Some stories don’t go the way you planned.
After university I threw myself into banking. I started at the bottom, worked hard, and dreamt of becoming a fat cat. Then, just three months into what felt like the start of everything—a promising career, meeting the woman of my dreams, and planning a future—I was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
It stopped me in my tracks.
During recovery, I cycled around the world following the Tropic of Cancer, raising awareness of early detection of male cancers. By the time I returned, banking no longer felt like the right path. I wanted my work to have a more tangible impact.
That led me into impact investment, helping connect institutional investors with early-stage businesses tackling social and environmental challenges. I believed conscious capital and innovation could help solve some of the world’s biggest problems. I found my dream ‘corporate’ job.
Then COVID arrived and everything changed.
The company I worked for became insolvent just a week after the furlough scheme ended. Around the same time, our home was devastated by dry rot that wasn’t covered by insurance. Holly and I lost our income, our home, our savings—almost everything we’d worked for.
It forced us to ask a simple question: if we had to start again, what kind of life did we actually want, for us and our young daughter.
For us, the answer was to be closer to nature.
My Dad had a small parcel of land in Winchester that was bought by his Grandfather after the first World War. I was rented to a farmer until the 1980s when he retired and left to nature since.
To most people it was an overgrown mess, but to us it was a beautiful naturally planted forest garden on a rare habitat - chalk downland, an area of habitat that has declined 96% since World War 2 due to intensive agriculture.
We poured what little we had left into creating a home there, dug a bore hole, built a geodesic dome to live in, grew vegetables and began building a community by launching a forest school and drum circle. We were learning to live more simply and in rhythm with the land with a simple goal: to build a more resilient, meaningful life.
But there was one problem.
To live permanently on agricultural land, we needed a business that genuinely belonged there.
Then one morning, while walking the dogs, I spotted something extraordinary growing from a fallen birch tree.
A wild Lion’s Mane.
I stood there staring at its cascading white spines for what felt like an age. It remains one of the most profound moments of my life. It felt as though the mushrooms were speaking to me. Not with words, but with possibility. For the first time in years, the direction ahead felt clear.
That encounter in 2022 sparked years of reading, research, cultivation and experimentation. The deeper I went, the more fascinated I became. Fungi have quietly supported life on Earth for hundreds of millions of years, yet most of us barely notice them.
Moon Mushrooms grew from that moment of paying attention. We are inspired by ancient ways that are gone but not forgotten. We pay attention to lunar cycles and celestial movements, use biodynamic preparations from a friend's local farm who has been using them for >50 years and we are leaning into frequency to enhance our mushrooms and processes to produce the best possible products we can.
We exist to reconnect people to fungi, to nature, and, perhaps, to themselves.
