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A little more about the people behind the Stile app and why we felt the need to create this digital community…
Let me introduce myself…
My name is Rachel, I’m a wife, a mother, and the co-founder of Stile.
I spent the first part of my childhood on a smallholding in Warwickshire. My father is a livestock auctioneer, and my mother comes from a line of dairy farmers. My earliest memories were of bottle-feeding lambs, helping with sheep checks, running sales sheets at the market and hours spent messing around with my very naughty Shetland. I feel like farming and the countryside is in my blood, it has so heavily impacted who I am today.
We moved to Oxfordshire when I was still fairly young and unfortunately had to leave the farm, but the village we moved to was still quite rural and I was lucky enough to continue riding and used to visit Dad at the market regularly.
I think growing up with a connection to the countryside has given me a huge amount of respect for the land around me and a sense of being a small part of something much bigger. It has taught me the value of animals but also the realities of mother nature, that we can love and cherish them but also have a responsibility to manage them and that sometimes means tough decisions. It has most definitely taught me the value of good food and the effort that goes into producing what we consume – this is something I’m dedicated to teaching my two young daughters.
I’m drawn to the countryside because it feels like home, but more than just good memories… I think in our modern world we are at risk of losing a connection to our heritage and our animalistic parts. Being outside is wonderful for our mental health, being active is good for just about every part of us, eating decent food to fuel our bodies works wonders. I am certainly a better version of myself when I’m in the countryside.
The idea for Stile came about as myself and my husband were getting fed up with having our content blocked on current social media platforms. My husband, Ian, is a gunmaker and I have previously worked for several shooting grounds and gunmaking companies. We also saw a lot of trolling online, uneducated and nasty comments, about farming and fieldsports.
We felt that there should be an alternative to the current social platforms that had more educated, fair posting policies and worked to connect liked minded individuals, and to support and promote small rural businesses.
It is still early days for Stile, we’ve launched an MVP (minimum viable product) as a prototype and are now looking to grow. The mission is to provide a digital community where people can meet new friends, try new rural experiences (fly fishing, shooting, deer stalking etc.) and consume authentic, valuable content without all the background noise and trolling. We want people to use Stile to find what they want to find, then put their phone down and enjoy the countryside around them, not be sucked in for hours of doom scrolling and brain rot.
Where Stile is now…
Stile is live on the App Store and Google Play, and our small but wonderful community is growing steadily.
The app is currently pretty basic as its entirely self funded, but we are working hard in the background to progress and the future is so exciting.
Our goal is for the app to provide personalised recommendations for people and businesses to connect with, as well as to host amazing exclusive and educational content, promoting all parts of rural life.
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