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.

Then COVID arrived.

The company 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, the answer was to be closer to nature.

We moved to four and a half acres of chalk downland near Winchester, left to nature for decades and gradually transformed into a rare forest garden. We poured what little we had left into creating a home there, learning to live more simply and in rhythm with the land.

Holly, our daughter Minnie and I moved onto 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 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 exist to reconnect people to fungi, to nature, and, perhaps, to themselves.