Our Founder Reflects on 10 Years of We Are Explorers

A Life-Altering Bike Ride

In 2010 I had an uncontrollable urge to pursue a massive adventure, so I bought a bike on eBay, found a riding compadre (who thankfully became my best mate) and rode 38,000km from my hometown in Shrewsbury, England to Sydney. With no exaggeration, the journey completely changed my life, how I now choose to live it and what I now prioritise. Bikepacking is also a sick way of life and I’m convinced the world would be a better place if more people rode wheels through dirt.

Around kilometre 12,724

The 6 O’Clock Club

Re-urbanising myself in Sydney was a challenge, given I’d spent two years living in a tent. I found my escape by heading outside any hour I wasn’t at my 9-5 job for a quirky team-building company. Hiking, camping, MTB, 4WD, packrafting, surfing… I quickly realised that the adventure potential within just an hour or two from Sydney was mind-boggling and many other people I met wanted to experience it for themselves.

The 6 O’Clock Club – times were simpler but photo editing was not!

So I started the ‘6 o’clock club’ – a ragtag crew of new friends chomping at the bit for wild weekends out of the city. The premise was simple – meet at 6pm on a Friday and hit the collective escape button for two nights and days of outdoor mischief. The crew grew and a community of like-minded folk and friendships formed. We even did mid-week microadventures where we’d blast out of the city on Tuesday nights and be in the office with questionable odours and massive grins before the clock struck 9. Damn, we had fun.

It was now 2013/14 and Instagram was becoming a significant part of the cultural zeitgeist too, meaning the allure of the outdoors was getting impossible to avoid #campvibes #adventuretime #youdidnotsleepthere

We Are Explorers has a Namesake

On a trip to Brazil in June 2014, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I needed to take this whole idea a bit further. How can I create a platform that celebrates the simple joy and inclusivity of adventure? I wanted the adventures to be inspiring but also achievable and it was really important that the website embodied a genuine sense of community and connection. Whilst brainstorming names on the flight home Cut Copy’s We Are Explorers came on my headphones and I knew I’d struck gold.

I loved photography and writing (I kept a blog on my bike trip that raised $100,000 for charities in the UK) but hadn’t a clue about building websites. So the whole process was new and challenging, but ridiculously exciting. As a side hustle, all the relentless content writing was done before and after a pretty intense full-time job, but I was having such a good time creating and promoting the site that I just kept going.

The very first We Are Explorers logo

In late 2014 I kicked off the Explorer Challenge. The idea was to encourage creators to submit their adventures and be in the running for a gear prize from brands I’d partnered with. From packrafting down the Colo River, to canyoning in the Blue Mountains, and splitboarding in the alps, the initiative generated some cracking submissions and cemented the community-driven DNA so integral to us now. 

Maybe this thing is for real?

Over the next 18 months web traffic grew, email subscribers grew, social followers grew, and before long I had to ask myself whether I should quit a stable job and go all in on figuring out how to turn a passion project into a livelihood. I was starting to see some potential ways it could make money through partnering with aligned brands in the outdoor adventure realm – I just needed more time to figure it all out and make it happen.

The cadence of fresh articles and social posts picked up considerably and as such we started to draw an incredibly eager and engaged audience. Community initiatives kicked off too. Alongside good friends Emma Walker, Tim Ashelford, Brendan Ives, and the late Ollie Khedun we started Adventure Tales; a speaker series in a warehouse in Annandale that brought together like-minded Explorers for a night of storytelling, trip planning, and probably a few too many ales for a Thursday night. We’d regularly get over 70 people in the room and ran 14 of them over the following two years.

Adventure Tales always saw a packed out crowd

I launched paid weekend trips too – Wilderness Escapes – which made it super easy for our readers to overcome many of the barriers that stopped them from heading into the wild. We organised everything from the gear, crew, professional guides, and food and my god were they fun. 

It was around this time that I hired my first team member to help out a couple of days a week with all things social and community so that I could focus on growing the commercial side of the company. Tim Ashelford cycled over for the interview in a bid to casually impress me with the distance he rode (and the size of his ear stud). He didn’t get the job, but I did hire him as the editor a few months later which evolved over eight years to Managing Director as of April 2024 (on the condition he removed the ear stud).

Ellie, Tim, and I during a team meeting

Teams Growing on Both Sides

Jet Blaze Brydon arrived in 2017 and our little family relocated from Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs to the Northern Rivers of NSW in search of rainforest and cheaper rent. As we began working on larger-scale media partnerships with brands like The North Face, Jeep, and Canon, we started to grow and expand the business, hiring more full-time staff in Sydney (Amy Fairall and Jono Tan) and in Byron Bay (Bee Stephens). The growth meant we began renting offices in a community hub in Mullumbimby and a very fancy office in Sydney within the foundations of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

We started producing large-scale content projects for tourism boards like Destination NSW, Tourism NT, and Vanuatu resulting in a separate content agency called Explorer Studios for our dedicated film and photography services.

We produced our own films too, my favourite being Limitless, the story of Jezza Williams who turned a life-changing canyoning accident into a global movement that makes adventure sports accessible for everyone (it won best film at Australia’s first Adventure Film Festival!).

In 2019, after a chance encounter with a rainforest warrior called Kelvin in Mullumbimby, we found ourselves diving feet-first into the wild world of crowdfunding, something that’s become a key part of our business ever since. Through our community, we raised $30,000 to buy a hectare of the Daintree Rainforest and hand it over to QLD National Parks for long-term conservation. In the proceeding years, we’ve raised $40,000 to plant 8,000 trees and help rewild the Snowy Mountains, as well as $42,000 to restore crayweed off the coast of Sydney.

Bye bye blog!

Around this time we rebuilt our website from the ground up and relaunched the brand with a freshness that rivalled a crisp Granny Smith apple.

A String of Unprecedented Times

Then in early March 2020, the world went completely and utterly bananas.

Looking back on 2020 and 2021, it’s all just a blur. Whilst its impacts hit our business faster than you can say spicy cough (making staff redundant over the phone was horrible), the government’s Jobkeeper support soon kicked in and we were able to find some degree of stability again (giving staff their jobs back again was ace!). 

The result was we suddenly became an immensely relevant and useful resource to a much larger group of people around the country. So we doubled down and really built our brand during this time.

We kicked off a project called ‘Explore Your Backyard‘ helping local tour operators get through the tough times and encouraging readers to get back out there. Alongside 1.5 billion other people we launched a podcast that’s still firing on all cylinders today.

A podcast so legit we’ve got a logo

We earned our B Corp status which cemented what we stood for as a company and how we want to show up for the planet, our people, and our audience. To top it all off we won Publication of the Year at the industry’s leading award ceremony. Whoah, that was a good day.

Then just as things were beginning to feel normal, I heard the word ‘unprecedented’ again, confirming its top spot on the words-I-hate-to hear list. Mullumbimby’s rainfall hit unprecedented levels in February 2022 and the result was a biblical flood that ripped through the town and claimed many of the homes there, including mine! Escaping through a window in the middle of the night with my wife and two young kids to take refuge on our roof was an experience I won’t forget in a hurry. Explorer HQ (our Mullumbimby office) was also destroyed and with it an exodus of the six staff working from there.

We returned to fully remote working once again.

By mid-2022 we had ten full-time staff dotted around the country in Explorer Outposts, from Adelaide to Darwin, Sunshine Coast to Sydney. 

Our motley crew have canoed down the Nymboida River, kayaked to and camped on islands in Far North Queensland, and recently hiked up to The Castle in the Budawangs. Every trip is filled with laughter and I feel ridiculously lucky to work with such brilliant colleagues who all share a mutual love of being in wild places.

2024 and Beyond

Fast forward to 2024 and we’re still going strong. Not content with just ‘business as usual’, we continue to be the ambitious independent publisher we’ve always been and experiment with new initiatives (my team holds their collective breath when my sentence starts with, ‘So I’ve got this idea, how about we…’). It keeps things fresh and exciting for me, not just you!

We enlisted the expertise and charisma of Cam Doyle to travel around the East Coast of Australia in an Explorer Bus meeting local legends changing the planet for the better, creating a 26-part YouTube series called Act Local – and we just won the Best Use of Video award for it too. 

We clean up good for a bunch of dirtbags

We also finally produced a creativity competition called MOMENTS that celebrates writers, photographers and filmmakers in the Australian travel and adventure industry, which tied in rather perfectly with our ten year anniversary last month. 

I could go on but I’ll leave it there for now. 

I’ll finish by saying a massive thank you to you, dear reader. From the bottom of my now 40-year-old heart, thank you for joining us on this very fun and wonky journey. As cliche as it sounds, we really are just getting started and I can’t wait to bring you on the ride as we navigate the next ten years, map and compass in hand.