We chatted with sisters Tifany and Olivia Khakdoust of The Great Love Club about community, connection, and wellness. The Great Love Club is a Laguna beach-based collective uplifting local makers and focusing on an organic and natural lifestyle, all while celebrating love + community.

A:  The Great Love Club (TGLC) was born out of our own need to find a loving community of like minded people that we could share our values with. We’ve always had the gift of connection in the sense that we could make friends anywhere, but we found it hard to find folks who we could truly connect with once we got to know them better. We realized a friendship wasn’t sustainable if our values didn’t align. TGLC is a truly curated experience that emphasizes SLOW living values and works with small local businesses in as many ways possible to create a value based community and tell the story of why supporting your local small biz community is so important.

        

A: By supporting local and responsibly minded companies, we are using our dollar to vote for what we want to see more of. In terms of supporting the vendors specifically at "A Slow Market”, our monthly pop up series, you’re choosing to support companies who’s production and products have been vetted to be Sustainable, Local, Organic, and Whole, meaning these products are good for you, good for the earth and help us live a more holistic lifestyle.

Everything you surround yourself with becomes a part of you and is shaping the person you are becoming, either through your mindset or your bloodstream, so hosting a market that took time to vet the offerings felt like a natural next step for us and we didn’t see anything like it in our niche. We want to challenge the shoppers mindset from quantity (mindless shopping) to quality (mindful shopping). 

A: We’re most passionate about supporting organically grown food and textiles. The effect that non-organic farming and synthetic foods and textiles have on our planet and health is detrimental. No synthetic option can outweigh the benefits of farming organically in the first place. It’s honorable that people are working on options to turn our waste into useful items, but recycled plastic is still plastic.

Fake meat is still processed unnatural ingredients our bodies don’t recognize. We are committed to supporting local and organic farms and knowing where our food and clothing come from. Shops like LA RELAXED make it easy to look cute without sacrificing quality and our health. 

A: We’re meant to live in community, to support and uplift each other. Everything we do for TGLC is ultimately to serve God and use the gift of connection he’s given us to help create space for love to thrive. Our offerings are ever growing and changing and it’s really exciting that each month looks different from the last and it just keeps getting better and better. We’re having so much fun while helping so many people and to have that go hand in hand is rare. We’re truly blessed. 

A: Laguna Beach is absolutely magical. There’s a healing energy that circulates throughout town. I’m so blessed to live in a home steps from the beach with an organic garden. My perfect day always starts with rising early before the sun, reading The Bible, sitting in prayer and meditation, then a good cup of organic coffee with my boyfriend.

A mindful morning is really important to set intentions for the rest of the day. After that, a slow workout and catching up with a few friends in my backyard, at a cafe or at the beach soaking in the sun, is enough to fill my heart for days. If I can stay mindful that every situation is just an opportunity to learn to love like Jesus, it’s been a perfect day.

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