The website has never felt so crisp, good and cozy!

Google / Alphabet can't track you through our cookies anymore.

As some of you have figured out, we'd rather go broke than sell out our values to a horrible USA company like Google

Cylocybe isn't a normal shop, so what's the point in pretending it is? The products we sell are like walking a tightrope. It plays on your mind, kinda drives you a wee bit insane if you let it. We take the risk so you can go on life journeys with microscopy, and in return, we get to have some nice things for taking on that burden.

We're humans with empathy!

Recently, we wrote a blog post in which we made a passing mention of starving children in Gaza... Guess what happened to our place in Google Search? It knocked us down to 38th position, i.e., no one will ever find us unless they search for 'Cylocybe'. For a spore vendor that spent most of the last seven years at No. 1, it's a bad place to be!

It's a moral test. Do we remove the mention of starving children to get to a better position and more customers, or do we tell Google where to go and be truer to ourselves?..

We deleted their cookie code from the site, so your browser will still get that cookie from virtually every other website, but not from ours, at least.

We need to have a voice at Cylocybe. It's hard enough doing this job as it is, but we've always felt proud of what this shop brings people and it's the nice messages we get from customers that drives us to keep going. If you want to know your mushroom spores come from people that would help you up if you fell over, now you know.

Feel free to scan our site for any sneaky stuff by clicking the following image.

If you want, compare the results with other shops to see the difference.

Note, 16th September 2026: Now comes with: Free UK Shipping, Free Extra Spores (our random selection) and EZ-Replacement so you can have no-fuss replacements for up to 12 weeks... All of that for £8.

Why are our spore syringes suddenly so 'cheap' compared to other shops? It doesn't reflect crappy quality. Let us explain the real story behind the price....

When we first opened Cylocybe, there wasn't another spore vendor in this scene. We knew people would have to spend way more than £15 to import from the USA. Essentially, we took advantage of being the only shop and charged too much. We never thought our products would become popular or that we'd make more than a couple of hundred pounds a month. But they did.

With the profit, we stopped making spore syringes inside a SAB and built a proper lab. But we never dropped the prices down to a reasonable amount. Until now.

We have changed as people since our 2023-2025 hiatus. We didn't like where this scene was going, and we didn't want to be part of it any longer. But now that we are back, we have to fix a few things. We have to drive down the profitability of spore syringes; it's ruining this entire scene, and we've been equally complicit.

As the first dedicated website vendor in this UK scene, our perspective has been shaped by watching it grow from the very beginning. It has been a privileged position to be where we have been since the start, to ride that wave of an obscure hobby to a hobby so popular we'd bump into everyday strangers who mentioned they grew or knew someone who grew mushrooms with our injectable MycoBox. Even Vice tried to interview us (twice).

But it wasn't all about us. We wrote a blog post titled Growing Your Own Mushroom Business which explained the basics of getting a shop online properly. We had a lot of folk getting in touch thanking us and asking for advice. We have never been anti-competitor, we just wanted this scene to expand faster and further and for people to see this scene as utterly ripe for new ideas and innovation.

The influence we have in this scene isn't like it used to be. Taking a couple of months away from a business is bad enough, but we closed from '23 till '25 and genuinely didn't give a care about losing our No.1 spot on Google. We were confident that our regulars would return when we did.

In 2025, when there are umpteen different shops, those old, sky-high prices don't make sense. They aren't just unfair to customers' wallets and purses; they are creating a culture where 'money over morels' is the mantra. It's turned into a pure cash grab, where the goal isn't to innovate, but to steal original ideas, trademark common terms, and line pockets at the community's expense.

Magic mushrooms are deeply spiritual (when the spores are looked at through the 'scope...). It just doesn't feel right charging a fortune for them. We do need to make money, but we are going to try making money other ways, as we're effectively cutting our potential revenue from them in half.

A 12ml spore syringe only costs a vendor £0.76 to produce. We can fill and cap one hundred 12ml syringes in roughly 15 minutes; it's the bagging and labelling that takes all the time.

If we start making more sales for these spore syringes, we'll knock the price down further than £8 (which is half the price). £8 is still an extremely profitable markup from 76 pence a spore syringe.

This needs to be the new Cylocybe going forward. We're on a mission to make this hobby less about excess money-making (and the bad behaviour that spawns), starting with us. If we fail, we're out of here.

Next up is a sterile mushroom grow kit (for legal species only!) better than anything you have ever seen. Watch this space.

This is a retrospective news article about why we closed for 15 months.

Health, burn-out, loss, grief, mid-life crisis, you name it.

This is the reason we've not been open this year, all of you fun guys. That's the simplified honest truth.

For a good while, we had started to really despise Cylocybe and the effect this place had on our mental health. I think Covid times took a bigger toll on us than we realised. We were swamped in orders and you just would not believe the amount of constant abuse we were on the receiving end of from a completely new type of customer we hadn't experienced before. It really did feel like every nutter in the UK was shopping at Cylocybe and giving us a fkn' piece of their minds for absolutely everything and anything that had went wrong in their lives up to that point...

Gone was the ability for people to be able to read a payment instruction email or a grow guide, or communicate like civilised people. In with the people with the attention span of goldfish, purchasing grow kits and refusing to read the guides or appreciating what sterile meant... thinking ours were like ones from the Netherlands they could take the lid off to fruit mushrooms from uncolonised PF-Tek and Cylocybe Special MycoBoxes... It was a SURREAL time.

And don't get me started on the American spore supplier that sent us £10K worth of trichoderma-covered prints which was more than just a big waste of money, it massively dented our reputation for cleanliness. No flowhood can save you from that. Safe to say we never ordered from them again, they did the full works on us and we don't know why, other than an email exchange we had asking why a recent order wasn't the typical 50-packs with a security seal on each and which always had 20 Grade A prints (big fat, dense) and 30 Grade B in them and instead were just the grade B prints which were fine but about a quarter of the profitability potential - and told us we shouldn't ever have got those packs in the first place and that he would be speaking to the team to correct it.

Next order, it looked like EVERY print had been opened, all creased and messy like done in a rush.. thought I was being a little paranoid, until weeks later when the contam reports started piling in. Wild prints would have been cleaner than these.

Every other supplier from the USA we've worked with have been absolute gems and super nice people. If you are looking to start a business and want prints, head over to Inoculate the World. Unfortunately one of our other favourites, Ryche Hawk from mushrooms.com has closed shop (still miss the random chats with that guy).

Anyway, turning a hobby into a business stops it being a hobby. Everyone gets that. But, the number of work requests we get from people thinking Cylocybe would be super fun to work for all the learning is crazy, it's sitting in front of laminar flow hoods for hours doing the same repetitive task thousands of times, getting pins and needles and horrendous hand muscle problems from pulling a thousand syringes the day before, if any other spore vendors are reading this - those shooting pains that travel up your full arm are the worst. And then you have to bag every one of them and label them. And even at that, the spores are still the easiest part - then you've got the substrate and spawn and steriliser work to do - and fitting those injection ports on to tub lids at 5 a pop for MycoBox lids. When you have 100 MycoBoxes to get sterilised and you have to squeeze a port in to a lid 500 times for around 2% of the lids to break when you are fitting that damn last 5th port!

So, this news story has become a massive grumble. Some people like reading a grumble. No point pretending we are always happy happy at Cylocybe, but the thing that gives us a boost are the nice emails we get from appreciative customers. That can be the thing that makes a boring day less boring and has you feeling good and valued for a minute. But we all have hard jobs, this is the hardest of the 30-40 of them I've worked in!

I personally felt trapped for so long with Cylocybe - for someone who likes change, lots and lots of change, doing the same job year in year out goes against my nature. Ruth is someone who doesn't like change at all. Chalk and cheese I used to call us. Before I met Ruth, I would need to move the furniture around in my flat every month or so, I don't know why. Well, I do - for the change. I needed to. But Ruth works a little differently from me in that if I so much as move a book on the book shelf by a cm, she notices and it will drive her mad. Cylocybe for me became a thing I felt I couldn't control or change, and that's probably where the trapped feelings came from. If I quit Cylocybe, I'd not know what to do with myself. And if you've ever wondered why the site changes look so often, now you know a little snippet into my psychology.

Thing is with Cylocybe, the money can be good which lets you afford some nice things for once, but really we just wanted to go back to our lives before. We never intended for a whole year to pass and not to open up. That "one extra week" became the thing we said the next week, then after a while we stopped even talking about it. The months just kept passing and passing and re-opening got harder and harder to even think about. I rediscovered all the hobbies I hadn't had the time for for years, got back into coding and some super pointless projects which I could put all my focus on for months at a time (my brain needs to be constantly busy).

Why did Cylocybe have that effect on us? It's simple - being over worked. We created a blog post in 2021 trying to get new businesses to get involved, showing the tech stuff involved because we were struggling to keep up. Yes, we could have hired more people but unless you run a spore AND kit business at the same time, trust is a luxury you don't get to have with most people. If we were running a kit or spore business, you just don't need to have that same level of trust in the people working for you.

Cylocybe cost us personal relationships, employing pals - the dynamic changes after a few years. You start to piss them off and they start to do the same to you. And when you haven't learned how to be a good manager, like me, you make a double mess of things - you might think they know that work ends at closing time and you're pals after as usual, but the pal you berated (like a prick) for having to replace 10 wrong orders that week ends up resenting you. Self-reflection comes later, and you realise you were a 'boss' instead of a manager. If you want to destroy relationships within a few years, hire your pals to work for you.

So everything above is basically where our heads were at throughout much of 2024, until we got our shit in gear around Christmas time for a February 2025 opening!

Cylocybe.com

Note, 28th August 2026: we dropped this silly frustrated idea straight after saying it. You don't need an incubator to buy a grow kit.

You will need an incubator next month to grow mushrooms!

Starting after 5th November. Ending when it's a bit warmer!

Do you remember we closed last winter for 4 months?

We don't want to close for that long this year.

It's pretty depressing not having anything to do for months on end during the dark cold parts of the year.

But we also don't want to go through the same frustrating winter we've been through so many times before with Cylocybe...

Unless you have a business like ours, trust us when we say that it can be a struggle to keep everyone happy.

If customers are trying to grow sub-tropical species of mushrooms in cold conditions and expecting success, that's not our fault. Being blamed for failed grows and receiving replacement / refund demands as well as abusive messages is not fun at any time of the year, but winter time is by far the worst.

So we thought... instead of closing for a long time this winter, let's try something a bit different! 🙂

As of next month, you'll need an incubator to buy our mushroom grow kits.

Microscopy spores and supplies are exempt from this.

But with grow kits, you'll need to be using some sort of incubator.

We want you having success. Not failure.

This winter will be worse than ever. Energy costs have doubled and everyone is struggling these days.

We cannot take money in good conscience knowing the vast majority of you won't be able to keep your grow kits warm enough if you don't have an incubator.

Maintaining 20C+ temps (optimum is 26C during incubation) will cost you a fortune if you are just relying on home heating. Most people are going to have a rather cold winter.

Why are we being pushy about using an incubator?

It's not just for our self preservation in trying to avoid annoyed customers. We want you guys to have successful grows and keep coming back to us year after year - we will be shooting ourselves in the foot if we easily allow you to fail because you will simply go elsewhere (and suffer the same issues with possibly inferior products).

But I don't have an incubator!

Don't worry, we'll soon have a video up showing you how to build a good one like our CyLab. Which also has a heated fruiting chamber.

But if you don't want to build an incubator, you should also be able to buy one from us very soon.

What are the costs with an incubator?

Around £5 per month in electricity costs to run.

Let's say the heating element within the incubator is around 40W per hour.

If this was running for 24 hours per day, it would add to 28.8KW in a month. If the average cost per KW is around £0.34 (October, 2022) then it would cost £9.80 for a whole month of use.

But remember, an incubator is insulated well so would probably only be running for around half the time - let's say 12 hours a day.

What are the costs without an incubator?

Could be up to £500 per month to run. But it all depends on so many factors.

To keep a small 2KW electric heater working full pelt for even just half a day will amount to 12hours x 2KW = 24KW.

Over a month this will be 720KW at approx 34p per KW... Costing £244.80.

But that's only the half of it (literally).

Consider the fact that most homes are so cold and poorly insulated that even a 2KW heater running full pelt for 24 hours a day (£489.60 a month) probably wouldn't be enough to keep your home (or grow kits) above 20C. Forget reaching the optimum 26C either.

How will we go about this?

During checkout, when there's a grow kit in the basket we will make sure that a button to upload a picture of your incubator setup is there.

We simply want to drive home how important temperature is before an order is made to avoid disappointment and potentially save you a fortune in energy costs. And have you coming back here year after year and hopefully spreading the love for us with your friends.

When our customers are happy and having success growing mushrooms, we are happy. We just want you guys to have the tools for success this winter. And that's an incubator 🙂

What happened to the MycoBox?

Cylocybe Special MycoBox Grow Kit was the UK's favourite for many years.

We had an IP claim recently on the name 'MycoBox' which you can read about below.

But, this isn't about that..

It's easy to change the name to something even better, like 'CyloBox'.

But what's the point?

The truth is, we know our hugely successful kit was obsolete as soon as we launched our new Cylocybe MonoBox grow kit earlier this summer.

Cylocybe MonoBox is harder to contaminate, much faster, easier and even makes G2G or Agar transfer techniques possible for when you're ready to level up!

There's a reason why our new kit has been selling like hot cakes all summer, it's our best grow kit yet and the one we've been working towards for years.

Cylocybe MonoBox is the true way forward for our customers 1st, 2nd and 10th experience growing mushrooms 🙂

Original blog post:

WE HAVE TO CHANGE 'mycobox' TO SOMETHING ELSE

Forgive us if we seem a bit ratty in this blog post but the Cylocybe Special MycoBox means everything to us.

Why is it when things are going well something has to come along and pull the rug from underneath you… Life!

What happened?

A mushroom company in the UK got in touch to say we were using their name 'MycoBox'. Of course, we thought it was a hoax at first… After all we've been using this name since May 2018 with our PF-Tek MycoBox and thought it was an original name.

How did we manage to use another's product name unknowingly you may think? Especially when it's so simple just to search for the trademarks existance here and here.

Great question! …It's because the company in question didn't think to register the trademark.

The funny thing is, with the insane popularity of our 'MycoBox' over the years, so many competitors began to use the name to sell kits which resembled ours. Thinking that it was our cool unique product name, it did grate on us but we bit our tongue and let it slip.

We might not have been the first to use the name 'MycoBox' but with the greatest of respect, we made the name what it is.

What was our MycoBox?

Our MycoBox was a grow kit like no other. Innovation was bursting out its seams. Even the hygiene kit and humidity tent were different to what anyone else was doing at the time…

6 injection ports -- a true first of its kind product. And for tens of thousands of customers every year, MycoBox is synonymous with these innovative and forward thinking features to increase the accessibility for people to this hobby. And it certainly has -- since its introduction, we have seen first-hand an absolute boom for this product which propelled us to the No.1 spot for years.

What is their MycoBox?

Instructions: "You are going to start the kit by injecting spores at 4 equally spaced sites around the top of the Mycobox" "Inject as close as possible to the edge and push straight down -- if you get a small crack it is no problem as it will be covered by tape (N. B. Do not twist while injecting as this can block the syringe -- see MB-FAQ for how to unblock). Quickly tape over holes afterwards (with selotape or similar)"…

Difference between ours and theirs

Two major differences:

• Our kit is completely different in every way imaginable. No customer could possibly get the two mixed up.
• Our 'MycoBox' name is not as legitimate as theirs. We did research and they are right, they had it before us.

I'm presuming with the popularity of our MycoBox over the years that they might have been hounded by customers accusing their product of not being a genuine MycoBox and for that we apologise. We didn't do our homework well enough on that product name and it was 100% accidental -- we did a better job with our other product names.

We won't get in to which one is better -- they're from different generations. What I will say though is that their MycoBox doesn't have six sides, but now we're just poking a bit of fun 🙂

What I'll highlight instead is their MycoBox doesn't have injection ports (again, that was a unique innovation born on Cylocybe.com). Their product is used by pushing a needle through the plastic and essentially cracking a hole in the lid with a needle and then taping it up afterwards.

…We actually feel rather envious of these guys, especially after drilling literally millions of holes in plastic lids and pushing a bit of rubber through every tiny hole by hand -- our calloused fingers are the true victims of our Inject-thru products success!

Some other key differences:

• We use perlite for creating humidity, not vermiculite
• Different growing method
• We use a different tent
• Different hygiene kit
• Our kit is substantially bigger
• etc…

So, what now for MycoBox?

We know the other website has a point. It seems unfair on the surface of it but we understand and get where they are coming from.

Intellectual property is important to respect. We would be hypocrites if we didn't.

We don't believe in the slightest that we have profitised from this mix-up. The success is from our product's features, not its name and we think anybody would agree on this.

But, we are going to stop selling MycoBoxes until we come up with a new name. We've spent so many years dealing with copycats that we would never in a million years be one ourselves. Being unique is the DNA of Cylocybe.

An alternative to the MycoBox? MONOBOX.

Right now, 50% of grow kit sales are for the MonoBox Grow Kits. These kits are the absolute pinacle of 4 years worth of product development and a big quality leap from MycoBox. Customers are absolutely loving them and we couldn't be more proud of our offering. MonoBox really is the latest and greatest. And again -- unique. Completely new generation.

What we've learned from this?

Not to make the same mistake again.

We're also in the process of submitting all of our trademarks to be registered. We never thought we'd need to do this but turns out we should to make it easier for companies to make a search online and know definitively that it belongs to us.

Hopefully the other website learns from this situation and gets their name trademarked to try and avoid this happening again with other companies.

Even when a trademark hasn't been registered officially, it still belongs to the person who came up with the idea. So to anyone thinking that they can try to sneak in a trademark registration before us for one of our products, you'll be fighting a losing battle and wasting your time as it's easy to prove who was first.

Let's just say our MycoBox Grow Kit held something very special to us. It was such a unique grow kit at the time. It helped us become and stay a household name in the UK mycology scene. It helped change our lives and turn Cylocybe into the biggest UK myco site for years. Not because of its name, because of its stand-out qualities.

RIP Cylocybe Special MycoBox.

Running or wanting to run a business like ours?

This post isn't about growing mushrooms, it's about the technical side of starting and running a business like ours.

Advice

Below we've given a few pieces of advice for starting your own business, like ours. It's certainly not comprehensive, but it's a start for you guys and will have you on the right track at the get go.

Domain names

Make sure to seperate your domain name purchase away from the company you are using to host your site. If you fail to follow this advice, you're asking for trouble.

Companies who offer these services like Shopify (there's loads of them…) will leave you totally vulnerable to both your website name and your actual server being banned and taken away from you in one fell swoop.

Trust no-one. Don't be naive when it comes to your business. Any thoughts you once had about this scene being full of good guys is just pure fantasy. What we learned over this past 4 years is that when there's money involved, there's conniving folk looking to take you down so they can gain in some way. Protect your business by protecting your domain name.

Gandi is an excellent registrar where you can buy your domain name. They have a "No Bullshit" policy which they believe in and we believe in them, they are the only ones we trust to buy a domain name from.

Hosting platforms

If you are looking to open your own webshop, be very careful in choosing which hosting platform you use. Shopify is a big no-no, take it from us -- your webshop can get banned with nothing more than an irrate customer sending an email claiming your selling drugs.

We know this because it happened to us. Three days after a customer said he would destroy us (he tried to extort us for free products and we told him to f*** off)… Next thing we know, Shopify are accusing us of selling syringes which you inject into your arm to get high and we had no right to appeal the nonsense.

Self-Hosting

Forget Shopify, Go-Daddy or the rest… self-host your own website.

Find a hosting provider which specialises in VPS systems (Virtual Private Server) and set up a distro such as Ubuntu or Debian.

There may be 'One Click Install' servers so you can spin up a WordPress webserver in minutes without having to manually log in to the server to install and configure everything.

If you want complete control, learn how to install and set up PHP, Nginx, Mariadb and WordPress / Woocommerce. That's all you need for a webshop.

Web Security

Use the free 'LetsEncrypt' service to get your domain a HTTPS certificate. Don't ever buy one, why waste your money when it's free.

Never connect to your website using FTP, it's an ancient protocol which wasn't designed with security in mind. The only folks that use it across the internet are amateur web admins who have zero knowledge about web security. Protecting your customer data is a paramount, if your dataset gets exposed online because you were careless with security then you could end up being fined by the Data Commissioner and lose all of your customers through lack of trust.

If you want to transfer files to and from your server, use SFTP instead -- it's encrypted. FileZilla is a great program to use and it works perfectly on all popular OS's like Windows and MacOS.

Make sure to lock down and harden your webserver against attack; set up unattended upgrades and a script which automatically backs up your database and wordpress directory and sends daily backups to a 2nd VPS server you rent from another company. Regularly log into your servers and download these backups on to your local machine. Protect your data from loss so if disaster happens, you can be up and running within hours.

Extra tip:

You can hide your servers real IP address by using a service like Cloudflare. This helps secure the server from DDOS attacks by competitor businesses and makes it extremely difficult for anyone to locate which company you rent the VPS which your website is running from -- there are thousands of providers out there to choose from.

Other technical

In-depth technical help can be directed our way. Other than being mushroom geeks, we are proper computer geeks who are experienced in not just web coding but operating systems, infosec, scripting languages like sh/bash and networking.

Payment Processors

Stripe, PayPal (the worst), Square, Cashplus, WeTransfer and all the rest of them -- avoid!

If you want to sell microscopy spores, the only payment systems which have a solid foundation to run your business on are bank, crypto and cash.

PayPal like to freeze entire balances of money for very long periods of time. They've still got thousands of pounds of our money they took two years ago. PayPal are sneaky devils. We have seen new spore business get a foot in the door in this industry by using PayPal on their shops temporarily until they get banned (customers love PayPal and card payments). So if you are using this high risk practise, be sure to withdraw the balance to a bank account a couple of times a day. And do expect a ban at some point, but hopefully after you've managed to build up a large customer base who know they can trust you.

If you're using bank, use a proper business bank account -- all it takes is a conniving customer or competitor with an agenda who knows about business banking to report you and have your account closed down. This happened to us a few weeks after a customer said he was doing just that, all because we were delayed in getting an order out and didn't read their 10 psychotic emails sent throughout the middle of the night on a weekend -- that's all it takes to make some people go full cookie monster.

We use a proper business bank account now.

Couriers

When searching for the right courier to use, make sure you haggle the rates down. And then some.

The better rates you get, the better service rates you can pass on to your customers. As an example, we haggled DPD down to £5 + VAT for consignments up to 10KG. Make sure you ask for a consignment rate, it allows you to send multiple parcels to the same address which comes in handy when sending fragile breakables in one box and heavy bulky items in another.

Do your research on courier satisfaction rates and try to choose a courier which won't damage your business. Go for Yodel and you'll probably find yourself with no customers second time around -- sorry, Yodel.

Royal Mail are fantastic, but anything over 2KG and the price sky rockets to insanity. DPD are probably the best courier in the UK for anything heavy.

Marketing

If you make a customer happy, they will tell their friends. That's what worked for us.

We first started on eBay and wowed everyone to the point we got them coming to our website for a bigger choice of products. eBay was used as a marketing tool which we abandoned as soon as our website took off. eBay and PayPal fees are extortionate.

Since lockdown, we've seen new UK vendors popping up and getting their way to the top insanely quickly.

Want to know how?

A brand new webshop, coupled with well timed Google and Facebook ads and fresh Paypal with credit/debit card at checkout are the main componants newcommers in this industry use to get a successful head start. At least until they are banned from Paypal, but that is all it takes to get a foot in the door and a brand known.

Many customers would rather choose a 1 day old site with Paypal than a 4 year old site with bank transer. It's depressing for us, but it trully gives anyone an opportunity at getting involved in this industry without folks like us essentially monopolising it. If you think you can bring this industry something new to the table, then just do it 🙂

Planning to use a review site?

If you're planning on selling products like microscopy spore syringes which may have an association with 'drug use', be careful of which review sites you use.

Trustpilot may be the biggest, but they aren't a wise choice. Learn from us.

Trustpilot are not impartial and will ban a website from their platform if they don't like the products they sell. Ask all the spore sites across Europe who got banned this year! Denmark (where Trustpilot is based), is going through an ever increasing move to ultra conservative values right now. That's probably the reason, who knows.

If you get banned from a review site because of the products you sell, it doesn't matter if the review site shows the real reason -- expect your enemies (you will have them) to use this as an easy way to try to undermine your credibility and trust by spreading misinformation (such as being banned for 'fake reviews'). How do we know this? Check our previous blog post. 4 years in this scene -- it's not all roses. A nice email from a customer can suddenly remind you again of the good in humanity.

Extra advice:

Never try to fake success with false reviews. If you go in with that mentality, you'll go nowhere. Success comes with hard graft, I refuse to believe that it can be shortcutted.

If you're going to use another review system, make sure it's set up properly on your shop so that email invites are sent automatically after the order completes. External review systems will run script on WordPress based webshops which checks the order details and uses algorithms to know if it's a genuine order -- meaning when a customer responds to a review invite that it gets labelled as 'Verified' rather than 'Organic / Unverified'.

Why is this important?

Verified reviews are the only ones you really want because you'll spend enough time fighting off accusations of 'Fake Reviews' from bitter customers and jealous competitors on your business' journey that it will help back you up.

Suspicious Communication

Every few months, for a week or so we get bombarded with the same tell-tale emails -- it's clockwork and due in a few weeks time! Who knows who they are but they're barking up the wrong tree, trying to corner us into incriminating ourselves when we are running a legal business.

These emails really try to pull at your heart strings when all the other strategies don't work. We won't give away how exactly we know these folk are more suspicious than others, but it doesn't take a genius to recognise patterns in speech matching other suspicious emails we've had that week.

The only thing these folks are told is the same everytime -- our products are for legal use! Not for cultivating drugs for goodness sakes.

If you're not on the ball and fail to spot a single word in an email you are replying to, you could end up unknowingly giving advice which is illegal. Then that person can send it to the police and have your business shut down… all because of a word you failed to see! Eggshells which can land you in a heap of bother if you aren't careful.

This business is stressful, so be prepared to have a bit of weight on your shoulders 24/7. Though it makes up for it when you remember how much of a positive impact your business is making in helping people get into fungi and microscopy. We envision a future where gourmet mushroom growing in homes is as common as house plants are. One day we'll be right, you'll see.

Our experience

Over the past four years, we've amassed a wealth of knowledge and a tonne of ideas which have massively reduced our workload whilst being more productive.

Many of you may want to go it alone and that's fine. We went it alone, but wasn't for the lack of wanting help -- we just couldn't find a business like ours in 2017.

Up until 2 years ago, we were working 7 days a week to keep on top of orders. We nearly lost our minds and shut the whole site down just to keep our sanity.

Burnout will eventually catch up with you.

During the first lockdown of 2020 was when we really felt the stress, we were busy beyond anyone's wildest imagination… In one day we were bombarded with £10,000 worth of orders -- an entire week in a single day!

…It took an entire day just to process the payments, nevermind getting the orders out.

Many customers went absolutely bananas, it was a strange time.

Since then we've learned a few new tricks and we now each work a 4 day week and our lives are substantially better as a result, with more time to actually live and do things and still keep up with double the orders.

If you are thinking that those figures mentioned above are obscene, you have to remember that our outgoings are also obscene -- it costs a lot to run this business; staff costs, new equipment, replacing broken equipment (things break all the damn time!), rent, stock etc… We pay £10-15K every couple of months on prints alone because we go through them like hot cakes!

It costs a lot to keep your business growing.

Consultancy service

If you're running or wanting to run a business like ours and need a bit of help with something, get in touch and we'll discuss our fees based on what help you need.

If you need to ask questions such as

• How to quickly produce bulk amounts of perfectly cooked grain spawn
• How to sterilise certain products; times and temps
• How to make bulk amounts of agar, easily
• How to host and run your own webshop efficiently
• Where to get supplies and equipment
• How to deal with custom payments systems efficiently
• How to improve your SEO so your website has a real chance of getting to No.1 on Google*

*We were at No.1 spot on Google in the UK continuously from 2018 to 2021 without spending a single penny on advertising, so we must have been doing something right. We can share with you what we learned.

This month we're hovering at No. 4 -- taking your website offline for development work is risky, especially when it's as long as a month. That tip is free!

There are a million different questions that you may have so get in touch below 🙂

With a sad heart, we have to tell you that TrustPilot have banned us.

And no, not for anything grotesque like terrorism or fake reviews but for being what they like to call a "bad fit" business...

On Friday, 19th March at 8.05am we received an email saying we were a "bad fit" and that we break their "ethical" standards.

Trustpilot will ban for any one of these categories:

• Fake reviews
• Unfair review collection
• Reported Reviews
• Misuse of Reporting

Bad-Fit Businesses <- This one.

Profile Misuse

Abuse towards the Trustpilot community

So to the person spreading nonsense that we were banned for fake reviews... Get your facts right and read our old profile. We hope that you are just a bit clueless, rather than intentionally spiteful for whatever reason.

Could it be the microscopy products we offer?

We were thinking it may have been the microscopy spores because they are from the Psilocybe species of fungi and commonly referred to as "magic". To make it abundantly clear, as it is on the rest of our website - we offer these products to look at under the 'scope.. If we were to sell products to "grow magic mushrooms" we would probably be swamped in business, considering the boom in those Netherlands-based businesses! But, nowhere do we advertise, promote, condone or facilitate illegal activity on our website or communications. Did Trustpilot even read our website before they took this nuclear option?

This past year we have been chatting with our Trustpilot account manager about all sorts of features, getting API access etc... They like to call and email and treat us like good friends. Meagan would look through our site and suggest where best to place widgets for best effect etc. What other features might be good here and there. Trustpilot understood and knew our business. On January 19th, 2021 Meagan (our account manager) asked us to arrange a time to discuss renewing our contract which was due to expire on 19th March 2021. We were so busy that we forgot about that email and didn't get back in touch. Then came today, the 19th March 2021. Contract renewal date. Today is the day when we were banned completely out of the blue. Our "ethics" miraculously went bad on the renewal date, or so Trustpilot are trying to make you believe!

Being kicked when you're down

To make things worse, seemingly out of spite they have left behind a defaced profile page for everyone to assume the worst about us. Check it out here

What even is a bad-fit business?

We are sorry you even have to see some of these words:

"The types of businesses we don't want on Trustpilot, and would consider to be bad-fits, are those that:"

aid businesses or individuals to manipulate news, reviews, documents and results;

promote hatred, violence, terrorism, xenophobia or any form of discrimination against any individual or group;

offer illegal products and services; illegal drugs, prescription drugs sold on the illegal market;

provide or facilitate the provision of escort services, mail-order brides, prostitution or any form of forced labour or human trafficking;

offer or produce any sexual abuse or explicit imagery, and any material that presents children or animals in a sexual or illegal manner;

organize illegal animal fights or sell products made with endangered animal parts

facilitate criminal activities of any sort, including those carried out by means of computers or the Internet;

are engaged in financial scams such as pyramid schemes, credit card fraud, mortgage scams; or, otherwise operate illegally; for example, selling fake or unsafe goods and services, or generally mis-sell.

...It has only been one day and we've already experienced nasty accusations because we have been linked to this list! Trustpilot is trying to slaughter our business. A business we have put almost every single waking hour into since 2017 when we were amongst the only folks trying to revive a dying mycology scene in the UK with a half decent place to buy products from. We don't feel positive today, that's for sure.

Not a hint of consistency...

Trustpilot allows huge (30K+ reviews) Netherlands-based webshops on their platform who make a business selling magic truffles containing Psilocybin (UK Class A) and fully colonised magic mushroom substrates amongst a tonne of other mind bending chemicals. ...So surely it couldn't be our harmless microscopy spores that Trustpilot has used as their reason to ban us? How does that make any sense? None of this makes sense.

A disgruntled customer or a jealous competitor?

Over the years, it's fair to say we've experienced our fair share of despicable customers. Sorry, we would like to tell you that everyone who shops with us is great but that would be a downright lie. Most are though. In this day and age it's too easy for any small online-based business like ours to be reported for violating terms and have their service terminated. Thorough investigations are a thing of the past and you can rarely (if at all) have a decision reviewed unless the news somehow goes viral. After being banned from Shopify because of a troll who reported that our microscopy spore syringes were for injecting into an arm to get high, we quickly learned that the internet was savage to everyone! ...Yes, a troll successfully took our entire website down using total nonsense and a Shopify advisor blindly believed them; hook, line and sinker. We had to build from scratch and self-host our own website after that. Recently we took notice of another UK competitor suffer the same banning issue as us on Trustpilot. We were devastated for them... they didn't deserve it. It's an unwritten rule not to be evil to your competitors (even when they pilfer your product ideas, names and content), so we would like to hope / think that this wasn't another competitor.

What's your purpose anyway, Trustpilot?

Trustpilot, you have zero expertise on this industry or the products we sell and your ethics are pure nonsense. If Trustpilot has any idea what they were doing, they would see a major difference between a business like ours who specialises in all things fungi and the other (bigger...) businesses on their platform who specialise in customers getting as high as a kite. Let us remind you of your purpose, Trustpilot... You are a review website. Stick to what you are good at; making insane amounts of money simply to sell 'extra' email invitations for customers to review a business! The more you pay Trustpilot for the invites, the less their "ethics" get in the way it seems. It's also interesting to note that this scenario happened at the end of our yearly contract!

Closing words

Now when someone searches for us on Trustpilot all they will see is a nasty message to give the impression we did something wrong... No, we didn't. Our products harm no living things, they bring joy, knowledge and they teach fungi through the cultivation of mushrooms. Customers get a chance to experience the amazing and still highly unexplored health benefits mushrooms provide to mind and body. Our microscopy spore products allow us to visualise the beginnings of the journey through a microscope, where it all starts. Yes, it's true that there are customers out there who could use our products in ways which go against our terms, but that can be said about any business including your own where fake reviews are a business in itself. And if Trustpilot thinks it's going to easily push our small business about and shit over our entire reputation by essentially accusing us of everything in that list by not defining which one applies to us, then it's their ethics at question, not ours. Take your 'ethics' and shove 'em up your ass, Trustpilot!

RIP Cylocybe @ Trustpilot Jan 2018 - Mar 2021 Excellent 4.9 / 5

Note, 16th September 2026: The @cylomylo Instagram was closed down in Summer 2025.

Years of running your own business can build up a lot of rage frustration at times.. So, why not take this out on a few deserving walls with a sledgehammer?!

A highlight of our industrial unit renovation, for sure.

Lots of you have been wondering how our project is going.. it's been tough but we are finally getting there. Every day of our 4 week shop closure was spent working on the unit and the business as a whole. This week we have finally been in a position to start moving most of our equipment and stock over and we're trying to create as little downtime as possible in our operations so that you guys shouldn't experience any delays to regular dispatch times. But, the week is still young, so if we are delayed by a day or two on getting orders out - this is why and please be patient with us.

We intend to build multiple rooms and have a full second floor spanning almost the entire area of the unit, but for now we are basically treating the place as one very large room and an office area.

The main challenge with the unit has been the scale of dirt build-up for more than two decades. Yep, you read that right - two decades! It was a garage before we moved in, so imagine the worst and triple it..

This photo was taken whilst the ceiling was being cleaned.. look at that side-by-side difference!

Now that we have more space, we have also invested in two massive autoclaves with a 580L capacity each. So at any single time we can be sterilising way more than a volumetric tonne!! Touchscreening it all the way too.. Badass if you ask us 😀

The engineers are due out this week to help us understand how to use them and to program the onboard computers to suit our sterilisation requirements.

Here is a quick before and after of the place - we're sure you're all dying to see after us going on about it..

Not 100% finished, but what a difference.

We have set up an Instagram profile again to share some more photos of the renovation and the business progression.

You can find us by searching for @cylomylo in your Instagram app - or click here

A big apology is owed to the folks who have been waiting a while for an email reply.. We completely hold our hands up to this - we never kept on top of them properly and they have piled up to become the Everest of emails. During our shop closure, we had planned on replying to emails every few days but the work involved in the unit has been so much more than we ever anticipated and time just completely runs away from us every single day. Pissed off people are the flavour of the month right now, and rightfully so. But please know that we haven't been sitting on our butts neglecting our business - the majority of our waking life has been dedicated to our new unit, making sure that we are in there as soon as possible to operate from a much more efficient environment.. which means better service for our customers too.

We have been dedicating time to catching up on emails this week and aim to have a reply sent to every one this week. Very, very soon we will be set up in our new work space and our service as a whole will return to the normal 5 star standard that we are known for.

A lot of you have also been getting in touch to offer some words of support during this incredibly stressful time and we cannot thank you enough for that, it genuinely means so much to us.

Keep an eye on the Instagram page for more photo updates and we will also update this News page as often as we can!

Love, always

Cylocybe team

An overview of what's been happening the past few months, exciting things ahead for us and the reason why we have to close the shop to accepting new orders for a few weeks - starting on Sunday 28th June until Tuesday 28th July.

Innovation break

You may remember we went on an innovation break on 14th March (9 days before the UK went on lockdown).. During this time, we were already booked up to go to Mycelia's 'Group training on substrate and mushroom production' course in Belgium.

We were rather excited about this 5 day training course (understatement) but Covid-19 got in the way for us and we couldn't risk travelling and having borders being shut on us. Yeah, deflating..

We were meant to be reopening again on 27th March, but we realised we couldn't manage to stick to that opening date because we were having trouble sourcing much of our needed supplies / stock (..we all know about the toilet paper fiasco!).

Instead of making promises to open the site up a week later just to let you all down again, we decided to come back on the 28th April.

Opening day (28th April)

Whenever we reopen after being closed, we are always busy but the magnitude and scale of this was very different and far from ordinary.. minute after minute there was an order from the USA, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, etc.. It just wouldn't stop. Mylocybe was being flooded with orders to the point we had to eventually put restrictions in place for how many kits people could buy.

It seemed a LOT of people chose to hang on and wait for us to reopen rather than going elsewhere, which is fantastic and appreciated but wow did it take its toll on us.

Dispatch delays

It's a horrible feeling realising that no matter how hard you try, the lack of hours in the day make it impossible to stick to dispatch timescales we had previously promised prior to Covid-19. 18 hour days, 7 days a week became the new normal for us to be able to catch up.

Most customers were appreciative of the delays due to Covid-19 and how busy we were, but we would be lying if we tried to sugar coat this..

We don't know what's going on in this new world, but there's a lot of people who need to take a step back from their phone screens sometimes and evaluate first what they are about to send. Be better than that!

..It usually goes the same way too - customer gets angry because they haven't received a quick reply, then the 2nd irate email saying we are scammers then another email an hour later and before we know it we have a dozen emails sitting there which get nastier and nastier when we finally get a chance to read emails! C'mon folks..

Positive New Stuff

We had a list as long as our arm for all the things we changed during our (Covid-extended) innovation break. But we're only going to tell you about the most exciting ones which immediately spring to mind.

Fighting Contamination

You can probably guess that fighting contamination has always been a major priority for us; we know that the first growing experience can be make or break for people - failure can mean abandoning the hobby entirely whilst success can mean the start of an exciting new lifelong journey for people.

Our aim is to make indoor mushroom cultivation a reality in even the most mouldy of homes and clumsy of people and with SteriBag and other things we have planned soon, we are taking those crucial steps.

SteriBag is simply an autoclavable bag which your MycoBoxes etc are placed in prior to sterilisation. It's more work for us, but for you it means you can feel confident knowing the kit literally cannot be any more clean.

It also means no wiping injection ports anymore! And as long as you follow our simple inoculation technique, you will have the best chance against contamination we have yet seen out there. Groundbreaking seems an overstatement, but it has to be close.

We'll call this another unique thing we came up with just like Inject-Thru 🙂 But if you know otherwise, please get in touch so we can correct this and give credit where it's due!

Improved Payment System

We have changed so many things on our site and continue to do so on an almost daily basis. Basically, we overhauled our entire payment system and made it much easier to do. As a result we've had an 80% drop in the number of customers making mistakes when paying us (ie. forgetting to use the correct payment references when sending payment through their banks).

Communication Improvements

We have had to learn how to adapt to a changing landscape in microscopy study and gourmet mushroom growing, so whilst facing a mountain of orders on a daily basis we realised how much time we were losing to an inefficient communication system. So we decided to fix it.

All of our automated emails have been redone, plus there are more emails keeping customers in the loop throughout their entire order process.

We're sure you've already seen it 😛 Hope you all like it.

Syringe Processing and Packaging

Our syringes are processed better and are packed cleaner than ever, with more enhancements coming very soon (see Cleanroom*)

Cylocybe History

As some of you may remember, Cylocybe was born in a 1 bedroom flat in Glasgow. Suffice to say, we quickly ran out of space!

Our next upgrade was to a 5 bedroom house in the countryside with large outbuildings and outdoor space / storage.. but even this was too small for the business..

So we rented a shipping container. Then another. And another. Then we started storing stuff in our transit van until we finally said enough was enough..

Industrial Unit

The business is moving into new premises and we will be reclaiming our home for the first time 🙂

The exciting evolution of our business and how far we've come.. It's a proud moment for us and probably will be for many of our customers who've been with us since the start.

Closing Shop for a Few Weeks

The new unit needs a good bit of work, which is why we are closing the shop to new orders all of July. Time to get our DIY hats on.

Any important questions or issues throughout this period, we'll still be here for you of course.

New Equipment

Our industrial unit gives us many more options with the space we have.

We have purchased a very large ISO Class 5 Cleanroom Tent which will be installed within the next couple of weeks.

If you are unsure about cleanrooms, the lower the ISO Class the better and a Class 5 has particularly high end air cleanliness.

Cleanroom (ISO Class 5) - Clean Tent Model 1700 / Removes 99.995% of Airborne Particles 0.3 Micrometers (μm) in Size.

This is a temporary solution until we have fitted an even larger rigid walled cleanroom.

Clean Tent Model 1700

Laminar Flowhood (ISO Class 4) - HLF1800 / Removes 99.9998% of Airborne Particles 0.12 Micrometers (μm) in Size.

Within our already incredible clean room, we are installing a brand new 1.8m horizontal laminar flow hood which has much better filtration than a typical ISO Class 5 laminar flow hood commonly used in mycology.

It cost us a fortune, but it's important for us to keep improving our products to the point of world class quality. Customers who've known us from the start know that we're genuinely all about high quality.

Good riddance DHL

Issue after issue left unresolved, refunds for damaged parcels not being provided to us, customer parcels not being collected from us, the list goes on..

Finally a courier we can rely on to do their bit right!

We've sent a tonne of parcels so far with not a single issue. Plus, we have our very own DPD manager so if something goes wrong it will be sorted swiftly. Perfect.

Other Things

Fixed many bugs within the login system, change of password etc.

We disabled non-account holders from purchasing on our site a few weeks back, this was to slow the number of orders coming in because it's been chaotic to say the least.

So if our competitors are reading this and wondering why more customers are ordering from them; you're welcome 😉

You may have noticed we've had a banner on our site looking for artists. As we are moving into a new chapter for our business, we wanted to reach out to customers to help add a bit of life to our new digs.

Plenty of opportunity to be creative, murals etc. We have had a few very talented artists get in touch with so far, but we need many more as it's a very large space we are moving into. Travelling in July to us in Ayrshire, Scotland is a must for this project.

Get in touch on project@cylocybe.com

As you can tell, we've been hard at work for months and have so much more to do to get where we want.

Thank you for supporting us through and through over the years. Without your trust in us, we would never have made it this far and we wouldn't be about to break new grounds in the future of Cylocybe. We have had a lot of people supporting our cause because they believe in what we are doing. We want to thank every one of you from the bottom of our hearts.

Cylocybe Team x

Cash, Bank Transfers and Cryptocurrencies available as per usual.

Sorry about this folks, but PayPal has such a moral disliking to our hugely popular microscopy spore products that they abruptly shut down their payment service with us yesterday.

..Not just that, they also ran off with our entire balance which we use for everything from stock to paying our utility bills! But it's OK because they promise to give us it all back in 180 days! ..Seriously?! If we were just starting as a business, this would probably ruin us.

One interesting PayPal fact you might like to know:

With approximately 10,000 orders processed via PayPal so far, we had only two instances of people attempting to do a charge-back on us! And one of them dropped as soon as we proved it was a scam (that customer must have been in a pretty rubbish place to feel he needed to resort to that with us..). These figures are pretty awesome though, clearly a combination of amazingly honest customers and us doing a pretty decent job of handling everything nicely!

But we always knew that PayPal was the weakest link in our chain. These internet giants (mostly American, aren't they?) rule the internet - whatever they say goes because they can. They don't give a toss about the wee people like us or you, it's all about the dollar and power. Their ideologies are our arch nemesis and the reason we even started this project - to prove that you could be a humanist and run a pretty cool store where people get a brilliant experience and a (sometimes life-changing) new hobby to indulge in.. There is so much crap in this world that we wanted to bring something good into it.

But don't stress, just like in March '19 when we were taken offline and had to rebuild ourselves a brand new website from scratch - we always come back bigger and stronger. We are twice the size we were back then because we're a relentless bunch. Just as well we purchased an amazing new piece of equipment hours before PayPal struck - a gigantic 110Litre digital autoclave with a powerful air compressor (now bringing our total capacity up to 271L). It feels like Christmas has come early for Cylocybe! So you can all feel free to give us everything you got, we have the sterilising capacity to take you all on 😉

Bank transfer and cash in post payment options will remain available for UK customers and CoinPayments (for cryptocurrencies) will remain available for all customers.

We will be working on sourcing some new reliable and trustworthy payment methods over the coming weeks. If any readers have or know of some good payment solutions which are reliable and not run by closed minded companies, please get in touch with us.

Thank you, as always.

The Cylocybe team