Inspiration is a tricky thing. It can be found in the smallest of adventures or the grandest of schemes, quick jaunt around the neighborhood or cresting the peaks of the highest mountains. It’s also the driving force behind Wonders, an app full of community-sourced inspiration in the form of images and narratives that speak to all of our deepest urges for adventure.
Part adventure inspo, part travel guide, Wonders scours the world to find the most interesting, casual, sometimes whimsical stories of freedom and put them together in one place. We had a chance to pick the brain of Martin Ahe, CEO and Co-Founder of Wonders, who left his job, attended Harvard, and changed his whole life from one single moment of inspiration.
Q. It’s easy to get lost in the beautiful imagery on Wonders. What was the founding purpose of the app?
A. I had a job in advertising working in New York and one day I watched this movie, 180 Degrees South. It’s about the founders of Patagonia and The North Face, and it really made an impact on me. It moved me on so many levels. The movie has this strong environmental aspect to it, but the thing that really resonated is the fact that many people think that evil is just doing something bad, but evil can also be knowing something is bad and not doing something about it. And for me, that was kind of just the truth staring me in the face, about how we treat the whole environmental process.
I’ve learned that people who have been exposed to nature sort of naturally have a tendency to appreciate it and take care of it much more than people who haven’t. Living in New York, I saw it first hand. Kids who grew up there thought that bananas came from Walmart. Stuff like that. It’s not that they didn’t care about the environment, they just didn’t know what it was. Living in that sterile environment, nature’s just not a part of it. It was just this abstract concept. So the whole goal for us became to inspire people to reconnect with the natural world again, and we thought one of the best ways to inspire them to do that was through beautiful imagery and kind of make the outdoors cool again. Specifically, we wanted to target millennials, and the millennial’s device of choice is the smartphone. We put all these pieces together and decided to build an inspirational app for the smartphone with tons of visual content about travel and the outdoors. The power of storytelling is so strong. How else would you get someone to drop what they’re doing and change careers? Storytelling is fundamental.
Q. Is storytelling a fundamental part of Wonders, or was it meant to simply be a visual platform for adventure inspiration?
A. It’s a bit of both. The way it works is while anyone can consume content, we only work with a handpicked group of storytellers on the content side. Sometimes these contributors will have a deeper story to share, but mainly they submit pictures to us and tell their stories through imagery. We’ve had really personal stories with more text and we’ve had stories that don’t have any text that are just purely imagery driven, but I think both have the same impact. They both inspire us to go and do something. We get emails all the time from users saying, “Your app actually inspired me to go surfing or camping or just be more outdoorsy in general,” and it’s super validating.
Q. Wonders features community-sourced narratives and its contributors include talented photographers, outdoor storytellers and other creative sorts, as well as companies like Topo Designs and Poler. How does this variety of voices speak to outdoor enthusiasts in a unique way?
A. We believe everybody has a story to tell. We don’t discriminate between one category and the other. With companies like Topo Designs or Poler, all of their DNA has a strong environmental aspect. Everybody in this industry got into it because of a love for nature and we all want to do something about it. So regardless of who the storyteller is, if it’s good and beautiful we will publish it. Even though we get content from so many different people, it ends up feeling very balanced. It all comes together.
Q. The market for outdoor storytellers is booming to say the least. What makes Wonders different from other outdoor communities? What impact do you see user-based storytelling having on the adventure community as a whole?
A. There is definitely a community forming around this sort of content. I heard somebody say they blame Instagram for our generation’s renewed interest in the outdoors. And it’s kind of true and kind of awesome as well. Technology gets a good and bad rap, but it’s really shifting the way we’re behaving, and it’s shifting how we think of ourselves. It’s not really competitive. We’re all striving toward the same social goal. The difference comes with how we ensure that commercially we stay around tomorrow, and that’s sort of the challenge of this industry as well. We all do it a little differently. We do a lot of curation, so content quality is extremely high. We only work with the best people, whether that be content quality, mobile presence, or design. All these things we’ve found really resonate with the millennial audience.
Q. Wonders celebrates the casual adventure more than the grand, the trips we can all imagine taking in real life. Was this a conscious goal? What is the benefit of this accessibility?
A. The idea of casual outdoors is not new. When we just started with the app, one of the first people we got in touch with was Benji Wagner, Creative Director at Poler. Poler is probably one of the first brands that pioneered the idea of the casual adventurer. We totally got on board with that. It used to be “I don’t have gear. I don’t have time. I don’t have money.” There was always an excuse not to go outdoors. However, if you don’t aim to climb Denali or hike the Pacific Crest trail, you don’t have to do that. Even if you have adventures in your own backyard with a group of friends and make a bonfire, that’s good enough. It still generates these kind of cinematic moments that you can remember forever. We wanted to celebrate that. You can see the industry heading that way, too.
Q. What do you see in the future for Wonders?
A. We’re very intrigued by other forms of content that are coming out with virtual reality. We’re doing a lot of experimentation with that, the idea that you can almost hypothetically teleport people to all these locations. We have some projects in the making with brand partners that will be essentially virtual tours. We will hopefully have demos very soon.
Images courtesy of Wonders.
xx Arya
