There's a particular kind of humility that comes from setting up a small stand between a chainsaw carving competition and a display of heavy horses hauling timber. That was LOXKIN's introduction to West's Wood Fair in East Dean, our first exhibition as a young company, and honestly, one of the best community experiences we could have asked for.
West's is not a curated design show. It's an authentic celebration of rural trades and craft skills; a three-day gathering of sawmillers, hurdle makers, pole-lathe turners, foresters, and timber merchants who have spent decades, or even generations, working with wood. Standing among them with our small-batch, UK-grown hemp and beeswax finish, we were reminded that the "circular economy" language we use in grant applications and pitch decks is, for many of these makers, integral to how they've always operated: provenance, sustainable forestry management, timber materials, nothing wasted, nothing shipped further than it needs to be, and a deep, practical respect for the materials.
What struck us most was the openness and genuine engagement with our mission. English Woodland Timber and the Timber Rack offered advice on the essentials of zero-waste that provide a competitive advantage to the bottom line, whilst doing the right thing. A hurdle maker asked sharp, fair questions about how our finish performs outdoors, questions we're still working through as part of our UV weathering testing. Rather than competing for attention, exhibitors traded knowledge freely, because provenance and quality are shared concerns across the whole trade, not proprietary advantages. That's the kind of community we want LOXKIN to be part of one where craft knowledge is passed on rather than hoarded, and where a small regenerative materials company can stand shoulder to shoulder with people who've been doing this since before we were founded.
The evening gatherings at the Turner’s Arms and watching a range of bands were the ideal ways to finish our balmy summer days in the valley, nestled between the woodlands of the South Downs.
Indoor Air Quality: Our Visit to the University of York INTERIORS Lab
A few weeks later, we swapped the sawdust and traction engines of East Dean for the University of York's Wolfson INTERIORS (INTERdisciplinary facility for IndoOr air quality ReSearch) lab, where we're a product partner working alongside Professor Nicola Carslaw's research team to understand the impacts of materials and finishes within our living spaces.
The lab's two instrumented houses- one a leaky 1990s build, the other a Net Zero, Passivhaus-standard property have been designed to answer a question that's easy to overlook: as we make our homes more airtight to cut energy use, what happens to the air we actually breathe inside them? With indoor air quality (IAQ) up to 5x more contaminated than the air outdoors, the lab's early findings are sobering: increased airtightness can, without careful material choices, concentrate indoor air pollutants rather than dilute them.
It's a finding that lands close to home for us. LOXKIN was built on the premise that the finish layer, though small, disproportionately affects a room's air quality and a product's end-of-life impact. Seeing that argument tested rigorously in an instrumented, monitored house, rather than asserted in our own marketing, is a genuinely useful check on our own claims.
We left excited about the ongoing testing; now all the live sensors and the state-of-the-art gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) equipment are properly calibrated. It’s great to be able to contribute to this pioneering study and understand how our finish that’s free of harmful VOCs fits into a much bigger conversation about healthy buildings