Natalia Vodianova doesn’t look like someone who needs help meeting people. Even through Zoom, even with no make-up, geeky glasses and dishevelled hair, the 40-year-old Russian supermodel is dazzling. The kind of woman that many, many people would like to meet.
But meeting new people and making friends, all while raising money for charity, is the idea behind her new app, Locals. “The pandemic created a lot of loneliness, and a real need to create new connections,” she explains from her home in Paris, where she lives with her five children and her husband, Antoine Arnault, son of LVMH founder Bernard Arnault. “Locals is about creating those meaningful connections,” she says, fast and articulate, her accent more French than Russian. “They meet around experiences that they enjoy together, and make a small donation to charity.”
Those experiences can be anything from a cup of tea to a trip to Burning Man, where her co-founder Timon Afinsky, an angel investor, has just been with a group that he met on Locals. He joins us on Zoom from a petrol station in Utah, his campervan in the background. “There is a lot of talk about the metaverse, about NFTs,” he says, looking surprisingly clean for a man who has just emerged from a wild desert festival. “This is a counter trend; it is real life.”
Vodianova smiles and nods while he speaks. They’ve been co-investors for years, most notably in the period tracker Flo and the Elbi app, a platform where charities showcase their work and get donations with every like. “We wanted to use social media for social good and give an alternative to endless scrolling,” Vodianova says.
Elbi morphed into Locals, which still has the prerequisite of a charitable donation, but with a real-life social side, which, she says, people are craving right now. So how does it work? First, you ask to join (it’s available in London and Los Angeles). Once accepted, the algorithm fills your feed with events that it thinks you’ll like, from a pancake party in Primrose Hill to gardening with Camilla Al Fayed at her biodynamic farm or a booze-free night out with DJ Fat Tony. Each event asks for a donation of a minimum £5, which goes to the host’s chosen charity. More than 20,000 monthly active users have already signed up, raising £200,000.
So is it just a fancy version of a friending app, like Bumble BFF or Wink? No, she says: “It’s more interesting, exciting, safer.” More than half of its members are women, and it shows you events, not profiles. “It’s not a dating app, it’s not a friending-up, it’s not a business connection. All of these are possible, but we are creating meaningful connections for people. And they are good people,” she adds. “Donation creates a good filter.”
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This isn’t Vodianova’s first philanthropic venture, far from it. Her Naked Heart Foundation has raised £50 million since 2004 for children with special needs in Russia, the UK and elsewhere, creating more than 210 play facilities and family centres. That, though, is down to her childhood, living in poverty with a younger sister who has autism. “It devastated our lives. We were outcasts. I missed a lot of school and started working when I was 11.” By 17, she had moved to Paris to sign up with Viva Models. “My mother couldn’t work because she was caring for my sister.” And her father? “Not present,” she says. Her success, modelling for everyone from Chanel and Louis Vuitton to Stella McCartney and Diane von Furstenberg, meant she could start her charity at the age of 18. “I’ve been very lucky with modelling. From a young age, I could choose what I wanted to do. I had time to raise my children and do quite a lot of philanthropic work.” She is a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund, lobbying for women’s health and gender equality, and is working on a new facility outside Paris for children with special needs. “I’m dreaming of bringing my mother and sister over to France one day.” They still live in her home town of Nizhny Novgorod.
None of that leaves much time for fashion shoots, right? “I do very little modelling,” she says with a shrug. Locals is her focus, and is soon launching in New York, followed by Paris, Warsaw, Dubai and Boston. She is always on the lookout for new projects to fund with Afinsky, who talks to me as he gets back in his campervan to drive to LA, his squad of hip, millennial “Locallers” waving cheerily. “We’ve hired a ‘Locals’ house in Santa Monica,” he shouts over the engine. “We’ll have a few more experiences there.” Vodianova laughs and shakes her head. “Your bus already looks like an experience,” she shouts.
Fun, yes, but with a good cause. “Social and economic impact is very important to us,” she says, serious again. “It’s not a nice-to-have. It’s important for scale. It ensures long-term success. That’s what people want. Something that changes their lives.”
locals.org
