The Business.
Why launch a brand and a business around your trip? Why not just do the trip and have the time with your family? Why have sponsors? Why try and be “that” travelling family on Youtube? Why not just take a year-long holiday and leave the camera at home?
All good, valid questions. . .So if you want to know, read on.
I mean, yeah, why not? Sounds pretty tops doesn’t it? Take a year off, travel the country in a caravan, forget about work, explore, adventure, play with the kids, drink beer, swim in the ocean, toast marshmallows and live the life - every single day!
I’d call that a dream existence. . .Imagine. . .no worries, no deadlines, no plans, no dramas. Just floating wherever the breeze blew and living in the moment. I can almost feel it now, the complete cruisiness of the days, the seemingly endless succession of magical sunrises and sensational sunsets spent in compete calm, nothing required of us other than to be present with each other and to take in as much of our stunning surroundings as possible.
It was wanting to experience more places like this…
You see that dream, it’s actually a reality for some people and good on them! The grey nomads whittling away at their super funds, the families who invested cleverly and sold up the house or the ones who diligently saved for years and years to afford a work less, chill more, worry-free lap.
Yeah, we’re none of those. . .we’re the decide one day you want to travel the country in a van with your kids and try and hit the road 6 months later despite the fact that you don’t have a caravan or a suitable vehicle - or the money to purchase such.
Sounds stupid and naive, right? Yeah. We were. To be honest, I’m glad for that too - because if we’d known exactly what we were in for, we might not have tried. True story.
You see - we didn’t have a big savings account, we didn’t own a house, we didn’t have a nest egg. The only thing we had going for us was our existing business (a creative agency and production house) and the quality of our work. It was with that, we figured, that we could generate some interest from companies to produce work for them as we travelled. And to be clear - if that didn’t work. . .well, we couldn’t afford to do the trip. Simple as that.
And so down the rabbit hole we went.
It was really one of the hardest things we’ve ever done - continue running our existing business, build an entirely new brand in Salt, Earth and Sun, buy a van, a car, a canopy, and make sure it was all gear that would support our rather strange requirements. That being a totally off-road, off-grid setup with the ability to run our existing, power-hungry, agency from the road with very little compromise. A lot of people called us crazy - I’d like to thank them for that. Because it drove us even harder and well, here we are.
It was for dirty little feet like these…
Rationalising the decision to work and travel? Well, at that time for me, 70+ hour weeks were the norm, family time was limited, quite often I’d be up and gone before the kids were awake and home after they were asleep. I’d find that it had sometimes been a few days since they’d seen me, even though I wasn’t shooting interstate and had been sleeping at home every night. To say things were horribly out of balance is an understatement.
So thinking about a working trip around Australia where I did even 30 hours a week? That seemed like a complete dream by comparison and something worth pursuing at any cost. And that was the exact agreement Katie and I came to. . .”If we decide to do this, we do it at whatever cost, in whatever fashion we can. Even if it means keeping our existing car, selling everything and doing it in a camper trailer or an el-cheapo old caravan, we are willing to break literally everything to do this and work it out as we go.”
Sounds pretty intense, but the vision was strong. We had this mental story we told ourselves about how we would view things when we were on our death beds. Would we look back and say “Jeez, you know what? So glad we didn’t do that trip around Australia with the kids. It was so worth staying on the Sunshine Coast and working in our business like we did every year before that!”. . . Yeah, exactly - who would say that? We knew that even if we broke everything and achieved it in some form, it would likely be the best thing we’d ever done and only remember the amazing bits. So. . .we gave it everything!
It was that level of commitment that allowed us to press on, I think, even through the hardest parts. There was no Plan B. We just made a list of things we had to do and started doing them in the order that we could. Put it this way - at one point, we’d cancelled the lease of our primary residence, our office, sold our car, had no new place to go to upon the lease end date and still didn’t have a caravan or a tow vehicle sorted. Every single thing we could do to commit was done when it could be done and a lot of what we needed was worked out along the way.
It was chasing more moments like this…
Smart? I don’t know. It worked. So maybe. . .but yeah, it was so epicly stressful. There was always something hanging out there in the wind that would have made or broken the entire exercise and every speed bump felt like Mount Everest.
But as we progressed, we formed great relationships with some wonderful people and businesses and the vision slowly started to become our reality.
As we started to imagine the trip, what it was we wanted to do, what we could do differently and all the rest of it. It dawned on us. . .
To truly do this differently - it couldn’t just be about us. It couldn’t just be “family in van travelling country doing cool stuff”. That’s been done to death and to be honest, it didn’t really sit so well with us. We’re not usually the “look at us!” kind of people on Social Media and don’t really go looking for attention, trying to live our best life and all that stuff.
For us, it seemed that the idea of blowing through regions in a cloud of vlog dust and insta-selfies was not very enticing. If we were going to put ourselves in the public eye, we wanted it to be with good reason and bigger than to just ‘follow’ us. So we decided to put our talents and our brand to good use.
We decided that we would look for opportunities in the areas we travelled through to produce pro bono films. Imagine short documentary pieces about causes and charities in that area to help them with raising awareness and produced in the hope that it would assist them in realising better outcomes for those they represent. We had quite a bit of experience in this kind of work before with our existing business and loved the idea of what this aspect of our journey would teach our kids about our interaction with social media, the platform we were building and the positive impact we and it could have on the lives of others.
So it was with that realisation that Salt, Earth and Sun suddenly became a mission bigger than just a lap. We now had ourselves a purpose and a real reason to grow our platform outside of personal gain. On a personal level, that sat a lot better with us and we started to feel really good about what we were setting out to accomplish.
It wasn’t just the whiskey….
It was this trip…
around this fire…
we decided to make the attempt.
Once we’d worked all that out, we went to all the companies that we wanted to work with, shared the plan and the vision and asked for the world.
Most of them listened politely, most of them told us we were dreaming, some laughed. . .some told us to go away. But in the end, after much persistence and a large helping of humble pie (for me 😳) most of them decided to help us in some way.
Salt, Earth and Sun became a commercial reality. Yes, we have some commercial partners, or sponsors. . .but before you go freaking out, nobody owns us. . .we are who we are, we say what we want and the people we work with chose to work with us because they believe in our work and our mission and those things align closely with their own brands. It was with their assistance that we managed to access some of the awesome products that we’re taking on the road with us.
So in the spirit of transparency and full disclosure, we are working with Marvel RV, Norweld, Safiery, Lovells Springs & The Bush Company. We didn’t get everything for free, we still had to pay - however I’ll be honest and have nothing to hide, we haven’t paid full retail. In return for that concession, we have agreed to produce content for them for their own use, that largely, doesn’t include us! :D Hahaha. So the stuff that you see in our Salt, Earth and Sun content is not really a part of those agreements, it’s just our own opinions about the products we’re using and we did all our own research and chose those companies first. They certainly didn’t choose us! Well, not in the beginning, anyway! 😄
I mean seriously, let’s get down to brass tacks here - Salt, Earth and Sun at the time we were seeking commercial partners had no website, 37 followers on insta, 2 Subscribers on Youtube and was essentially a well-crafted dream, on paper, with no track record in the space. So if you think about it, what brand in their right mind was going to see value in us making videos about their gear as we travel and posting it to our non-existent socials? Certainly not brands of the calibre that we ended up partnering with, that’s for sure. Our offering is not our trip, but our work, pre-sold, produced as we travel.
That, laying on the floor in the office about to throw in the towel face. Documented for this very purpose.
The relief and joy we felt in this moment, in our temporary one bedroom unit accommodation, was so next level!
So there you go. . .I guess we wanted to explain this so you understand how and why Salt, Earth and Sun came to be. So you don’t think we’re wannabes who just want to be insta-famous. So you understand that something we never want to be referred to as is “Influencers”. So that your perception of us personally, is not some couple that sold out to a bunch of brands to get likes and followers. So you know our mission is as much about sharing the experiences we have as it is about positively contributing to lasting community impact in the regions we visit.