘vain-type’ industry. We want to break those barriers, because really it’s about having people feel their best, and looking the way they feel on the inside.” 

Brannen said she’s happy her company is adding to the synergy at Minges Creek Athletic Club.

“We definitely have a collaboration where it seems like it’s not separate businesses in this building,” she said. “Even though we are all our own entities, it’s a really motivating and encouraging atmosphere.”

Mark Harvey, president of Minges Creek Athletic Club, purchased the property in 1999. It was established in 1976 by Marshall Garvey, who developed many of the residential and commercial properties along the Beckley Road corridor, for $1 million, about $4.7 million today adjusted for inflation.