This March, Molly Cooper, the Founder and Host of the Apple Top Ten Podcast, Curated Spaces, is Launching a New Platform to Connect Curious Travellers and Britain’s Best Slow Living Spaces.
Molly and her new co-founder, India Hogg, are on a mission to reignite real world connection through a tech platform and community club.
From Podcast to Platform
The Curated Spaces podcast has captured the stories of leading founders and creatives, across hospitality, design, and travel, and has regularly secured over 10K monthly listeners.
Guests have included Ben Harper, Group CEO of Watergate Bay, Hector Hughes founder of Unplugged, and interior designer Francesca Rowan.
Initially Molly thought the series would focus more on design elements, however deeper conversations and topics evolved and revealed themselves, around mental health, sustainability, and the importance of bringing people together.
Unexpectedly, guests would honestly and bravely recount the initial risk they took to get their dream projects off the ground. This included putting their life savings, with no previous hospitality experience, into breathing new life into spaces and communities across the country.
Molly commented, “Curated Spaces is about living life in full colour and connecting deeply with the spaces and faces around us. I’ve been blown away by the response to Curated Spaces – it’s been an incredible journey seeing how the story behind each space has resonated with listeners and reaffirmed for me, just how important these places are and the impact they have on people’s lives. What started as a project exploring the stories behind boutique spaces has snowballed into a community of curious travellers and slow living spaces, around the UK. From founders sharing their stories of burnout and loneliness to the spaces leading the charge in rewilding and sustainable food production.”
Whilst recording, Molly herself fell ‘back in love’ with the UK. Discovering brilliant spaces across the country, where people are doing incredible things for their local communities, sustainability, food, and design, continues to be both motivating and inspiring. This resulted in the content evolving to create a ‘snapshot’ series, featuring condensed macro themes covering lifestyle trends and travel guides.
The Launch of a New Community Inspired Guest Platform and Club
Having sat down with the founders and owners of over fifty boutique spaces around the country, Molly realised there was a shared frustration with incumbent booking platforms, whose high fees and legacy design, provide a poor user experience for spaces and bookers alike.
Molly made the decision to launch a design-led travel platform, that puts the joy back into booking, by championing a curated selection of Britain’s best boutique spaces, while supporting their founders; through 0% commission bookings and innovative features designed to:
· Boost low season/midweek bookings.
· Generate press coverage and social media exposure.
· Secure brand partnerships and content creator collaborations.
From weekly giveaways to flash sales, and last-minute availability, users will feel a warming holiday glow from the moment they start to imagine their text trip.
The platform has harnessed recent improvements in software development technology, making it easier and quicker to create enterprise grade products, at a fraction of the cost of traditional in-house front end/back-end tech teams.
Molly commented “Incumbent booking platforms are 20 years old with expensive legacy tech and are unable to tap into the potential new development opportunities platforms now offer. They also don’t enable venues to maximise their exposure via new technology and media e.g. ‘User Generated Content’. And most importantly, we want to ensure we pass the huge savings on to the spaces we feature, to ensure their continued success.”
The User Experience
By combining magazine standard curation with the authenticity of real-life travel stay-cation experiences, within a design-led platform, they have perfectly captured the ethos of the podcast, by helping and supporting curious travellers to discover slow living spaces and the founder’s story behind them.
A Wellbeing & Sustainability Ethos
Offline is the new luxury. In a world where we all spend too much time online, onscreen and on the sofa, Curated Spaces is on a mission to reignite real world connection by helping people to discover the best boutique spaces to stay and under the radar finds around the country.
The platform has been designed to appeal to what Molly and Holly understand to be their key audiences; young professionals looking to escape from the city, empty nesters wanting to reconnect with nature and time to themselves, along with partners and families who don’t want to sacrifice on style or comfort for their escape too.
With all the venues will being under the radar, and without the need to travel overseas, the platform offers a more sustainable approach to travel experiences.
The Creator Club, a Space for Venues to Connect
The ‘Creator Club’ is a secondary streamlining marketing tool, available to all venue partners, allowing them direct access to journalists, influencers, and content creators.
This will enable busy founders to easily invite them to their space for collaborations and exclusive one-of-a-kind events. Molly and India wanted to eradicate high booking commissions, by replacing them with fair, transparent packages.
Based on being a highly successful creator herself, India commented “As a creator myself, having witnessed the challenges of bridging the gap between spaces and storytellers first-hand, I am passionate about creating a collaborative space for creators to thrive and to tell their stories authentically. Simultaneously, I’m committed to partnering with brands to navigate the evolving landscape of social media marketing. The idea that creators need spaces to create, and spaces need creators to tell their story, is what drives our mission to foster meaningful and real-world connections, in today’s evolving digital age.”
Partner Packages
Along with the 0% venue commission, Molly and India will offer separate content packages for different spaces according to their size and requirements with prices starting at £25 per month.
The app will be live from 19th March, in the meantime venues and creators can apply to join the platform via the Curated Spaces website, with all applications reviewed on an individual basis.
app.curatedspaces.club
Launch venues include:
Updown Farmhouse, Deal, Kent
The Queens Arms, Sherborne
The Collective at Woolsery, North Devon
Bert’s Kitchen Garden, North Wales
The Bell at SkenfrithHurley House, Berkshire
The Bell Inn Ticehurst
