The Salty Souls Experience: Surf Retreats Create by Women, for Women
She is Canadian, she is a surf lover, a yoga teacher and also an inspiring instagrammer. Erika Drolet travelled the world before creating The Salty Souls Experience in 2015, women-only surf and yoga retreats based in South America and Bali.
Erika is with us today to talk about the beginnings of The Salty Souls Experience and how she is running this innovative business.
Click here to listen to the Podcast:
The exciting beginnings of The Salty Souls
Few years ago, Erika quitted her job and deciding to go travelling. That year, she met Marie-Christine Amyot in 3 different places in the world. Few months later, they landed at the same time in El Salvador, arrived at the same time at the same beach.
The combination of these funny circumstances caused the two friends to start talking about The Salty Souls, and the project was born. They wanted to find a way-won to keep living on the beach and Erika wanted a real crew of girls who wanted to get wet! They started the experience in El Salvador, the first destination of the business. Two years later, they opened Ecuador as a destination.
The strong and fun girls team
“We comes as a package now!”, she said laughing. The Salty Souls is composed of a real girls family. Erika grew up around boys but she was craving to having a crew girls and do with them what the boys do. Even if it’s challenging sometimes due to a lot of ups and downs, this strong team is a real strength to keep going the retreats they offer and a good reminder of their values.
The challenge of setting up a business in an unknown country
“There is this idea that we can just go somewhere start a business and use a beach and just working. When you find yourself in these little beach towns, locals are pretty protective of their beach, their waves, environment.”
As Erika said, they had this idea to create a sort of “mobile” retreat at the beginning and set up the business in multiples places. But to create a good and sustainable experience, the immersion in the culture of the place is really important to have a connection with the locals.
“You come to a place with your ideas and strategy, but then you realize it is important to really bond with the locals and be able to listen their ways.”
Take time and invest some of energy into developing a relationship with locals is also an opportunity to create added-value because that will make the experience richer and the locals will be happy to contribute to the project.
The importance of being constantly in people's minds
Between the time that people book their trips and the time they actually come, there is time and people will probably go seing others surfcamps and seing cheaper offers for example.
“When you buy a tee-shirt, it can be very impulsive. But when you buy a retreat at $2,000, it’s not a overnight decision, it takes a while.”
What create the success of The Salty Souls is that the guests keep hearing and seing the Salty Souls everywhere: it could be friends that came back to a Salty Souls retreat, someone on the street wearing a Salty Souls shirt, seing new posts of the company on social media.
“We are big on social media for sure; Instagram is one of the most use tools.”
Social media definitively give a company much more credibility. The number of people that follow a company is a community and that is what people trust. From the beginning, The Salty Souls understood that concept and hire a photographer for every retreat to be able to get a good quality content for social media and also to showcase what the retreats really look like.
Covid-19 and the future of The Salty Souls…
Like many companies all over the world, The Salty Souls is on a hold and waiting for better times to come.
In 2018, Erika and her crew launched The Salty Club. This online version of the Salty Souls retreats has set 2 objectives: offer the guests who came to a retreat to keep evolving and stay connected and it also gives the opportunity to people who are enable to come to the retreat to experience The Salty Souls at home. It gives access to surf inspired workouts, yoga sessions, interviews, masterclasses, healthy recipes and nutrition guides and so on.
“No better time to add offer at-home retreats so it’s growing, become even more popular, right now it’s our main focus!”
Want to learn more about this business? Go listen our podcast with Erika Drolet!
To follow this business on Instagram: @thesaltysouls and @thesalty.club.
Podcast and interview by Solene
Addictive traveler who gives a voice to the entrepreneurs who inspire us in the surfing world, Solene is collaborating with Surfpreneurs Club as an intern.
