We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lindsay Ridenour. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lindsay below.
Lindsay , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Do you take vacations? Why or why not?
This is an interesting question for someone who has made it her job travel. Taking vacations is what got me into this; my business partner, Sarah Driggs, and I bonded over our shard love for travel and the fact that friends and family often asked our advice or for our help when planning their own vacations. Our website started as a place to share inspiration by writing about places we’d been and sharing our photos. Instagram influencing was taking off (this was about 8 years ago mind you) and we found ourselves in the right place at the right time to begin a business. Suddenly on the road 2 weeks a month, our vacations were now work trips where we had little downtime and were hustling to produce successful campaigns. Over time, we found a balance between working, gathering content, and sharing on social and actually relaxing and enjoying the places we were fortunate enough to visit. Now, we both have little kids who often travel with us and let me tell you, whether its a work trip or a true vacation, if the kids are along, it’s a trip. Maybe one day it will feel like a vacation again but with little ones, it’s the same schedules, whining, and growing pains just with different scenery – though our children are very good travelers. To anyone struggling to find the time to step away from work for a vacation I say: Take the time away and use up every last vacation day you’re given. We are humans not computers – we need time to unplug, reset, and enjoy time with the people we love most.
Lindsay , 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?
My name is Lindsay Ridenour and I co-own the luxury family travel brand Compass + Twine. We are bloggers and social media influences in the travel realm, love creating content and sharing new destinations with our audience. We started our company in 2015 but travel blogging was never what we set out to do. I am a former news anchor and reporter and my business partner Sarah Driggs was in finance for many years. The skills we gained from those careers have helped us immensely in running our own business but at the time, we both felt stuck and were aching for a change. As avid travelers, we decided to get our travel agent license and build a website where we’d write about our favorite places and share photos, as inspiration for our clients. Social media influencing was just starting to be a real thing and we worked hard to make a space for ourselves there. At the time, w e both lived in NYC but once we both started families, we left the city. I’m in Minneapolis now with my husband and 2 kids, and Sarah lives in Houston, TX with her family. We don’t get to travel together often anymore – life is busy with toddlers and babies- but I am proud of the evolution Compass + Twine has made. We share luxury family destinations now and love working with family friendly brands to highlight best in class travel related products for kids and families. We made slight changes to our content and in doing so, gained new audience members and opened the door to tons of potential partnerships.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
Sarah and I are extremely generous when it comes to content sharing. Most travel bloggers we know are a bit stingy when it comes to giving partners content from campaigns. But the way we see it, if we snapped a ton of great images and only need 5 for our blog and social media, why not allow our partners to use the rest? We pride ourselves on spreading the word about places, hotels, and brands we love and don’t hesitate to write an article about them for some of our writing partners, even if that wasn’t part of the initial collaboration. We believe this sets us apart from others in our industry in a big way.
How’d you meet your business partner?
Sarah was at my wedding in 2012 and I didn’t even know her. Her boyfriend at the time (now husband) works with and is friends with my husband. So they were invited and kindly made the trip from NYC to TN for our nuptials. After our honeymoon, I moved from Chattanooga, TN to NYC where my husband already lived. I was lonely and Sarah didn’t hesitate to invite me to brunch or out for a glass of wine with her friends in the city. She wrapper her arms around me and welcomed me into her circle and I am forever grateful. Over wine one evening in TriBeCa, we decided to start a travel company and after a few glasses, we’d named our business Compass + Twine. That was in 2015. Flash forward to now and we are still working on our growing business, take family vacations together and get to watch our kids become friends! She is my best friend and business partner so it’s truly the best of both worlds.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.compassandtwine.com
- Instagram: @compassandtwine
- Facebook: @compassandtwine
- Twitter: @compassandtwine
- Other: TikTok: @compassandtwine