Welcome to Acanthion Home

Our Mission

To provide top-quality products with outstanding customer service, delivered sustainably. We eliminate the risk of online shopping and guarantee the accuracy of our website listings through our own photography, product testing, and detailed descriptions.

The journey to Acanthion Home

I started a business called The Spice Cellar in April 2008 as a personal challenge to see if I could code my own ecommerce website and sell products I was passionate about, namely organic herbs and spices. Mission accomplished and the business started to grow.

For the first 10+ years the business grew steadily, organic herbs and spices, led to tea, sauces, blends, non-organic products as well as the weird and wonderful things such as camel milk. At one stage I had over 1000 different product lines and was even splitting 25kg sacks of spice into 25g bags. All very complicated!

As time rolled on herbs, spice and tea led us to oriental tea posts and infuser mugs as well as an opportunity to expand my long running interest in all things magical and mystical, not to mention Feng Shui.

Then came Covid!   We sold 3 months of spice stock in the first 3 weeks of lockdown and were unable to replace it; not to mention Chinese stock stuck for months on the good ship Evergiven. You must find positives amongst negatives and these difficult times gave me the motivation to rethink and now The Spice Cellar no longer sells herbs and spice. Why?   There will always be people who can sell it cheaper. It’s a pain watching people sell herbs and spice for less than I have paid for it and they were buying from the same place. Another dirty trick is to buy organic products in bulk and then in your garden shed you split it into smaller quantities and continue to resell it as Organic. It isn’t! If your premises is not certified by one of the organic bodies such as the Soil Association and you repackage you have broken the certification chain and the product is no longer organic. The main marketplaces are full of this and customers online don’t understand why our prices were premium. Ce la vie!  Sadly it was time to move away from food related products.

So, with the help of fantastic suppliers, I expanded our non-food range to include beautiful homeware and much more. At the same time, we changed most of our packaging to more environmentally friendly solutions such as paper bubble wrap, sugar cane mailing bags and recycled boxes, wherever possible.

Up until May 2025 we continued to run as The Spice Cellar, the spice store with no spice! Times change and to take our homeware business to the next level we needed a new website, so farewell to The Spice Cellar, hello Acanthion Home.

What else is under the Acanthion Ltd umbrella?

With my daughter India we have a successful floristry business called Thistle and String. India has a background in fine art which she uses to inspire her creations. With this also comes the ‘No design is too big!’ approach and she can turn your floral dreams into reality! 

Occasionally I can be seen helping with floral creations, flowers, and scissors in hand.  Really enjoyable and relaxing.

And there is Sarah…..

My wife Sarah is a talented watercolour artist who has supported the business since the start and plays an essential role in managing the dispatch of goods, editing the website, testing items, and selecting new stock items. 

Sarahs cards are available at on our web site

                   

                                                                                   

Acanthion Home, Thistle and String, The Spice Cellar are trading names of Acanthion Ltd