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

Hi Lilia, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

A few years ago, I was living in NYC and teaching yoga when I had gotten engaged!! As I embarked on my newly engaged journey of wedding planning, I realized that the wedding industry was majorly lacking any wellness practices for stress relief! Why did weddings have to be so stressful?! It didn’t make sense to me. Then, fast forward to my own bachelorette party (which was an absolute blast), my sister surprised me and hired a psychic to give everyone readings during the bachelorette weekend. It was hands down a highlight of the weekend and helped everyone quickly open up, share stories, laugh, and learn about each other.

Immediately I thought, “how do most people book wellness experiences like this?” I knew there needed to be an easier way for these types of experiences to be more common. That was an ‘aha’ moment. Wellness experiences and conscious gatherings are SO fun for groups to do together, but it can often be incredibly challenging to find vetted healers or guides to lead these types of sessions.

For most people, it can be really hard to find a good psychic, tarot reader, and so on. This is especially true for those traveling to a new city. On the flip side, many wellness practitioners don’t know how to price their services and would rather be offering their services than handling the logistics or payment piece of things.

I decided I would create a platform to book these wellness experiences for groups. That’s how Luv Collective came to exist! Now we offer experiences for group events ranging from bachelorette, birthdays, girl’s night, corporate events. Our services range from tarot parties, yoga, sound baths, astrology, pilates, psychic readings, and custom events. We span the range of wellness to woo-woo services :)

Lilia, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started diving into the wellness world when I was a sophomore at Cornell studying hotel management. I became spin-certified and yoga certified in college and quickly became fully obsessed with different wellness modalities and learning about spirituality.

I spent my early twenties working for different companies in the hospitality and wellness sector – so starting Luv Collective felt like a natural merging of my two passions. In general, I LOVE creating experiences and am always attending some sort of experiential activity. Hence, the idea of creating a company that provides wellness experiences! Luv Collective often feels like an extension of my interests and personality!

In regard to what I’m proud of:
I’m incredibly proud of this business that brings healers and conscious events to the forefront. COVID-19 has forced everyone to take a pause and look within. People are more conscious of how they spend their time and are being more intentional about their lifestyles and experiences. I’m proud Luv Collective is a service that benefits people to connect with themselves and others, and bring wellness to their friends and family in a fun way!

Another thing I am really happy about as a female Iranian-American is building an inclusive company. As we grow our practitioner community, we are making sure we’re centering LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC practitioners since the wellness industry has had an unfortunate history of not including these practitioners. We have a really special and magical community of healers – but you’ll have to experience that for yourself at your next Luv Collective experience ;)

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Most of our clients come from our partnerships (like event planners), Instagram, and word of mouth! So far, everything has been quite organic.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

During COVID, events went to a halt and I thought the business would close with it. Weddings and bachelorette parties were all canceled at the time (which are the majority of our clientele), which was slightly nerve-wracking. I tried to embrace the changes and actually gave myself a few months to stop working on the business. I think it can be really useful to take a break sometimes and embrace the ebb and flow of a business. But then all of a sudden within a few months, intimate gatherings became much more popular and people were doing small, private bachelorette parties – and bookings started to flood in. Since Luv Collective offers at-home experiences, we started getting client reservations and jumped back into helping our clients!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.luvcollective.com
• Instagram: @luvcollective
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lilia-karimi-a9004256/

Image Credits
@marcellalaine on instagram