Roth is an American entrepreneur who built and ran Matisia Consultants, a technology consulting firm, and sold it in 2016 for a sum she has never disclosed. In interviews she traced the island back to years spent working in a male-dominated industry — CNBC ran her story under a headline about a world of tech bros. She bought the island the following year and spent months on renovation before opening it to the SuperShe community on 23 June 2018. What she built was not a spa in the conventional sense. Guests kayaked, hiked the shoreline, did yoga and meditation, and sat through motivational talks and long discussions. The pitch was less about pampering than about being temporarily released from an audience.

The price did most of the arguing on the island's behalf. A week cost €4,600, and in 2018 prospective guests could not simply pay it — they applied through the organisation's website, and Roth screened for personality before deciding who came. Bloomberg summed the model up as a ticket that excluded all men and some women. The Guardian ran an opinion piece arguing that a women-only private island is not empowering but elitist, and the label stuck hard enough that it now sits in the island's permanent record. Roth rejected the criticism. By December 2019 the gate had narrowed further: the island was open only to active members of the SuperShe app.

Whatever the merits of the argument, the network behind the island was real and much larger than the island itself. At its height the SuperShe community counted more than eight thousand women across 122 countries, most of whom would never set foot on the property. The island functioned as a home base and a symbol — somewhere the idea had a physical address. That address was always going to be the fragile part. A membership network scales; a small island in the northern Baltic does not, and it is unreachable for half the year by anyone who does not enjoy ice.

In late 2023 the shipping executive Deyan Mihov bought the island for a million euros. Asked what he intended to do with it, he said he had no specific plans. The SuperShe community carried on as a global network headquartered in the United States, though the website that once described all this has since vanished from the internet, which is a very modern way for a place to end. The island is still there. Nothing about Finnish granite, pine and brackish water has changed since 2017; only the rule attached to it has.

The setting was never incidental to the pitch. This is the outer edge of the Raseborg archipelago, where the Finnish mainland dissolves into thousands of low, glacier-scoured islands scattered across the Gulf of Finland. The Baltic here is brackish rather than properly salt, cold enough to shock in June and warm enough to swim in by August, and the land is still rising slowly out of it — postglacial rebound lifting the whole coast a few millimetres a year, as it has since the ice left. Midsummer nights barely darken. In winter the sea freezes and the boat stops running. Isolation was the product being sold, and it was not manufactured.