Beach foraging turns into creative business for Charlotte and Stuart
Foraging on the beach has been a lifelong passion for Charlotte Jacob and she’s now turned her love of seaweed into a sustainable business with husband Stuart.
From greeting cards and prints to homewares, the pair now create sumptuous designs using the fronds they gather on their local beaches for their Devon Seaweed Company venture – and it’s truly sustainable as they collect only flotsam, use recyclable FSC art board, compostable bio-cellos, 100% organic cotton for textiles, and it’s all designed, printed and manufactured in the UK.
As Stuart explained: “All our designs are created using hand-pressed seaweed that we sustainably forage and harvest from our beautiful Devon coastline, only natural flotsam is collected.
“Our main range currently consists of 23 cards, with a smaller four-card range in a Pantone colourway, not yet launched on our website. We’ve also been working in collaboration with the Museum Of Barnstaple & North Devon on their Victorian archive of seaweeds, a real privilege, and a range will be released soon in conjunction with the museum.”
The couple met when they both lived in Brighton where they developed “a soul-deep, everlasting passion for our beautiful British coastline”, and found it “inevitable” they’d settle in Devon with its own coastal beauty and their family links.
Charlotte comes from a design background and admitted she’s “never been able to walk along the beach without collecting and foraging” – thankfully Stuart found it “endearing” and soon loved beachcombing too.
Having started with flowers in a press given by her grandmother, this evolved into seaweed pressings, as Charlotte now seeks out the delicate fronds, which range from lustrous green to vibrant mahoganies, then carefully dries and presses them in the time-honoured Victorian tradition ready for the prints to be fashioned into designs for cards, notebooks, aprons, cushions, calendars, and scented candles.
Having started trading officially in October 2022, Stuart and Charlotte already have a 30-business client list, including the National Trust’s multiple sites in Devon, and are beginning to expand across the country as the National Seaweed Company.
And part of their aim is to highlight the rich variety and beauty of Britain’s native seaweeds, where there are 650 varieties which are very important to the marine ecosystems as it sequesters carbon, provides habitat to fish, and limits ocean acidification. They already work with charities such as the Marine Conservation Society and The Seal Project in Brixham.
They also run regular pressing workshops and recently opened a pop-up shop within the Cider Press Centre on the Dartington Trust Estate, where Charlotte explained: “It was actually my grandma who showed me how to collect seaweed and then press and dry it back in the 80s, her mother was a Victorian and she had also done it.
“We’ve seen a resurgence of this kind of art recently, but my grandma was doing this back when it really wasn’t fashionable. She would have flowers drying in the garage and would make dried flower bouquets and give them to people.”
And the awards are already coming, as they picked up the Family Business Of The Year South West title in the Federation Of Small Business (FSB) awards earlier this year, as well as being featured twice on the Muddy Stilettos’ lifestyle website.
