Open
CURRENTLY BOOKING:August 10-14, Hocking Hills, Ohio
RETREATS
Creativity Retreats for FABULOUSLY-DELUSIONAL WOMEN BRINGING POWERFUL WORK TO LIFE
A curated gathering for founders and creatives in places handpicked to offer an inspired environment for your most important creative work. We choose places and design experiences that evoke a specific result for you. These experiences (and places) allow you openness to change how you think, something that’s difficult to do at home. These environments make it easy to go deep into the work only you can do. We build clarity through truth, structured deep thinking, and unstructured open space. The land, the food, and the place itself show up as collaborators- full of beauty, surprise, and delight. This is your space to lean into your own audacity and depth.
Fall Retreats
Dropping Soon
Avignon, France
September 26-30
Booking details coming soon.
Istanbul, Türkiye
October 10-14
Booking details coming soon.
Paris, France
October 26-30
Booking details coming soon.
THE HOCKING HILLS RETREAT
Your Yearly Business Deep Dive
Served alongside Ohio’s Freshest, Most Abundant Season
NOW BOOKING / AUGUST 10-14, 2026Hocking Hills, Ohio
Soft cotton sheets keep you cozy each night. A full moon begins your week. The trees stand in full leaf, and the land is at its highest moment of abundance. It’s a culmination of all that came before– the belief that goes into planting a seed, the devotion that follows as we nourish and water consistently, and then the celebration that is harvest.
As foodies, small-batch enthusiasts and relentless creatives we always set up a culinary world that could be a retreat on its own. For this iteration of Hocking Hills, we’re working with Chef Katie Tackett.
Our conversations have been FUN. We talk about crafting local sweet corn into ice cream and into slab cookies studded with giant blackberries. Strawberries swirling with fresh cream , to be dolloped softly onto your cold brew each morning, or afternoon. Whatever you’d like. Dreams of farm salads. Fresh peaches. Herbs sprinkled into greens and butter. Sourdough paired with bubbling berry jam. Watermelon and mint combining into the most refreshing thing you've ever sipped after a forest walk. And the Three Sisters (that’s corn, beans, and squash) working together on our table, the way they worked together in the earth.
All of it conspiring toward the same thing: to help you unearth what matters most, to delight you in its abundance, and to surprise you in the shapes it takes when you're not expecting it.
OPEN is honest work
No vision boards, no manifestation rituals, no "find your inner CEO" worksheets. What we offer is harder to find and more lasting: real clarity, built through truth-telling, deep conversations, and undistracted time where you can know your own opinion rather than follow some strategy or advice of anyone else. Our days are designed around land, food, and the kind of conversations that actually helps you get really clear about what you’re building, why it matters and the conversations you want to have about it online and in person.
Whatever you’re going deep on, you have the space, the structure and the surroundings to make it happen.
OPEN
To become accessible, exposed, ready to receive. To unfold from a closed position. To begin.
It's not a metaphor. It's the literal thing you cannot wait to do — with your ideas, your time, your attention, and the parts of your work you've kept folded shut.
Deep work is best done when you’re well fed, well rested and having fun.
The thing about Ohio in the middle of August is that the land is bursting with flavor, color, texture — it's the most generous the earth gets all year, everything arriving at once, nothing holding back.
We're foodies. We believe that creative nourishment is essential fuel — not a side note, not a perk, not a box checked. We know what it feels like to sit through a conference lunch of lukewarm chicken and a bread roll and try to think creatively afterward. We're not doing that to you. Nothing here could be found at a hotel conference center, a catered corporate event, or anywhere that treats food as an afterthought to the real agenda. Here, food is part of the agenda. It always has been.
Dinners are relaxed, family style — dishes spread along the table, no agenda but the conversation. Fresh bread every morning. Sandwiches on the go for excursions. Spiced nuts and plump dates always nearby. Beautiful olives marinated in fragrant lemon, garlic, and spice. Food here is a special ritual — not an afterthought, not unnecessarily fussy. It's creative. We take things too far, always in the direction of more delight, more care, more honor — for our chef, for our people, and for the land that made all of it possible.
The Deliverables
OPEN is geared to support whatever idea, project or inkling you bring. And there are also set deliverables and structure to support a fruitful creative process that can move those ideas into reality.
YOUR FOUNDER STORY–
The Founder Story is the story you build about yourself and your work that becomes your anchor when everything tries to pull you off course — your partner, your critics, your own brain defaulting to the loudest, most repeated narrative. It's not a bio. It's a counter-narrative. The one that holds the true meaning of why this has to exist and why you're the one to build it. It does double work: internal anthem and external signal at the same time.
YOUR OPENING LINES–
You will walk away with a notebook full of opening lines.
The sentences that were always underneath everything, waiting for enough stillness, enough depth, enough honest conversation to finally surface. The foundation for every product you'll build, every email you'll send, every page you'll write. Headlines that make it immediately clear who you are and why anyone should care. Words your people read and feel found by. Words you read and feel like yourself.
You don't write these. You uncover them.
That's what five days of depth, truth, and genuine creative freedom actually produces.
PHOTOGRAPHY–
A full gallery of high-quality images captured throughout the week. You working, writing in your journal, laughing at dinner, lost in a moment, on your balcony with your coffee, and in that cool new outfit you picked out just for this. The photo that stops the scroll on Instagram. The one that belongs on the cover of something. The image that welcomes your best people to your homepage or lives alongside your best Substack story.
Real. Beautiful. Different. Intentional. You.
Your opening lines along with your photography become powerful posts, carousels, Substacks, website pages, emails, brand guides, product pages, business visions. All of it offers you the ability to transform your words and thoughts into language that others can get behind.
GUIDING PRINCIPLESWE TELL THE TRUTH
OPEN has a strict no-performance policy. We don't pose for the page before we've lived it. Day one opens with a Truth Teller session — twenty minutes, one walk, no audience — where you say the thing you haven't said yet, even to yourself.
WE TRUST YOUR
OWN MIND
No templates, no worksheets, no methods built to replace your own thinking. We trust your own discernment, fed by land, food, and time. The work gets shaped by what's actually true, not by what photographs well.
WE SWIM IN THE
DEEP END
Depth reveals what we're always looking for in our work — it doesn't create it, it just clears enough space to finally see it. No templates, no shortcuts, no frameworks promising speed. What's actually there gets found one true question at a time, one detail at a time, one layer of intimacy at a time. We don't trade depth for fast.
WE’RE HEAVY ON DELIGHT
A handmade mug. Dates by your bed. Dinner set out in a field. A sweet treat in the afternoon, just because. Your journal travels with you all week, catching everything that comes rushing out. While depth expands your edge, delight turn on your light-hearted creative side.
Who we are. Who we’re not.
Truth. Not performance.
Risk as the ingredient. Not the obstacle.
Your own discernment. Not a template.
Real connection. Not small talk.
Meeting the truth. Not "I don't know."
Tuned in. Not busy.
Bravery and action. Not hiding and perfecting.
Small batch and boutique. Not performative luxury.
Comfort in service of depth. Not luxury for its own sake.
Returning to yourself. Not escaping your life.
Witnessing each other's truth. Not figuring it out alone.
Burning what needs to go. Not gossiping it out.
Generating your own clarity. Not consuming someone else's.
Stewarding what you build. Not waiting to be given something.
Foundational questions. Not fonts and colors.
The story you choose. Not the one you inherited.
MEET THE HOCKING HILLS TEAM
ALLIE | TRUTHTELLER
Allie is a truth teller and an Ex-Corporate Elder — someone already on the other side of the identity crisis many founders are just beginning to face as they think of leaving big salaries, quarterly bonuses, job titles behind for something more aligned. She left a stable corporate career while pregnant, survived the financial precarity, the relational fallout, and the years of unglamorous persistence that followed — and came out the other side with her family intact, her business real, and one life that is genuinely hers. She brings that hard-won steadiness into every Truth Teller session at OPEN, sitting with people in their most inconvenient truths without flinching — because she's already made peace with her own.
STEPH | BIZ ARCHITECT
i’m Steph. I built this site, this brand, and most of the methods you’ll find in OPEN. I study creative risk by taking it. I understand creative block by moving through it. I know that great work isn’t always easy but it’s a hell of a lot easier when we learn not to nitpick our own ideas, rely heavily on AI or outsource our truth and opinions to what feels safest. By nature I’m a pretty structured person with a very messy side. These two worlds colliding is how I somehow make space for my own magic to happen. My work with our five days together is to make sure the experience delivers big. From food to coaching to our modules and methods, every single detail is in service of your creativity. I’m equal parts hospitality as I am business and equal parts wild and weird as I a practical and structured.
KATIE | CHEF
Local, global, a steward of the beauty of food from the moment she picks it up to the point it reaches your plate. Plates of blistered green peas from the garden, piles of homegrown herbs on the chopping board, paper thin radishes mingling with slivers of cucumbers in piquant pickling, pink cauliflower and muhammara, sweet fennel made soft from the grill, thick slabs of zucchini, silky slices of ghostly-white cod slathered with thinly sliced lemons waiting for the grill, an intensely-green dressing dolloped softly on harissa-coated wedges of yellow potatoes, flavors from far and wide, strawberries made into a shrub recipe from across the ocean. Ingredient-obsessed, perpetual student, a true collaborator with the land and its offerings. This is Katie.
COURTNEY | PHOTOGRAPHER
Courtney is a photographer based outside of Lisbon, Portugal and Fort Wayne, Indiana. She’s obsessed with telling love stories, seeing every tiny detail, and bringing out the beauty of each of her clients. Courtney began her photography career in weddings and has expanded to include portraits, family sessions, styled product shoots, lifestyle and boudoir. What sets Courtney apart and why she was chosen for OPEN is her ability to tell a story through photography, to bring out your true nature, to help you see what the world sees instead of what your inner critic offers you. Courtney sees what so many of us miss. She’s naturally drawn to how shadow and light bring emotion and depth to a photo and makes her clients feel not only seen but safe– a crucial element in capturing what makes us special.