Female founder, enthusiastic and tenacious, passionate about sustainability and travel, Hilary Matson is the Founder & CEO of Yugen Earthside. Hilary currently has several hats to wear as the CEO of a firm. Her time is divided between managing the company’s partnerships, acquiring new customers and assisting them with travel arrangements, creating social media content, and managing day-to-day operations, including keeping the company’s license, registration, insurance, and tax payments current. According to Hilary, finding new amazing partners to collaborate with or assisting customers in planning their travels makes her the happiest during the day.
Prior to founding Yugen Earthside, Hilary spent over ten years working for Amazon, initially at their Seattle headquarters before moving to their France branch. She worked for Amazon in a number of positions, including financial analyst, inventory manager, and senior product marketing manager. She left Amazon to pursue a career better aligned with her values and interests.
Below are highlights of the interview conducted between World’s Leaders and Hilary Matson:
Describe who you are as a person, inside and outside of the workplace.
I am motivated, focused, and a bit of a workaholic inside the workplace (which is my Paris apartment, by the way). I possess a strong attention to detail, love looking at data and metrics, and find great joy in both discovering new sustainable tour operators for us to partner with as well as helping clients find and book their dream trip.
I love traveling (obviously), and specifically enjoy traveling by train to every possible corner of France. Another main love of mine, in addition to travel, is cooking — so when not working, I’m usually making meals from scratch. I also enjoy running, yoga, and essential oil baths as my preferred ways to relax!
Tell us about the inception of the company. How did it all start?
Leaving the fast-paced corporate world gave me a chance to really think about what direction I wanted to take my career in. I did a brainstorming exercise about things I like, things I’m good at, and things I want to do. When I stepped back and looked at those ideas together, I came up with the idea of launching a sustainable travel booking platform and resource hub.
I realized I had no idea how to start a company, though! This led me to pursue an MBA, which I earned from top-ranked HEC-Paris in June 2020. HEC boasts an entrepreneurial program within their MBA and is known for producing CEOs. As part of my studies there, I wrote my business plan for Yugen Earthside and started working on it full time upon graduation.
What has made you successful? What do you value?
I think knowing my why has helped me be successful. My why—and really the mission of the company—is to make it easier for people to understand, discover, and book responsible trips. There are a lot of ways that can be gone about in order to achieve this. Staying true to why I’m building this company has let me adapt it and evolve it along the way. I think that this type of flexibility is essential for young companies.
What are the major services of the company and how do the company to get ahead in the competition? What value-added services does the company provide?
The crux of our business is helping small groups of families and friends book responsible trips. For example, we’ve helped groups of friends book a sustainable self-guided walking holiday in Portugal’s Douro Valley, and we’ve helped a family book a privately guided ethical climb of Mount Kilimanjaro followed by a responsible safari in Tanzania.
While we focus on groups, we also provide services to individuals or couples traveling together. We help these guests either book spots on responsible fixed-departure trips (where they’ll meet like-minded travelers) or provide ad-hoc consulting, research, and advisory.
For all our clients, we take a 360-degree, holistic approach to sustainable travel. This means suggesting travel insurance through our B-Corp certified, 1% for the Planet insurance partner, as well as suggesting zero-waste travel products and travel books (from another B-Corp certified partner of ours). We also assist clients in educating and purchasing carbon offsets and removals, and make it clear how and why their trip is sustainable.
Our blog and resource center are regularly updated to continue providing easy access to how travelers can go on their adventures responsibly. This is not monetized – it’s just something we’re passionate about.
What are the most important aspects of a company’s culture? What principles do you believe in and how do you build this culture?
As a young company, our culture is certainly still evolving, but two things stand out:
- I genuinely believe transparency is the best way to combat the threat of greenwashing, which is when companies use words like “green”, “eco”, “sustainable”, etc. for marketing, rather than truly adhering to those values. We try to over-index on sustainability. We’ll tell you exactly what a partner of ours does for sustainability, and we’re not blind to the challenges that travel presents in this space.
- Walk the Walk. We promote sustainability, so it’s crucial for our company to be sustainable. To this end, we worked with an independent third party to become a verified carbon neutral company. We pay for monthly carbon removals (far more effective than carbon offsets), and pay for carbon offsets for all that we cannot remove. Additionally, we commit to donating at least 1% of our gross profit each year to causes that support the growth and development of sustainable tourism. We’re happy with our progress in this space so far, but we know it’s not enough. Our sights are set on obtaining B-Corp certification as soon as we can afford it!
What is the significance of innovative ideas in the company?
You always have to be innovating. You have to constantly be speaking to clients so that you can continue building a product that will solve a problem for them. This means knowing what they want and designing solutions that will make it easier for them to accomplish what they came to your site to do. As a young, scrappy company, we are always thinking of how we can progressively innovate on behalf of our mindful travelers.
Give us your opinion on; do organizations rely heavily on individual heroics or team processes?
Our company does not have enough employees to provide a thoughtful response to this. In general, though, it does take a mix of individual and team contributions. Individuals may have great ideas and visions, and it may take a team to bring that to life. I don’t think organizations should be completely focused on individual participation or team participation. Even if team dynamics are heavily favored, an individual who goes above and beyond to deliver results on time or delight a customer is a great thing.
What advice would you give someone going into a leadership position for the first time?
Be confident in your vision and don’t be afraid of feedback.
