We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Annie Berdick a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Annie, thanks for joining us today. Naming anything – including a business – is so hard. Right? What’s the story behind how you came up with the name of your brand?

My co-founder Kristen and I chose the name Purpose & Pine to reflect our mission of helping women reconnect with their purpose and passions. The pine also symbolizes strength and being rooted no matter what life brings your way. Kristen and I met while working at Alford Lake Camp, a very special girls’ summer camp in Maine. The pine tree holds special meaning there, making it a fitting symbol for our business. Today, we continue to honor that connection by hosting our summer women’s retreats at Alford Lake Camp – there’s no place like Maine in the summertime!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I grew up in upstate New York and have spent the last 15+ years living in southern Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., the Bay Area, and now Gig Harbor, WA, where I live with my husband and baby daughter, Ava.

I’ve always been passionate about facilitating retreats and empowering women—whether leading events with my college’s women’s center or organizing annual cabin weekends for young adults in D.C. My greatest joy is lifting people up and creating authentic spaces for connection.

What makes Purpose & Pine special is our intentional approach to bringing women together for deep connection, in addition to fun and relaxation. We design each retreat to ensure every participant feels safe and welcomed from the start. Some women come alone, while others bring a friend or family member—but our goal is for everyone to feel equally comfortable.

Purpose & Pine retreat weekends are a balanced mix of relaxation time, optional activities like group hikes, yoga, and massages, and workshops that spark the most amazing conversations. One of the most powerful parts of our retreats is hearing stories from women of all ages and understanding how much we all have in common. I think I laugh and cry in equal parts at every retreat.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

A lesson I had to unlearn is that you have to be perfect in order to connect with people. In fact, I think that the opposite is true. I think that the less perfect and more real that you are, the safer people feel around you. Since Purpose & Pine is all about facilitating authentic connections, it’s really important to us that women feel like they can be their true selves when they attend our events. Interestingly, this has actually meant that I myself have had to model vulnerability and imperfection throughout our events!

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

Every time we host a retreat, it’s always amazing to see how the registration unfolds. During our 2024 registration period, I was 8 months pregnant. We use Facebook to run ads but someone had just hacked my Facebook account and Kristen and I were working with her neighbor, who was an employee at Meta, to figure out how to regain access to the account. I was filling out forms and uploading photos of my government ID at 1:00 a.m. to reestablish my identity and it was just a comedy of errors. However, the registration was still amazing! Every year, we somehow are able to connect with women who just seem to “get it” – they see the mission and heart of Purpose & Pine. Whether they find us from Facebook or Instagram ads, word of mouth, LinkedIn, or a Google search brings them to our website, the right people always seem to find their way to our community. That’s what makes me feel like we’re on the right track!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.purposeandpineretreats.com
• Instagram: @purposeandpineretreats
• Facebook: Purpose & Pine Retreats