Stacey McNeill on the origins of Fox Under the Moon – and how its social media following shapes the brand

Can you tell us a little bit more about Fox Under the Moon, the purpose behind it and how you got started?
I taught myself to draw during the winter lockdown of 2021. I’ve always been a creative person and I studied graphic design at school, but I’ve never been a natural artist. The brand came about quite by accident really… I had a close friend who was going through a difficult time around then, and I simply couldn’t find a greeting card in the shops that said what I wanted to. I decided to set myself the challenge of creating a suitable piece of artwork using watercolour, which I’d recently taken up to fill some time while lockdown was happening.

My husband and I were sympathetic to mental health challenges, as we’d had our own journeys with it in the previous years. In fact, when Fox Under The Moon started, we were living in a tiny touring caravan. We’d sold our mortgaged house and left our teaching jobs three years earlier in search of some headspace and a lower stress lifestyle. We were working on a campsite in North Wales when lockdown happened. This meant I was then out of work – which looking back now was a blessing in disguise… It gave me the time to be creative.

So the card you created for you friend sparked the idea for the wider company?
Yes. The picture I created for my friend was of a little fox sat under a huge moon, and I wrote some words of encouragement underneath. My friend, my Mum and a few others shared the picture on social media, and it quickly got a fair few likes! Friends of friends began messaging me to ask for new designs with different themes, and so I set about creating a series of eight pictures, all with uplifting messages on. I had them printed as greeting cards, which I sold on Etsy – and every single one sold out within 24 hours!

Within a few weeks, the Facebook page I’d set up as a bit of a hobby had grown to have more than 5,000 followers, which is when I realised that I could possibly make a business from my artwork.

Your work is very distinctive. Did you consciously set out to establish your own original look?
The style I have now is continually evolving. I’m sure many, if not all artists and illustrators would say the same. For me, things really fell into place when I switched from watercolour to drawing digitally using my iPad. This meant that I could use a consistent colour pallet, and experiment with the highly textured work that I create now.

“Our brand tagline is ‘finding beautiful ways to say the things that matter’.”

Can you talk to us about the things that influence your art?
I am passionate about the natural world, as you’ll see from my little illustrations – wildlife, woodlands and magical night skies inspire everything I create. I’m a real nature-lover, and a bit of a tree-hugger at heart!

Nowadays we work from our small office in the Northeast of England. When we’re not touring in our caravan, you’ll find us gazing at stars, getting lost in the woods or taking meandering walks with our border collie, Pixie, on the blustery beaches of wild Northumberland. Many of my fox characters started out as photographs of Pixie – I use her as a model all the time to get the scale and perspective right in my illustrations.

Nice! And what informs the messages with your cards and prints?
Our brand tagline is ‘finding beautiful ways to say the things that matter’. These are really from a combination of my heart, soul and life experiences, along with the empathy I have with others. My social media audience is a huge inspiration for many of the themes I include in my books and on the cards and prints. I find it a huge privilege that so many of my followers feel they can open up to me about things going on in their lives.

You mention your social media audience there. How does that contribute to the business? And how do you interact with your followers?
It’s crazy to me that our social media audience is now more than 270,000 people, I can’t even comprehend that number! It is no exaggeration to say that social media has been the making of our business. Without this audience, we have we wouldn’t be growing sales as we are – and we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to win the Gift Of The Year People’s Choice award in 2023 and 2024.

I use the social platforms a lot when creating new products – I test ideas, get feedback and ask for input from my customers. After all, there’s no point creating something that consumers aren’t interested in.

Absolutely – and congrats on your recent successes with Gift of the Year.
The Gift of the Year competition has been game changing for our brand. Even without the wins we were fortunate enough to have, being seen as finalists in multiple categories – and being able to use the badge graphics for marketing – has been really powerful. The People’s Choice win two years running has been immensely beneficial to our business – we had a massive uplift in orders at the show in the days after the announcement, and so many new stockists tell us they found us through the competition.

We love working with the Giftware Association too. Sarah and her team are an absolute fountain of knowledge, and they’re always so helpful and supportive. I am continually recommending that other small businesses join as members as it’s been so beneficial to our brand.

Focusing on your products and distribution, how does a new brand ‘sell itself’ into retail?
We have around 270 stockists now across the UK and USA, with a couple further afield in places like New Zealand too. The vast majority are lovely small independent shops which we absolutely adore working with – the personal touch is so perfect for our brand, and the type of products we sell.

My husband and business partner Jamie heads up the wholesale side of the business, and he’s had some huge success with the online platform ‘Faire’ and also with building connections at trade shows.

Again, the thing that convinces retailers to try our products – and then to keep coming back to reorder – is our social media following. It acts as living proof that there is demand for our products. We’re always happy to share our insights on which products are most popular with our stockists.

Your products sell internationally. How do you approach product development to ensure things work internationally?
When we first started selling, I didn’t give it a second thought – it has certainly been a ‘learn by doing’ situation! Around 50% of our social media audience is based in the USA, and a huge part of our direct to customer sales go to North America, so it’s been a steep learning curve!

We ship directly to the USA from our website, but we also have a partner stockist there called ‘The Bees Knees British Imports’ that makes it much easier, and cheaper, for our American customers to buy our products.

The main things we consider now with regards to selling internationally is product liability. This is something we hadn’t even thought about until we launched our plush toy fox character this time last year. We had a shock when we found out how much it was going to cost us to insure ourselves to sell toys abroad, which eventually led to the decision to make them a UK only product.

We’re moving more into licencing now, which is certainly making the process of product creation easier, as our licencing partners do all of the heavy lifting when it comes to the nitty gritty!

What’s next for you and Fox Under the Moon? How is 2025 shaping up for you?
I’m launching a new book just before Christmas. It’s called ‘The Longest Night’ and is the first ‘proper’ storybook I’ve created. It is around love, loss and friendship. Grief is a really important part of what we do at Fox Under The Moon, and in 2025 I’m planning to use this new book as the basis for a new range of products that help to support people through loss.

As well as that, we’re looking to continue expanding our wholesale and hopefully secure some more licencing deals, so we can get our products out even further into the wider world! We’ll also be entering the Gift Awards again, so fingers crossed – if nothing else we’ll look forward to another brilliant night celebrating everyone’s achievements at the event in London!

Finally, if you were given the keys to your local art gallery to curate your own show, which three artists and illustrators would you include and why?
What a fantastic question!

I’m going to choose one artist that I just love – Jamie Heiden – who creates beautifully whimsical textures by cleverly combing photography and art to really stunning effect. One that I think is impactful for the world is Agnes Denes, the pioneer of the Environmental Art Movement. Her wheatfields project in Manhattan was just incredible in my opinion.

Finally, one I just can’t leave out: Swiss-German artist Wassily Kandinsky. I have a lifelong obsession with the Bauhaus, and I can still remember studying his piece ‘Yellow-Red-Blue’ as part of a colour psychology unit while studying product design at school.

Great answers. Thanks again Stacey!