It feels as though a lot has happened at LOXKIN over the past few months.
We've spent time with furniture makers, researchers, students, Men's Sheds, social enterprises and hemp growers. We've been in workshops, universities, schools, farms and design studios. We've been asking increasingly detailed questions about everything from indoor air quality and the chemistry of hemp oil to how much British farmland might ultimately be needed to supply a growing market for natural wood finishes.
On the surface, these can look like very different conversations. Increasingly, however, we're beginning to see them as parts of the same story.
Next week, we'll be bringing some of that story together at Shoreditch Design Week, where you'll be able to come and meet us and explore some of the materials and ideas behind what we're building.
Before we get there, we thought it was a good moment to share what's been happening behind the scenes and why we think it matters.
Looking Beyond the Bottle
LOXKIN began with a relatively simple idea: could we create a genuinely natural wood finish from British-grown hemp seed oil?
That question led us to make a product. But making the product has led us to ask much bigger questions.
What actually happens to the air around us when we apply different finishes? How does the choice of finish affect the ability to maintain and repair wood years later? What happens to those materials at the end of their useful life? Where does the oil come from, how was the crop grown, and could increasing demand for it create additional value elsewhere in the system?
These are questions that can't be answered by looking at a tin of wood finish in isolation.
That's one reason our research relationships have become so important. At the University of York, LOXKIN is involved in the INTERIORS indoor air quality project led by Professor Nicola Carslaw. The facility is particularly interesting because it combines realistic housing with research-grade instrumentation, allowing researchers to understand how materials, furnishings and everyday activities contribute to the air inside our homes.
We're also working with Coventry University to explore what happens much later in the material's life, including how differently finished wood behaves under end-of-life conditions. Alongside this, our wider testing programme is helping us build a much clearer evidence base around the performance and safety of natural finishes.
None of this is about finding a single sustainability claim to put on a label. It's about understanding the whole life of the material.
That kind of life-cycle thinking is important because the environmental quality of wood products isn't determined by one characteristic alone. It stretches from raw materials and production through use, maintenance, potential recycling and eventual disposal.
The more we learn, the more interesting the questions become.
Following the Hemp Back to the Field
Perhaps the biggest shift in our thinking this year has been upstream.
Our hemp seed oil is British-grown, but as demand for LOXKIN increases, simply knowing that isn't enough. We want to understand the agricultural system behind it and, ultimately, whether growing LOXKIN can help create meaningful new demand for British hemp.
That has taken us into conversations with growers, processors and researchers, including people involved in hemp research at York. We're looking much more closely at hemp varieties, seed yields, pressing, fatty-acid profiles and how the natural chemistry of different oils influences their behaviour as a wood finish.
We've also started looking at the relationship between litres of oil and acres of farmland.
For now, we're using a deliberately simple working figure of around 100 litres of hemp seed oil per acre under realistic UK growing conditions. It isn't intended as a precise agricultural claim, yields vary enormously but it gives us a useful way of understanding scale.
A customer buying 100 litres of British hemp oil can begin to think of that demand as roughly an acre of hemp cultivation. At 1,000 litres, it becomes around ten acres. At 20,000 litres, we're potentially talking about demand equivalent to around 200 acres.
For a mature agricultural commodity, that might not sound particularly significant. For a crop still grown at relatively small scale in Britain, it starts to become much more interesting.
And the seed is only one part of the plant.
Hemp can also produce fibre for materials and composites, shiv for applications such as hempcrete, and nutritious hemp hearts from the seed itself. Suddenly, increasing demand for one natural wood finish has the potential to connect with a much wider material system.
That's something we're only beginning to explore.
Keeping Value in Circulation
At the other end of the journey sits the wood itself.
Our work with organisations such as Glasgow Wood has reinforced something we've believed for a long time: some of the most sustainable materials are the ones we already have.
Reclaimed timber contains more than carbon and fibre. It contains the energy used to grow, harvest, transport and process it, as well as craftsmanship, history and often considerable social and economic value. The challenge is keeping as much of that value in circulation for as long as possible.
That's why maintenance and repair matter so much.
Circularity isn't simply about finding a better destination for waste. At its best, it's about preventing useful materials from becoming waste in the first place. Wider circular-economy thinking similarly places emphasis on maintaining products and materials at their highest value, while designing systems that regenerate rather than continually extract and discard.
We've seen that principle brought to life repeatedly this year, whether through reclaimed timber at Glasgow Wood, craftspeople restoring furniture, or members of Men's Sheds repairing and making things in their local communities.
The material remains valuable because people remain connected to it.
More Than Materials
This has probably been one of the most rewarding parts of the last few months.
We've been working increasingly closely with UK Men's Sheds, including getting LOXKIN into the hands of individual Sheds and spending time with the community at ShedFest. We've worked with young people through our Nothing Is Wasted workshop and Green Careers activity, encouraging them to see waste not simply as something to manage, but as value that has somehow become disconnected from the system around it.
We've spoken with students and craftspeople about natural materials, repair and healthier ways of making. And we're beginning to explore how workshops originally developed for schools and community settings might translate into workplaces and other organisations.
What connects these experiences isn't wood oil.
It's participation.
When somebody repairs a chair rather than replacing it, learns how to maintain a piece of timber, shares a skill with someone else or begins to see waste as a design problem, a small amount of value is preserved. When hundreds or thousands of people do the same thing, those individual actions begin to form a system.
Increasingly, this is how we think about LOXKIN.
Connecting the Pieces
We've started using the phrase Value Ecology internally to describe some of this thinking.
The idea itself is very simple. Value already exists all around us, in materials, skills, relationships, land, knowledge and communities. Often, what we call waste is simply value that has become disconnected from somewhere it could still be useful.
Our job isn't necessarily to create more value from scratch. Sometimes it's to recognise what's already there, preserve it, connect it to somewhere useful and allow it to circulate again.
Seen through that lens, the different things we've been working on suddenly don't feel quite so separate.
The farmer growing hemp, the processor pressing the seed, the researcher studying the oil, the furniture maker choosing a finish, the social enterprise reclaiming timber, the person learning to repair a table and the customer choosing to maintain it are all participating in the same ecology of value.
Commercial success matters within that system too. A healthy business creates demand for crops, supports research, pays suppliers, creates employment and generates the resources needed to invest in social and environmental outcomes. The aim isn't to choose between economic, environmental and social value, but to find ways for each to strengthen the others.
That's becoming an increasingly important part of where LOXKIN goes next.
Come and See It for Yourself
Next week, we'll be at Shoreditch Design Week, and it feels like a particularly good moment to bring some of these threads together.
Alongside our finished products, we'll have hemp oil, seed, hemp hearts, fibre and shiv on the table. You'll be able to see and handle the different parts of the plant, try LOXKIN on wood and talk to us about everything from natural finishes and indoor air quality to British hemp cultivation, circular design and repair.
For us, that's much more interesting than simply displaying tins on a stand.
We want people to understand where the material came from, what else the plant can become, why the finish matters and what might happen if more designers, makers and manufacturers begin making different material choices.
There is still an enormous amount we don't know, and that's part of what makes this stage of LOXKIN so exciting. What started with a fairly simple question about whether there might be a better way to finish wood is increasingly taking us into farming, material science, indoor air quality, circular design, education and community.
The common thread remains remarkably simple: how do we recognise the value that already exists in materials, people and places and build systems that allow more of that value to remain in circulation?
That's what we're working on.
And next week, we'd love to show you.
Come and meet us at Shoreditch Design Week.