A supplier in the Kent countryside.

Jacobi Jayne is a birdcare supplier based in the Kent countryside, at Wealden Forest Park near Herne Bay. It trades as Jacobi Jayne & Company and sells to garden centres, department stores, nature shops and mail-order firms, while its own consumer catalogue and online shop, Living with Birds, describes itself as the company’s “shop window.”

The company tells its origin story as a mission rather than a date. Its 2026 trade catalogue says Jacobi Jayne “started out with the aim of bringing more birds to more gardens,” and that it has kept that focus “for more than a quarter of a century.” Its websites have a long trail of their own: the Internet Archive holds captures of jacobijayne.com from May 2000 and of jacobijayne.co.uk from 2001. By 2004 the site promoted a free mail-order catalogue called Wild Bird News, an online magazine called Bird On!, and pages for schools, conservation professionals and resellers.

Those 2004 pages already set out the business it still runs: Schwegler nest boxes for professionals, feeders from the American maker Droll Yankees, and Jacobi Jayne’s own Special Mix bird foods, which the conservation page recommended pairing with those feeders for reserves and parks. The same page offered advice on choosing and installing boxes and feeders, and volume discounts for conservation professionals. The Living with Birds site still says the company scours the world for feeders, foods, nest boxes and accessories, and that when it cannot find the right product it creates one itself “right here at our home in the Kent countryside.”

Feeders, foods and woodcrete boxes.

The company’s own brands make up most of its catalogue. The 2026 trade catalogue lists foods including Flutter Butter, sold in jars and in pods that twist into dedicated feeders, Chunky Dumplings, See the Difference and I Love Robins, and feeders including Ring-Pull, Ring-Pull Click, flo, BigEasy and Old Iron. A LifetimeCare service supplies replacement parts, and the company says registered Ring-Pull feeders are covered by a lifetime guarantee. It also changed its I Love Hedgehogs recipe in autumn 2017, replacing mealworms with dried calci worms, it says. Its Vale’s range covers swan and duck food and hedgehog food, and Living with Birds offers a Forever New parts service for damaged feeders.

Alongside them sit imported ranges. Living with Birds names the Canadian Squirrel Buster range of squirrel-resistant feeders and the American Droll Yankees feeders, and the trade catalogue describes its rugged BigEasy feeders as designed in Canada. On the conservation side, Jacobi Jayne says it is the exclusive distributor in the UK and Ireland for Schwegler, the German maker of nest boxes, and it refers professional buyers to specialist distributors including NHBS, Wildcare and Ark Wildlife.

Schwegler’s boxes are made from a material it calls WoodcretePLUS, which Living with Birds describes as a blend of wood fibres with clay and cement, compressed and cured. Jacobi Jayne’s Schwegler range covers bird, bat and mammal boxes for parks and woodlands as well as designs for building into residential and commercial projects, and the company addresses it to charities, conservation groups, local authorities and architectural practices.

Jacobi Jayne also says it is a founding member of the Birdcare Standards Association, an industry body concerned with the suitability and safety of feeders, foods and nest boxes. It offers its range on special terms to schools, colleges and universities, and for international customers it says it works with retail chains and distributors to create specially branded products for their own markets.

Feeding wild birds, as a trade.

The seven brands in this group all make food or feeders for wild birds: Haith’s, Jacobi Jayne, Peckish, Gardman, CJ Wildlife, Droll Yankees and Brome Bird Care. Wild bird care brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger garden or pet groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a garden centre to a hardware store or a mail-order catalogue.

A wild bird care brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a name, a pack and a promise about the birds it is meant for, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its seed or feeders are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packs and marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A week in February, with the BTO.

Jacobi Jayne’s best-known public role is in National Nest Box Week, which starts each year on St Valentine’s Day and encourages people to put up nest boxes before the breeding season. A British Trust for Ornithology press release for the 19th week states that it “was first launched in 1997 by BTO and Jacobi Jayne,” and that the week “is organised by the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) and sponsored by Jacobi Jayne.” The same release described Jacobi Jayne and Co as a conservation products company that provided a free nest-box information leaflet for participants. The company’s own site still links to the week’s website.

That partnership is a quieter kind of branding than a logo. Each February the company’s name appears next to a national ornithology charity’s campaign, attached to advice on where and how to put up a box — the same message as the woodcrete boxes and feeders it sells the rest of the year.

The company also keeps a trade network in view. Its website lists recommended mail-order stockists, among them the Lincolnshire seed firm Haith’s, and stockists abroad, including Schwegler in Germany and the shop of the LPO, the French bird-protection league.

For a design guide, Jacobi Jayne shows how a distributor can build a brand around its own catalogue names as well as the makers it represents. Compare Brome Bird Care, the Canadian maker of Squirrel Buster, and Droll Yankees. For this guide we use a feeder green, a finch yellow and a woodcrete brown with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Jacobi Jayne’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.