Why We Partnered with Ecologi
At Grounded Fox, we believe that spending more time outdoors — in nature, in your garden, in the fresh air — is one of the most powerful things you can do for your health and your happiness. That belief extends beyond the products we sell. It extends to the planet those products come from. That is why every single order placed through our store automatically plants five trees in the ground, somewhere in the world that needs them most.
The Honest Truth About Why This Matters to Us
We sell outdoor living products. Saunas, hot tubs, cold plunges, pergolas, outdoor kitchens — things built from natural materials, designed to connect people with the natural world. It would be a strange kind of hypocrisy to run a business built around the healing power of nature without taking active responsibility for the health of the planet that makes all of it possible.
The climate crisis is not a distant, abstract concern. It is already reshaping the landscapes, the weather patterns, and the ecosystems that make outdoor life meaningful. The wild swimming rivers, the forested hillsides, the open moorland that our customers return from and want to recreate a piece of at home — all of it depends on a living, functioning planetary system. Supporting that system is not a marketing exercise for us. It is the logical extension of everything we believe about why the outdoors matters.
We chose Ecologi because they are, quite simply, the most credible and most transparent organisation doing this work. Trusted by over 16,000 businesses with a Trustpilot rating of 4.8, their projects are independently verified, fully traceable, and evidenced on a Public Impact Ledger that anyone can examine. No greenwashing. No vague promises. Just trees in the ground and documented evidence of every single one.
Who Ecologi Are — and Why They Are Different
Ecologi is a Bristol-based climate action platform founded in 2019 with a straightforward but ambitious mission — to make meaningful climate action accessible to businesses and individuals who want to do something real rather than just feel good about doing something. They are a certified B Corporation, which means their environmental and social impact is independently assessed and verified to standards that most companies could not meet.
Ecologi's platform helps businesses measure, reduce and report their carbon emissions, and fund high-integrity climate restoration. They operate what they call a 3Rs framework — Reduce, Restore, Report — that gives businesses a complete pathway from understanding their emissions to taking credible action to address them. For Grounded Fox, the most important element of that framework is the restoration side — the tree planting and nature restoration projects that put real, growing, carbon-sequestering trees into the ground in the places that need them most.
What sets Ecologi apart from the dozens of organisations in this space is transparency and rigour. Their due diligence and assessment frameworks follow global best practice including the GHG Protocol, the SBTi and Oxford Principles. Every project they fund is independently verified against international standards. Every tree that is planted is tracked. And the entire impact record is available to view publicly — because organisations serious about this work should be able to show their receipts.
Ecologi's Shopify app has helped plant over 5 million trees via Shopify alone, and holds a 4.9 star rating on the Shopify App Store, trusted by over 2,000 stores. The integration is the reason our partnership works so seamlessly — more on that below.
How It Works — What Happens When You Place an Order
This is where the mechanics matter, because the difference between a genuine environmental commitment and a marketing claim is whether it actually happens automatically and verifiably every single time.
Grounded Fox uses Ecologi's Shopify integration — an award-winning app that connects our store directly to Ecologi's tree planting infrastructure. The moment an order is confirmed on our website, the integration fires automatically. Five trees are funded instantly. No manual process. No batch processing at the end of the month. No possibility of it being forgotten or skipped. The moment you complete your checkout, five trees are on their way into the ground.
The Ecologi Shopify app automates tree planting by seamlessly tying sales to tree planting — set it and forget it, automatically planting trees with every sale to grow the store's climate impact. The integration is real-time, fully automated, and completely transparent — meaning every tree planted through Grounded Fox purchases is logged, tracked, and verifiable.
Over time, as the Grounded Fox community grows, so does our collective impact. Every sauna, every cold plunge, every hot tub, every veranda — each one of them arrives with five new trees added to the planet's forest cover. It adds up quickly, and the cumulative effect of thousands of small acts of funding is the kind of large-scale reforestation that makes a genuine difference to the global carbon balance.
Where the Trees Are Planted — The Actual Reforestation Sites
Ecologi works with a carefully vetted portfolio of reforestation partners operating in the regions where tree planting delivers the greatest combined environmental and social impact. Their reforestation projects span Madagascar, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Morocco, Ethiopia, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Ecuador. Each project is run in partnership with local organisations and employs local communities — meaning the trees that grow deliver social and economic benefits to the people living alongside them, not just carbon and biodiversity benefits to the planet.
Here are four of the key project regions where trees funded through Grounded Fox purchases are being planted right now. Each map shows the actual planting location — not a head office, not a city, but the exact stretch of coastline, forest, or hillside where the trees are going into the ground.
Marotaola, Madagascar — Mangrove Restoration
This was Ecologi's very first planting site and holds a special place in their story. Located on the northwest coast of Madagascar near Mahajanga, Marotaola is one of three mangrove restoration sites Ecologi supports on the island. Madagascar has lost more than 90% of its original forest cover — one of the most dramatic deforestation stories on earth, in a country of extraordinary ecological uniqueness. The Ecologi community has funded over 7.9 million trees on this single site alone.
Mangroves are among the most carbon-dense ecosystems on earth — they sequester carbon at up to four times the rate of tropical rainforests and provide critical coastal protection for communities vulnerable to storm surge and sea level rise. The initial survival rate at these sites exceeds 80%, and between years three and five the young trees begin producing their own propagules — baby mangrove trees — resulting in natural regeneration that multiplies the original planting impact by up to 500%.
Changalane, Mozambique — Terrestrial Reforestation
Mozambique has lost more than 8 million hectares of forest to deforestation driven by firewood demand, agricultural expansion, and commercial logging. The Ecologi Mozambique reforestation project plants terrestrial species in the Changalane region in the south of the country, addressing the urgent need for reforestation in the tropics whilst aligning with multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals including climate action, life on land, and sustainable communities.
The projects in Mozambique are run by Eden Reforestation Projects using their "employ to plant" methodology — hiring local community members to plant, grow, and protect trees. This model simultaneously addresses deforestation and extreme poverty, creating stable employment in communities where both the forests and the livelihoods of local people have been devastated by decades of environmental degradation.
Kijabe Forest, Kenya — Forest Restoration
Kenya's forests have been reduced to covering just 7% of the country's land area through decades of mismanagement, logging, charcoal burning, and agricultural encroachment. In partnership with the Kijabe Forest Trust and the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, Eden Reforestation Projects restores forests in the Kijabe Hills that support both wildlife and the human communities that depend on functioning ecosystems for water security, food security, and climate resilience. The loss of Kenyan forest cover has contributed directly to increased drought frequency and severity — replanting these forests is not just an environmental act but a direct intervention in the climate resilience of entire communities.
Mount Elgon, Uganda — Forest Gardens & Agroforestry
In Uganda, Ecologi partners with Trees For the Future to plant forest gardens — multi-species agroforestry systems that combine food-producing trees with native species to restore degraded land while simultaneously improving food security for the farming families who tend them. The Ecologi community has funded the planting of 766,663 trees through this programme, with 300 farmers — 57% of whom are women — involved and 3,522 people benefiting from the project so far. One farmer, 56-year-old Philister Khana, took the number of trees on her plot from just 4 to over 2,000 in two years. This is reforestation that works for people and planet simultaneously — the kind of integrated approach that makes genuine long-term impact possible.
Beyond Tree Planting — What Ecologi Does More Broadly
Tree planting is the most visible and most tangible element of Ecologi's work, but it is part of a much broader and more sophisticated climate action platform that represents genuine leadership in the corporate sustainability space.
Ecologi helps businesses measure their Scope 1, 2, and 3 carbon emissions — the full picture of their environmental footprint from direct operations to supply chains to the products they sell. They support businesses in setting science-based reduction targets aligned to the Paris Agreement's 1.5 degree pathway. They provide verified carbon credits from high-integrity projects for emissions that cannot yet be eliminated. And they supply the transparent reporting infrastructure that allows businesses to communicate their climate action credibly — meeting regulatory requirements like SECR and CSRD without the greenwashing risk that vague environmental claims carry.
Ecologi's projects support restoration from reforestation and peatland revival to coastal and blue-carbon habitats, channelling finance into measurable nature-positive outcomes that go beyond carbon to actively regenerate the living systems that businesses and communities depend on. The tree planting is the beginning of a much larger story about what a business genuinely committed to climate action looks like in practice.
What This Means for You as a Grounded Fox Customer
When you buy from Grounded Fox, five trees are planted. Not eventually. Not in theory. Right now, automatically, in a verified project in a part of the world that needs them. The integration between our Shopify store and Ecologi's platform means there is no gap between the purchase and the impact — they happen simultaneously.
Over the lifetime of a sauna, a cold plunge, or a hot tub — products that will sit in your garden for decades — the cumulative tree planting impact of that single purchase, and every subsequent purchase our customers make, adds up to something genuinely significant. A stretch of Madagascan coastline being restored by mangrove trees. Carbon being sequestered. Coastal communities being protected from storm surge. Farming families in Uganda rebuilding their land. Wildlife habitat in the Kijabe Hills being restored tree by tree.
The outdoor life we are all building at home is connected to the health of the planet we share. The partnership with Ecologi is how we make that connection real rather than rhetorical.
Every order. Five trees. Automatically. Every single time.
You can learn more about Ecologi and their work at ecologi.com. To see the full portfolio of verified reforestation projects your purchases support, visit ecologi.com/projects.
