What started as an idea to stay sane and solvent during lockdown has become a fully-fledged side hustle for Florence Achery, an interior designer from London. “I’ve been going to retreats since the 90s but I would often come away thinking I could do a better job running them myself,” she says.
Life and work, however, inevitably got in the way. But after returning from a yoga retreat in India just before lockdown started in March 2020, she finally found she had the time to make a go of things.
“My interior design business really dried up alongside the freelance work I did styling shoots for photographers so I thought I really had nothing to lose,” says Achery, 49.
She started with two retreats in Cumbria in 2021 and now does nine to ten a year, including one in India this October. She makes between £10,000 and £12,000 a year, and donates a share of the profits (£3,000 so far) to animal rights charities.
“I usually charge around £499 for three nights or around £685 for a Monday to Friday retreat and I could probably charge more but, in my experience, it’s the women who can hardly afford them who need them the most,” she says.
One of the ladies who comes on her retreats, for example, currently works as a full-time carer for her elderly mother, who has dementia, but books in a family member for four days so she can get away.
Achery would eventually like to turn the retreats into a full-time business and says she has become more selective about the interior design work she takes on. “The fact I own my own property and don’t have a big mortgage means I can afford to be more selective,” she says.
“I work on my retreats business in the evenings or at weekends… It’s very time-consuming to try and hold two different jobs but I’m at that stage of life where I felt I had nothing to lose.”