The moment I knew Main Character Club was more than a side project
I was standing on the staircase overlooking a group of 45 amazing women dancing in the halls of Ardtornish House after a 5 day transformative and immersive retreat.
They were completely carefree, full of joy and donning their most magnificent gowns after a week of magic at Main Character University. And I got hit with this sudden realisation. Oh wow. There really is something here. This is so much bigger than I thought.
Three years of following breadcrumbs
For the three years I’d been running the Main Character Club, I'd been slowly following breadcrumbs of intuition. Picking up ideas, launching concepts, hosting events, and growing a team. Never looking up to see the bigger picture, that was never my intention.
It started with me doing a photoshoot here and there. Then 15 person, two-hour experiences in Edinburgh. Then March 2023, I ran 30 events in 30 days, which nearly finished me off and taught me more about this business than anything before. I then ran our first summer camp and then all of a sudden this enormous immersive experience that the version of me from 3 years ago couldn’t have imagined ever being able to run.
But I was! I was doing it! And I was watching a profound transformation happen in a group of women who had stepped so far outside their comfort zone to hand over their time, their money, their energy and their vulnerability to me and the MCC, and to a room full of strangers.
Don’t get me wrong I always believed in my ability to run a business well, but at that exact moment, experiencing one of the biggest fortnights of my life and having hosted 2 back to back 5 day immersive retreats for a total of 90 women, I genuinely felt like something had shifted in me and the MCC had entered a new era, one I never could have anticipated in my wildest dreams.
It took me a month to talk about it without crying
That’s not a figure of speech. It took a whole month.
MCU had deeply changed me and my life as much as it changed anyone who came. Watching so many women feeling the exact same was kind of hard to fathom. It was near impossible to articulate to people and we had to keep pulling the old “you just had to be there” because you really did.
What I realised afterwards
I spent a long time in deep contemplation after both semesters of MCU and what I landed on was this. I had really grown something that had become bigger than me, bigger than the events and the photoshoots and the online community.
The MCC had become an ethos. The energy and values were being carried around the world by the women who’d been part of it, and the effect was reaching well beyond anyone who’s ever been in the same room as us.
I had mums and partners messaging me saying “my loved one has had such an incredible shift since your event, it’s so wonderful to see”. What an incredible message to receive about a business that started as a TikTok joke 3 years ago. It felt monumental.
Why the fantasy part isn’t decoration
Here’s the thing I didn’t expect, and the thing I now think matters most.
I’ve always been a huge fan of self development, self improvement and living a bold life, but to articulate this through a fantasy experience or using fantasy vocabulary is far more impactful than I ever could have imagined.
I realised how much fantasy and whimsy have a profound and transformative impact on us and our ability to live like the main character. What I mean by that is, our lives are here to be lived by us, we are not the side characters, we really are the leads and we need to start acting like it.
It’s been such an unexpected joy to be able to cross over my love for self development and love for fantasy and let those two worlds collide and create some real, impactful change on women’s lives and I know it’s only going to get better from here.
Where that leaves us
The Main Character Club really did start off as a way to help women connect through experiences they actually loved. It’s grown into a way of approaching life with transformation, connection, elevation and whimsy as a priority and has created lasting and impactful change on a huge community of women.
I still can’t fully grasp the depth of impact our realm has had on women, and I'm not sure I ever will.
But having that moment on the staircase of Ardtornish House in 2025, I realised that this is just the beginning of something huge.
