Why we closed for all of 2024. Heavy.

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