A Brief History of The Ripple's Origins

By Lydia Morin

It may seem like The Ripple came out of thin air, but really, this journey started in Istanbul in 2013. There, I first fell in love with bathhouse culture after meeting some locals and visiting their family’s hammam. Turkish hammams are traditional public bathhouses that offer a multi-sensory experience centered around the rituals of cleansing, relaxation, and socialization. The first hammams were commissioned in the 1400s by Sultan Mehmed II after the Conquest of Constantinople. I found it especially interesting that over 600 years ago, there were all-powerful leaders who still intended to help grow a healthier population, something the US used to invest in as well…

From Istanbul, I spent the next months couch surfing a network of old friends, both from college and new friends I met along the way, all the while seeking out every public bathhouse experience I could afford on a backpacker's budget. I always met the best people while soaking in water of varying degrees. The Thermal Baths on what felt like every main street in Budapest, Hungary, made some of the biggest impressions on me, truly stunning places and such affordable, subsidized luxury.

I became obsessed with these public amenities and the first ideation of The Ripple happened a few years later in grad school as a grand scheme for the Allegheny Baths & Botanical Gardens, this dream isn’t over but as I learned in a strategy class, was not the minimum viable product for a city that despite being surrounded by water, rarely interacts with it. After graduating, I became focused on community and policy development work and the grand plan became a file on a laptop long gone.

Meanwhile, my sister Anna Morin was busy bootstrapping an awesome eco-tourism and yoga company based on Martha’s Vineyard, where we were super lucky to grow up getting work in the best kind of summer jobs, those on or around water. We’re both pretty sure lifeguarding and teaching swimming lessons at the community’s beach club was the best job ever. Her company, MV Paddle Co. provided intimate and educational paddle board tours of some of the most beautiful natural spaces in the world and survived the pandemic, but not without burnout.

Burnout. Burnout is what brings us to the present moment. In the past couple of years, Anna and I, as a small business owner and a nonprofit executive director, respectively, have both felt the symptoms of burnout badly. And as much as we love travel, we both realized we wanted to build a life we didn’t need a vacation from. When we thought about what we loved most about vacations, it was that we got to spend a lot of time in or around water with people we loved and meeting new people who were drawn to the same cozy settings. This is what we want the Ripple to be. 

The Ripple Pop-Up is just the beginning of a campaign for investment in community wellbeing and taking better care of ourselves, our people, and our places. Our strategy involves activating underused places (with cement flooring) to make space for the healing and growing. We got super lucky finding The Sneha Collective in a moment of transition with rooms on offer alongside a welcoming community of healers and connectors. We have big ideas for more permanent build-outs in this location and establishing a network of different styled/sized spaces, depending on what each community might be able to sustain. This summer, we hope we are offering not only a minimum viable product, but a minimum lovable product that starts a ripple effect for more bathhouse culture in our region and beyond.