About XPLR GUIDE
Exploring shouldn't be this hard.
There are incredible restaurants, towns, trails, and historic places all over Tennessee. Finding the ones worth your time is the hard part, buried under ads, algorithms, and reviews from people you have never met. XPLR GUIDE exists to fix that.
THE ORIGIN / 01
Content made places easier to find. XPLR GUIDE makes them easier to go to.
XPLR.NASH grew by helping people experience Tennessee differently, through its food, its history, its towns, and the stories that give a place meaning. People saved the posts, sent the videos to friends, and asked what else was nearby. But a saved video is not a plan. XPLR GUIDE gives all of that somewhere useful to live: the same places and judgment, organized into lists and days you can actually take.
THE PEOPLE / 02
Built by explorers and hospitality people.
XPLR GUIDE was cofounded by Stuart Deming and Erin Pennington. Both are creators, and both work the creative side of the videos XPLR makes. Stuart is the storyteller in person, the on-camera talent. Erin is the visual storyteller behind the camera.
Stuart Deming, cofounder
Stuart has spent nearly 20 years in hospitality and has personally guided nearly 20,000 people through tours and curated experiences. He grew up in rural New York, started working on a dairy farm at six years old, moved to Tennessee in 2013, and built his career in ministry, hospitality, production, and tour guiding before cofounding XPLR.NASH.
Erin Pennington, cofounder and creative director
Erin is XPLR's visual storyteller. His background is video production and technical direction, and he holds a broadcasting degree from Western Kentucky University. As creative director, he shapes how the places XPLR covers are filmed, photographed, and presented.
Two cofounders, a small team of Navigators and creators beside them, and one rule: if we put our name on it, we went.
OUR MISSION
To create actionable content that helps people experience their local communities.
OUR POSITION / 03
Three pieces, one standard.
XPLR.NASH is where the daily discovery happens: the social feeds where Tennessee shows up in your pocket. XPLR SERIES is the long-form show, where a guest spends a real day in a real place. XPLR GUIDE is the app built from years of that work. They are connected but distinct, and they feed each other on purpose: GUIDE is the hub, and everything we make leads to it or from it.
The content lives together, too. The short videos from our social feeds are attached to the places they feature. The long-form work, XPLR SERIES episodes, itinerary films, and podcast conversations, lives inside the app, where watching is part of exploring: every XPLR SERIES day becomes an itinerary in the guide, so what you watch is a day you can actually take. And some content will live only in the app: documentaries, behind-the-scenes series, and original work made for the people who explore with us. The app is not a link out to somewhere else. It is the place the work comes home to.
Before XPLR was a media brand, it was a production company: for years we made videos for other people's businesses, learning how places actually run by standing inside them. Our own audience grew the slow way. We stayed under 10,000 followers for our first five years, and kept going anyway, one real place and one honest video at a time. That is our position, and it is why this guide exists: recommendations earned by showing up for a decade, not a database scraped together last quarter.
One rule runs through all three pieces: if we put our name on it, a human on this team went, saw it, and would recommend it again.
Curated. Vetted. Human.