Words by: Trudy Darmanin
Photography by: Yentl Spiteri
Our small but feisty creative hub was born during the pandemic, with creative peaches working remotely tucked in their cosy corners of the world and magicking ideas into life in between video calls, Slack chats and the occasional sharing of memes and playlists.
This totally worked and is still working, but the concept of togetherness which seemed vague and distant for months was becoming more of a necessity as time rolled by. And with Von Peach’s first birthday approaching, we knew we couldn’t pass this by without at least downing a drink or five to celebrate, in person (with an actual toast and glasses clinking audibly).
So we did it. We packed, overpacked, bore our vaccine certificates defiantly at the airport gates, and flew off to meet up in sunny Sardinia.
What can we say about being together? About living with strangers who aren’t really strangers for a whole week?
I won’t go into the nitty gritty detail – we’ll leave that to Glenn Galea, who’s taken it upon himself to conduct a deep dive into his impression of every team peach before and after the offsite. But I’ll break it down into the most meaningful three things I observed manifesting themselves when two founders from Switzerland, two designers from Italy, a writer from Malta, and myself, also from Malta and a hybrid of the latter two, closed off those couple thousand kilometres separating us and touched down on common soil.
A shared love between different humans
Some things just connect people. Food, wine, and in our case, the love of creativity and adversity to anything plain and conventional. While we had known each other remotely for some time, living with people, sharing space, elevates the relationship to a new level and we somehow managed to do just that harmoniously from the get go, despite our wildly different personalities. And I really believe that this is because it is innate to the creative’s nature to accept and embrace the different.
“Well, that was actually quite fun wasn’t it?”
Another thing about being with people – the lines of your comfort zone start to blur, maybe because there’s safety in numbers or maybe just because everyone’s buzzing about an activity and the hype is infectious. So we ended up doing things I’m usually a bit hesitant about, like sailing in high winds or climbing up an Italian hillside full of steps at baking temperatures. Loved the former, survived the latter.
On that sailing trip. Our offsite planning queen Yentl booked us a four-hour sailing experience with Sardinian heart surgeon (I’m not joking) Paolo, who sailed us through the winds to beautiful Poetto, allowed us time for a dip in the sparking blue sea, and made sure we learnt enough to at least survive another sailing trip if we ever had the chance to.
And now, we’re ready to roll.
No, we didn’t just drink wine and lounge on the beach!
We spent time working together in person to plan the next three months of Von Peach’s shiny future, and it’s got to be said, pasting pastel sticky notes onto a wall in a villa in Sardinia injected us with an excitement that an online Activities board never could have. We discussed and forged a clear vision for what’s next, where each team peach would like to head, and drew our own path up the milestone mountain.
Now we’re back, sun drenched, happy. We have toasted to Von Peach turning 1, we have enough random videos of each other to last until our next meet-up, and more than enough ideas and drive to make the next 3 months peachier than ever. Together.
Any creatives that would like to contribute their talent or just show case some creation of theirs with a chance to be featured in our next issue of Impeached, get in touch with us on glenn@vonpeach.com