ABOUT

Feel Good Wood sources the best wood from around the world and prepares them for sale with musical instrument builders, knife makers, wood turners and other creative makers people in mind. Wherever possible we source ethically and fairly from FSC certified and community managed sources.

 

We are a small family, home-run business team of two - Jasmine and Neil - with the work divided roughly by Neil sourcing and cutting the wood and Jasmine selling, packing and despatching. Based on the UK’s Suffolk East Coast, all our wood is prepared in and around our workshop in the garden of our home. We work around our young kids - Ruby and Finley - whom we are home schooling with wood and the wild playing a central role in building their worldview.

 

The inspiration for Feel Good Wood came from Neil’s experience working with forest communities in Tanzania, East Africa. Over a 15 year period that work involved being part of Anglo-Tanzanian team that established Africa’s first FSC-certified, community managed natural forests and saw over 150,000 hectares of miombo forest brought under responsible management and commercial utilisation.

 

Work initially focused on developing markets for the numerous hardwood species found in those forests - African Blackwood, Panga Panga, Pau Rosa, East Africa Padauk / Kiaat and Afzelia / Doussie, as well as numerous lesser-known species. The primary objective of the project was to enable local development through the sale of timber so the marketing focus was on high value export markets, the most significant of which was the musical instrument industry. 

 

Later work involved the development and management of a community based sawmill that was scaled up to supply container volumes of timber to some of the world’s biggest woodwind and guitar manufacturers.

 

During the course of the project Neil established connections with wood users across a wide range of industries and with wood distributors and primary producers in many different parts of the world, including numerous FSC certified and community forestry initiatives.

 

Those connections and knowledge are now fully focused on Feel Good Wood and are reflected in the wide range of species and products we offer to our customers.