We LOVE teachers, and this year we wanted to do more than just say it! We wanted to bring them home. Ponte Vedra Beach isn't just a pretty backdrop for us, it's where Natural Life started and where our whole team still gets up every day to make this little dream real. So this year, our second year hosting this retreat, we got to welcome eleven of the most influential teachers on social media into our own backyard for 2026 Teacher Retreat, a weekend built entirely around celebrating the people who show up for kids every single day!
The second everyone checked into their oceanfront rooms at the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club, we knew this weekend was going to be something special. There was a shared clothing rack waiting outside everyone's rooms (because obviously), and by 6PM we were all headed to Patti's house for a brand dinner, and a beach photoshoot as the sun went down. Getting to have these women in the place where our whole story started, sharing a table with the woman who started it, meant more to us than we know how to put into a blog post. Cameras out, sandy toes, golden hour... it's the little things that mean the most, and that night was full of them.
Thursday started early (and we mean early) with sunrise yoga on the beach, taught by our own Nikki Jones. If you've never done yoga while the sun comes up over the Atlantic, we highly recommend it. After coffee and breakfast at the Inn's gourmet shop, we gave everyone the whole morning to just... be. Beach walks, shark tooth hunting, paddle boarding, a little surfing...whatever felt like rest that day, that's what we wanted for them.
Next, we loaded up and headed to our actual office for a full tour, some behind-the-scenes content-making, a super fun group craft (wrapping phone chargers with cute colorful yarn + charms), and of course a delicious dinner. There's something so special about opening your own front door to people you admire and saying, "this is us, this is where the magic happens, and we wanted you to see it." Then came the main event: Teachers Gone Viral, an evening and livestream at Natural Life Headquarters where we got to sit down with our special guests, hand out Happy Bags, and celebrate everything they do in front of a room full of people from our own community who feel exactly the same way we do about teachers!
We were beyond lucky, and honestly a little emotional, to spend the weekend with eleven teachers who mean so much to us: Taylor Anne Wesley, Kayla Hair, Katie Lynn Ward, Grace Boros, Molly Miller, Adriana Estrella Perez, Savannah Sullivan, Hannah Brosh, Kaitlyn Biernacki, Rebecca Gordon, and Julia Gruber. Eleven women who pour themselves into their classrooms every single day, and who still find the energy to show up online and make teaching feel a little less lonely for everyone watching. Every one of them showed up in their own Natural Life pieces, and watching them mix and match off that shared rack was basically a masterclass in making comfy clothes look effortlessly cute.
By Friday morning, we were so sad to see everyone leave. We said our thank-yous, hugged it out (more than once), and let everyone take one last slow morning by the water before heading home. But this weekend was never really about the itinerary, it was about opening up our hometown, our office, and our hearts to eleven women who give so much of themselves, and telling them, in as many ways as we possibly could in 48 hours, that they are seen, appreciated, and genuinely adored.
Teachers really do make the world a better place!! Getting to say thank you to them where Natural Life was born is a memory we're going to hold onto for a long, long time. We can't wait to keep dreaming up new ways to show teachers everywhere how much they matter to us. We are sooo ready to start planning 2027's retreat!
See you next year! 🌈🍎
Watch the Livestream here: Teachers Gone Viral!