Nominee Summary
Rvival creates bespoke nature-focused experiences, working with traditional Scottish estates for corporate clients and high-profile individuals like David Beckham, connecting them with the knowledge and skills that connect us to nature. Eliza Brown started Rvival in 2023, wanting to ‘influence the influential’ by taking them into nature, teaching skills we’re losing, and helping them to make significant change. She brings together people such as herbologists and ghillies, to share their skills, knowledge and stories within bespoke experiences. She has seen first-hand the impact these experiences have, with clients using them to influence the world through their companies, audiences and network.
What makes your nominee stand out?
Experiences offered by Rvival vary, depending on the client and the traditional working estates Rvival takes them to. It can be a series of days including hunting; cooking food over fire; foraging to discover the flora and fauna of the area; travelling with ponies; wild camping; and natural navigation. Clients can also go to islands for an immersive survival experience called ‘Wild Isles'. The team makes it stand out – their personalities, their authentic, ‘real deal’ selves. They live and breathe what they teach – it’s their lifetime of knowledge, skill and connection to a place and they’re passionate about it. Something magical happens when you put them in front of influential people. Rvival helps people connect with nature, gets them using their hands, and gives them an understanding that in nature is where we should be, in an ancestral way. You can find a missing piece in yourself. The team and guests become a unit in the process – a family. Rvival didn’t plan to stand out, but it does because of the people, the places, the stories and the authenticity of the escapes.
Supporting the local community
Rvival works with estates across Scotland, supporting them through delicate diversification, giving highly knowledgeable and skilled people a platform to share their stories and their skills, as well as building experiences that bring a new form of income without the need for infrastructural investment or mass tourism, but through experience. They have built a pricing model to suit and ensure investment into a place and its team. Rvival’s business model aims to put back into the land and place it works with and represents as a collective. Rvival supports heritage and craft, and works with luxury brands, and hotel and hospitality partnerships in creating unique experiences for their audiences.
Maintaining high ethical/environmental standards
The biggest part of reconnecting the audience with nature is not by passing through it, but being immersed in it. Rvival believes we’re losing the ability as humans to really tune into the smallest of things. Rvival believes it takes time to tune into a place, and they create that time for their guests to really start to get to know a place, its environment and the people within it. Everything the company does is about slowing down. It's an investment in learning – learning about trees and flora and fauna for hours to cook outdoors. Rvival helps clients reconnect with a sense of purpose. The value in that is about helping others to protect nature and the environment. It takes inspiration from David Attenborough, who said: “We won’t protect what we don’t understand and we won’t understand what we haven’t been taught." You care more if you’ve experienced it and have heard real stories from real people. Rvival is not just about doing something but investing in learning, experiencing things from a whole new perspective and returning to a world we are at risk of losing through modern day society.
