Hello you lovely lot!

Just a quick note from our home to yours, to say Happy New Year and share a short “Year in Review” for Love Logs for 2023.

We’re delighted to say that in a year where the economy continued to falter and some big brands saw online sales decline, we were able to grow again – and for that we can’t thank you enough. With mounting pressure on costs forcing us into a couple of price increases, your continued support has meant the world to us!

In 2023, your orders helped us:

• Plant more than 15,000 trees in areas of the world previously affected by deforestation

• Provide more than 400 meals for schoolchildren at risk of hunger in disadvantaged areas of the UK

• Prevent 2,600 plastic bottles from entering our oceans

Our tree planting scheme continues at pace – with the 15,000 planted this year we have now planted 51,000 trees in total. And these aren’t just stems in the ground, these are stems grown, planted and cared for by local employees – so our tree planting not only fights climate change, it also improves local economies and creates jobs.

Unfortunately, tree planting is suffering the same global pressures as every other industry and prices with our existing partner have increased fourfold, so we’ve recently reviewed our options. At the end of that process we were faced with a difficult decision about how to continue – either build in the increasing costs of tree planting into our most recent price increase, or change our tree planting pledge. While we don’t want to slow down our environmental impact, our products must remain good value in order to stay popular – so we’ve decided to reduce our tree planting pledge to one tree per order, effective from January 1^st. We will of course stay close to this during 2024.

Prices are now mostly stable, and we don’t expect to incur significant cost increases over the coming months, but timber prices remain volatile due to extreme competition – not against other firewood merchants, but against the biomass marketplace where power stations and industrial firms have lost the ability to import cheap Russian wood pellets. This is a tricky issue, on one hand we’re happy to see these firms using greener energy with low road miles, on the other it’s very difficult for our business to compete with corporate energy production. For now the situation is stable and again, we’re staying close.

The decision to start to provide school meals as part of our core mission was driven by the fact half of our product range is devoted to outdoor cooking. We feel lucky to be able to put food on the table, let alone enjoy the luxury of wood fired cooking, so we explored what we could do as part of our business to help those less fortunate. When we launched our own brand of British lumpwood charcoal, we decided that each 6kg bag sold would pay for a school meal via a partnership with Magic Breakfast.

2024 is looking like a big year for us! We hope to launch a couple of our specialist pizza oven products in the USA within the next week or two, again using locally-produced wood to minimise the carbon footprint of our products – we heard of British brands shipping wood to the USA and we just couldn’t believe it!!! We’re also working on retail readiness for some of our Spring/Summer products in the UK market, so there’s a chance you’ll see a small range of our products in a local garden centre this year, which would be hugely exciting!