As she neared her 30th birthday, in April of last year, Taylor Madison went to see a healer in Todos Santos, Mexico. She had successfully turned her blog, “The Simple Sol,” into a boutique luxury travel agency and was rooming with two longtime best friends. But she was feeling a disconnect. “I was starting to become numb to travel,” she says. “I was staying in these super amazing hotels or on safari in Africa, but I just felt like something wasn’t right.”
Sol Society founder Taylor Madison
Amid some of the largest cacti in the world, the Dallas native wrote down three ideas that inspired her: high fashion, art, and travel. “That’s where Sol Society was born,” Madison says. “I wanted to create these trips that could evoke emotion. It wouldn’t just be about travel but about curating experiences that a community could take part in and really feel connected.”
She launched the experiential, members-only travel club at the end of 2018, using her agency expertise to design unique trips to Mexico City, Big Sur, Morocco, Marfa, Tokyo, and beyond. Areas of interest online applicants can check include wellness, philanthropy, architecture, and food and wine. Madison isn’t targeting a particular demographic, but the immersive experiences—which are limited to about 12 members—do require a certain mindset. “There has to be a willingness to show up and be your authentic self, which I think takes a lot of bravery and vulnerability,” Madison says. “At the end of the trip, you’ll leave feeling changed.”
“There has to be a willingness to show up and be your authentic self, which I think takes a lot of bravery and vulnerability. At the end of the trip, you’ll leave feeling changed.”
One Sol Society member, Courtney Anderson, can attest. After returning from Marrakesh in March, Anderson decided to leave her position as creative director at Favor the Kind to pursue her own design career full time. But she started the journey to Morocco with some hesitation. “It was completely out of my comfort zone to travel internationally with people I haven’t met,” she says. “I was anxious everyone would already know each other.”
After a pretrip meetup at fellow Sol Society member Brittany Cobb’s Flea Style boutique in Deep Ellum, where she realized every jewelry designer, wedding planner, and photographer on the trip was a stranger, her worries were eased. “We started the trip setting intentions, and everyone’s was really just to try to get a bird’s-eye view of our own lives, to reassess,” Anderson says. “It was so cool and kind of magical to be taken out of your bubble and immersed in a whole different culture with new people. By the end, I was completely inspired to give my own thing a shot.”
courtesy Sol Societycourtesy Sol Societycourtesy Sol Societycourtesy Sol Society
Cobb, who helped develop the Marrakesh trip, remembers one day when transportation was the back of a motorcycle. “Up until that point, we had taken camels and ATVs, so I wasn’t really sure why we needed to add that, but it ended up being my absolute favorite experience. Three hours in the desert, straddling a hot Italian man on a vintage sidecar was like living all my fantasies.”
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