The Joinery

The Joinery was founded by sisters Natalie and Kim Ellis, who grew up on the factory floors of their father’s clothing manufacturing business in the 1980s, watching fabric become something else entirely in the hands of makers. Their childhood ran between that factory floor and a stone cottage in the KwaZulu-Natal mountains, built by their father with his own hands, where they foraged wild mushrooms, made jam from the fruit trees, and shaped ceramics from clay pulled straight out of the riverbed. Years later, in London, immersed in the international sustainable design movement, they sharpened an instinct that had been with them since childhood, quietly, like a seed waiting for rain: that beautiful things can also do good.

Sisters Natalie and Kim Ellis, founders of The Joinery, who turned an idea into a company, and a company into an opportunity for the women around them.

The Joinery launched in 2012, working first with ethical fashion ranges before turning towards recycled plastic. In 2015, working alongside local recyclers and fibre producers, the sisters developed FutureFelt®, a textile spun entirely from recycled plastic bottles. It takes close to 25 bottles to weave a single metre of the fabric. A tote bag carries five. A weekender bag carries twenty-six. Bottles that might otherwise have drifted into a landfill, or out to sea, are collected, broken down, and needle-punched into a felt that has since become the language of everything. The Joinery makes hotel slippers, travel pouches, totes and luggage, handcrafted in-house by a family of artisans that has grown from two sisters working around the clock to as many as fifty makers at a time.

Their motto, adopted in the earliest days when the scale of the plastic problem felt too vast to face, is disarmingly simple:

Do Something. Anything.

It is the kind of quiet, stubborn belief we recognise here at Londolozi, where a derelict cattle farm was once turned, one decision at a time, into a place the wild could come home to.

That sense of restoration runs deeper than the workshop floor. The Joinery works alongside the African Academy of Fashion to train seamstresses in sewing and small business skills, and the offcuts from their fabric find their way to local schools and community art projects rather than into the bin. Even their thread spools are given a second life, cleaned by a school for the blind before returning to production.

It is, at its heart, an African material born from an African idea. What we throw away could become the beginning of something else entirely.

A Kindred Spirit

Londolozi discovered The Joinery in 2017, and the recognition was immediate, the way it sometimes is when you meet someone who has been walking towards you all along. Two very different industries, shaped by the same quiet instinct. Both businesses had inherited something from the generation before them, and both had chosen, deliberately, not simply to preserve what they were given, but to build on it. Business, in both families, had never been separated from responsibility. Belonging, in both families, had always meant looking after something larger than yourself.

What followed was a friendship. From there, it became a partnership, and eventually, an idea that travelled a great deal further than either family expected.

Londolozi had its own reasons to recognise a kindred spirit. Each year, we mark Plastic Free July, and The Joinery’s products have quietly done real work in that effort long before it became a milestone worth writing about. Their FutureFelt® slippers replaced the throwaway plastic slipper in our guest suites and at the Healing House. Their wash bags and hotel amenities did the same in bathrooms across our five camps. Small swaps, guest by guest, but they added up to something we could feel underfoot: a lodge relying a little less on single-use plastic, and a partner helping to make that possible without ever asking anyone to compromise on how a room felt at the end of a long day in the bush.

Through Londolozi, The Joinery was introduced to Relais & Châteaux in Paris. Together, they developed FutureFelt® travel pouches, and what began as an experiment with recycled fibre became more than 300,000 pieces, diverting over 150,000 plastic bottles, culminating in a takeover on the Champs-Élysées. An idea conceived at the southern tip of Africa was, quite suddenly, being discussed on an international stage, a long way from the riverbeds and factory floors where it began.

In 2020, the story returned to where it had started. Londolozi and The Joinery created their first joint shoot here on the reserve, photographing products made from discarded plastic against the very wilderness they were, in their own small way, helping to protect. There was something quietly moving in those images, bottles reborn as beautiful things, set down in a landscape that has spent a century being restored in much the same spirit. Sustainability was never a trend for either family. It has always simply been a way of looking at the future.

As Natalie and Kim put it:

“African innovation did not need to imitate the rest of the world. It could lead it.”
— Natalie and Kim Ellis, The Joinery

Why The Milestones Matter

A century is not a number Londolozi arrives at lightly. It represents generations of the Varty family choosing, again and again, to protect a piece of land, its wildlife, and the people bound to it, long before conservation was a word anyone used as we do now. It represents rivers allowed to run their course, animals given room to return, and a belief, held quietly for a hundred years, that right relations between people, the earth, and its wild inhabitants are worth building a life around.

The Tinxiya Female leopard ambles along the Maxabene riverbed in search of a comfy, cool place to rest for the day.

A million bottles is not a number The Joinery arrives at lightly either. Since 2015, they have been counting every bottle diverted through FutureFelt®, working steadily towards this exact goal. By 2021, five years in, they had already passed the halfway mark. It represents years of experimentation and quiet persistence, and the hands of the artisans who have shaped each piece, one at a time. It represents every guest, every hotel, and every traveller who chose the more considered option, often without knowing the story woven into what they were holding.

That the millionth bottle arrived through a Londolozi commission feels less like coincidence than convergence, two families reaching a marker together, at the same time, without either side planning it that way. Natalie and Kim see it the same way:

“We see it as something more meaningful: the natural convergence of two businesses that have spent years walking in the same direction.”
— Natalie and Kim Ellis, The Joinery

The Second Life Of A Bottle – The Products

To mark Londolozi’s centenary, The Joinery has created a collection of celebration pieces in FutureFelt®, handcrafted by artisans and carrying, quite literally, the story of a bottle’s second life within their fibres. Each piece proves what The Joinery set out to show a decade ago: that considered design, African craftsmanship, and genuine provenance can sit, quietly and completely, in the same object.

It is a fitting way to mark one hundred years. Not with something disposable, but with something made to last, from something that was never meant to.

Shop the Londolozi collection, crafted by The Joinery here.

The Legacy We Choose

“Legacy is not only what you inherit. Legacy is what you choose to do with what you have been given.”
— Natalie and Kim Ellis, The Joinery

For Londolozi, that has meant a century of restoring wilderness and investing in the people who share it with us.

Next year marks ten years since these two families first found one another. It has been a decade of conversations, ideas, and products, but it has never really been about the products at all. It has been proof that African businesses, built by families who believe in something larger than the balance sheet, can lead rather than follow.

This year, we have asked every guest, guide, tracker, staff member, partner, and friend of Londolozi to see themselves as a light holder, in the wild and in the world. Natalie and Kim have been holding a light of their own for over a decade now, one bottle, one artisan, one small decision at a time, long before we found the words for what that meant. It turns out they were doing it all along.

One hundred years of Londolozi.

One million bottles diverted by The Joinery.

A legacy still being written, on both sides, by the light of the same fire.