This winter, the re:storied team met in real life for the first time. We gathered at MINDS AND MOUNTAINS, the beautiful Nordic eco-lodge in La Molina, Cerdanya, co-created by Mikkel Larsen and Dorothea Lorenz: Regenerators alumni and clients of our agency.
After two and a half years of collaboration between us – Jean-Philippe Steeger, Niels Devisscher, and myself (Emilie Grau) – this gathering was also a composting moment. We sat around the fire, releasing what we don’t want to keep with us in the next cycle of collaboration. We walked in the snow, breathing in the mountain air. We lived in the place we had helped make resonate, feeling its essence reflected back to us.
We were birthing our new website and offerings while letting old forms fall away.
One and a half years of silent metamorphosis for embodying what it means to be a regenerative communications agency. It was exactly what needed to happen.
The terrain teaches differently than theory
When we launched re:storied at the end of 2023, we imagined a learning community. A worldwide membership for regenerative communicators. We kicked off with a workshop: “re:storying communications: new pathways for caring and courageous visionaries.” More than 200 people registered. The momentum was there.
Then came the enrollment phase. Not enough sign-ups.
I felt disappointed. Also relieved when we decided to adapt our model. Animating a community for a small group isn’t financially viable, especially split three ways. And — here’s what the terrain taught us — the regenerative communications field demanded deep exploration and 1:1 business cases to root our work in actual soil, not only in thought leadership.
So we pivoted. We became an agency. We worked with TRANSITION NETWORK INTERNATIONAL on their rebranding. We worked with MINDS AND MOUNTAINS, through their full regenerative branding and storytelling journey. We learned by doing, by being in relationship with place-based projects, by letting our methodology emerge from real transformation work rather than pre-packaged frameworks.
Learning #1: Regenerative business demands terrain time. You can’t skip the rooting phase. Brand leadership comes after you’ve composted real experience into wisdom.
Between late 2024 and now, we barely posted on social media. We didn’t send many newsletters.
What looked like procrastination was actually the necessary time for transmutation. We were wintering, and that required understanding the energetics no one talks about.
The energetics no one talks about
As a holistic business coach and amateur Kundalini yoga practitioner, I’ve always been interested in the energetics of business — the invisible architecture that allows life force to flow or get blocked. Feng Shui. Ayurveda. Quantum Human Design. These aren’t “woo” add-ons to regenerative work. They’re ancient technologies for reading and working with energy.
What constantly collapses in our times is also our nervous system.
As leaders, we need to be nervous-system-aware. To nurture communications practices that care, that create conditions for more life rather than more extraction. This is the invisible wintering work these collapsing times are calling us to do. To regenerate the way we do business, marketing, and communication.
I know this intimately. Sometimes I feel like a prisoner of my own calendar. I don’t love having time blocked every Friday morning for our team meetings. But others, like Jean Philippe, need shared routines to thrive. We’ve had to find a rhythm between structure and spaciousness.
My solution: creative interseasons. Mini-winterings of 18 days, three times a year for each interseason, with no appointments scheduled. Time to take care of my creativity exclusively. And every Friday afternoon, all year round, I’m off, in the ceramics studio. It compensates for the Friday morning meeting.
These aren’t luxuries. They’re nervous-system necessities.
For me personally, 2024 and 2025 were years of deep inner falling. After COVID, and the sale of my home, I spent 2022-2023 living in Airbnbs without direction. I faced two successive unhappy collaborations within my own brand, LES SLOWPRENEURS, that left me exhausted and disappointed. I needed to winter. To compost those experiences, to let old identities fall away, to deepen the relationship between Life and Business I’d been exploring since 2019.
Your poison is your medicine, they say. Two years of wintering in an ever spring-summer mindset world was a very good prosilience experience. An intimate relationship with a usually non-loved season. An inner growing journey.
And this fertilized RE:STORIED too.
Learning #2: The energetics of a business is as important as its structure. You can have the perfect business model, the right offers, the aligned messaging — but if the life force isn’t flowing, if the nervous system is depleted, nothing takes root.
This understanding shaped how we built re:storied itself.
A membrane, not a machine
As an agency, we are a porous membrane to our own ecosystems.
Every Friday meeting is holistically informed by what’s happening in our personal projects — SYMPOIESIS (Niels), PERSPECTIVIST (Jean-Philippe), LES SLOWPRENEURS (me), and the other collabs we engage with in our ecosystems. Our questioning, our energetics, our personal explorations, our inner business seasons — all of this is with us in the field. Not acknowledging that somatic and cyclical parts of our work would not be regenerative.
That’s why we begin every meeting with a collective pulse check. To offer each of us spacious, radically self-expressed check-ins.
The three of us come from different generational soils. I was born in 1980 France, Jean-Philippe in 1989 Germany, Niels in 1997 Belgium. This means we each carry a different relationship with marketing, the internet, and what it means to build a business. These differences are the biodiversity that makes our work richer.
I’ve been questioning Marketing-As-Usual since my MSc in Marketing Management graduation 23 years ago — 16 years as a solopreneur, long enough to stop searching for institutional right answers and trust my own slow marketing path. Niels entered the regenerative movement fresh from his international entrepreneurship degree, with minimal imprints of business-as-usual to unlearn. Jean-Philippe came to marketing through regenerative communications itself, after after years active in politics and working in EU Affairs in Brussels — learning the craft through a regenerative lens from the start rather than having to decondition later.
Regenerative Communications isn’t part of Business School programs yet. We had no map for these territories. We had to source guidance from within and work at it through trial and error. In this messy medial process, we gave birth to our new offerings.
The wintering gave us the time we needed. Time to digest the nourishing Regenerative Leadership journey we’d jumped into with Laura Storm in 2022. Time to plant and water the seeds of our relationship as a collective. Time to grow our coaching skills, adding somatic, nature-led, and eco-spiritual approaches to our practice. Time to let our own businesses and re:storied inform each other: my signature around energetics, cyclical rhythms, and nervous-system awareness shaping how we hold space; Jean-Philippe’s choreographic theory of change and Perspectivist thinking bringing strategic clarity and systemic coherence; Niels’s aesthetic sensibility and multi-species imagination helping us visualize the worlds we want to help realize through beauty and design.
Learning #3: Wintering is necessary, even in a spring-summer world. The collective pressure to always be visible, always be launching, always be growing — it’s extractive. Regenerative business requires composting time.
How we work now
Our approach is coaching-led, not consultant-driven.
We don’t come in with pre-made frameworks to apply, although we have developed frameworks, as a means to ask what is relevant to pay attention to in a particular context, while remaining in a listening posture. We create conditions that allow the life force of our clients’ brands to develop their own capabilities. We prioritize presence. We create spaciousness. We invite our clients to dance with the fertile void alongside us.
This means the invisible work comes first: Metabolizing undigested work-life experiences. Composting past careers. Reconnecting with essence before crafting messages. Moving through the deconditioning necessary to shed extractive cultural patterns and adopt higher-frequency languages, stories, and practices.
With Mikkel and Dorothea from MINDS AND MOUNTAINS, this looked like holding space for them to compost their own journey. Letting go of what they thought they should offer to discover what wanted to emerge. Together, we dared to name what was already there: a “Nordic eco-lodge” identity rooted in winter, slowness, and depth. Not only what the market expected, but also what the place itself was calling for.
The wintering business retreat they eventually launched wasn’t a compromise with market expectations. It was an affirmation of their essence.
As they shared after our work together:
“Through the journey with re:storied, we have found the essence of our own values and beliefs, and how to bring those values into the world. We have been on many journeys, personally and professionally, but this one has without a doubt been the most enlightening and energizing journey so far. We are truly grateful to the re:storied team, for being our well-prepared guides on that journey, that we now happily know will never end.”
The beautiful website and offerings came after this deep work. Not before.
Our intention with regenerative communications, branding, and storytelling is simple: to help our clients experience, embody, express regeneration. Not just talk about it. To live it.
An invitation
After our quiet transformation, we’ve birthed our new website and offerings. You can explore them at restoried.earth.
If you’re feeling the call to do both the invisible and visible work — to compost what no longer serves, to reconnect with your essence before crafting your message, to let your communications emerge from regeneration rather than just talk about it — we’d love to begin a conversation with you.
Our free Communications Pulse Check is a good first step. It’s a self-audit questionnaire that helps you sense where your communications are thriving and where they might need attention. Once you complete it, if there’s alignment, we’ll schedule a call to explore how we might work together. No pitch, no pressure, just honest reflection and conversation.
The work of regeneration is slow, cyclical, relational. It asks us to compost what no longer serves, to winter when wintering is needed, to trust emergence over force.
We’re here for that work. Are you?
Come explore with us
We’re hosting a live session to share what we’ve learned guiding regenerative pioneers through brand transformation.
Worlding Your Brand: An Introduction to Regenerative Branding
🗓️ Tuesday, May 12 – 17:00–18:30 UTC+3
This isn’t a masterclass in persuasion, with hacks and hooks. It’s an exploration of what happens when you stop broadcasting about regeneration and start communicating from it. When your brand becomes a living story that holds a vital conversation alive. When you compost expired identities and let your essence lead.
We’ll share our framework, walk through a real transformation (the Minds & Mountains case), and guide you through a self-diagnostic to map your own brand’s vitality.
Cover photo ©hejpetrpepa - Pexels