Our Friends: The Cheeky Panda

For years we made a box with nothing to put in it.

The engraved oak tissue box cover has been one of those quiet successes, the sort of thing people buy for a spare room, a bedside table, a car, a friend who sneezes theatrically. We carved the wording, we sanded the edges, we sent it off. And then we said nothing at all about what should go inside it.

That started to nag. It seemed a strange thing to make an object designed to last for years, from oak we choose carefully, and then leave the part people actually touch every day entirely to chance. So we went looking for someone who thought about the everyday bit as hard as we think about the oak.

We found a panda.

The Cheeky Panda began, as the best of these stories do, in a spare room.

Chris and Julie had discovered that bamboo could be made into beautiful, soft tissue, and could not work out why almost nobody was doing it. For more than a hundred years we had been cutting down mature trees to make paper we use for a few seconds and then throw away. Once you have noticed that, it is quite hard to un-notice.

They didn't think it was good enough. So they made the alternative themselves.

Not long after, their son Leo was born with severe eczema.

Julie went looking for baby wipes that were genuinely gentle on delicate skin and made from plant-based, plastic-free materials. She couldn't find them anywhere. So, once again, they made them.

That one product grew into a whole range built around sensitive skin, and the company grew with it. You'll find them now in Tesco, Waitrose, Morrisons, Boots and Ocado, and in a great many homes, hotels and offices. They have kept their sense of humour throughout, which we rather admire. Their mascot, Colin, is officially their Chief Cheer Officer.

Driving change, as they put it, doesn't have to be serious.

Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants on earth. It regrows from its own root system, quickly, without replanting.

But the reason it ends up in our boxes isn't only that. It makes a genuinely lovely tissue. Soft, strong, kind to skin that has had enough of being blown. If the choice were between doing the right thing and having a nice thing, this would be a much harder article to write. Happily, it isn't.

Every engraved oak tissue box cover now arrives with a Cheeky Panda bamboo cube already inside it, so it works from the moment it is unwrapped. No hunting for a refill that fits, no compromise sitting inside a piece of wood you chose with care.

When it runs out, you refill it with theirs.

It is a small thing. It is also exactly the sort of small thing we care about far too much.

It turns out The Cheeky Panda was the obvious choice for us long before this collaboration began.

When we launched our straw cup holders, we went looking for straws good enough to stand in them, and theirs were the ones we chose. They were beautiful, and they came from a company that does the right thing. We had no idea we would one day be working together. We chose them anyway, for the same reasons we went back to them for our tissue box covers.

So the red and white straws standing to attention in our holders are theirs. They have been all along.

Suck it and see, as one of our holders puts it.

We are both certified B Corporations, which means we have both sat through the same long, forensic, occasionally humbling assessment of how a business actually behaves.

That matters here more than it might elsewhere. It would have been easy to put an anonymous refill inside a sustainably made wooden object and hope nobody looked closely. People do look closely. We would rather the inside of the box stood up to the same scrutiny as the outside.

Good company, good materials, and a panda with a sense of humour. We are very glad to call them friends.