Alex Shirley-Smith, founder of Tentsile, is unapologetically forthright about his company’s mission. Its tree tents and giant hammocks exist to help protect and conserve the world’s remaining primary forests. Their aim is to quite literally elevate people’s experiences in nature, inspiring them to connect with trees on a higher level, in every sense.
It’s a lofty ambition, if you’ll pardon the pun – especially for a brand that essentially makes portable treehouses. Indeed, it would be easy to scoff at this bold environmental mission. But the brand is deadly serious about effecting real change. After all, global deforestation is an issue that ultimately poses an existential threat to our species.
That's why Alex decided very early on that, alongside educating people about the threat of deforestation, Tentsile needed to put something back now. Straight away, the company started planting trees for every tree tent that it sold. That initiative quickly gathered pace. It now plants 20 trees per product sold.
The problem, as Alex acknowledges, is that these are saplings. The young trees won't reach the biodiversity of mature primary forest for about 400 years. It’s not a like-for-like replacement. “We’re hopefully creating new forests for future generations, but what we need to do is make sure that we are protecting the old growth forest that we have left, because that’s where the biodiversity is", he explains.
Of course, to really understand Tentsile’s chosen mission, you need to understand its origins. Which began, oddly enough, with children’s TV. Alex takes up the story. “When I was six, we had a very informative children's news programme in the UK on the BBC called Newsround. One day they showed the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. I couldn't believe that the adults of the world were allowing that to happen. I realised that by the time I became an adult there might not be much of it left. Even then I understood that this was one of the most important environmental ecosystems on the planet. And if you put the world in imbalance we are headed for catastrophe. That was just something I already knew innately, but of course as a six-year-old, there’s very little you can do about it”.
Then, a few months later, his grandmother took him to see Return of the Jedi, the third Star Wars film. When the Ewok village on the forest moon of Endor appeared on screen, Alex had a eureka moment. “That is how you save trees, I realised: you put people in trees and you give the trees a value other than their monetary value as timber. Not only that, but people get a closer connection to their environment”.
Most childhood dreams fade with time, but this was an exception. It shaped everything that Shirley-Smith went on to do. “By the time I got to 18 I realised that if I wanted to build treehouses professionally I had to jump in at the deep end and become a registered architect and do the full seven-year programme. It took me a bit longer than that, but I did qualify as an architect and then I did work in the treehouse business for about 10 years until the financial crash in 2008”. After that, no one was buying expensive architecturally designed tree houses anymore, but Alex wasn't done giving tree houses to people. That's when he pivoted and went into tree tents.
With his architectural grounding, Alex came up with a tree tent concept that created the maximum usable space with the minimum amount of materials. It relies on the principles of tension architecture, pioneered by the American architect Buckminster Fuller in the 1920s. Lightweight structures like Fuller's famous geodesic domes were born out of this architecture – instead of using compression, you use tension to create space and strength. This approach uses fewer materials, so it has less of a footprint whilst also being lighter and more easily transportable.
There was another inspiration too – which, unsurprisingly, came from nature. Tentsile’s tree tents use the tensile force between three natural pillars as support, using a platform tensioned with ratchet straps to create a flat floor. The model for this was a spider’s web. Alex confesses: “Our tree tents were born out of biomimicry really – observing how a spider always makes a perfect spiral web within a larger triangle, which always goes to three points, no matter how far away one of those points might be. If you turn a spider’s web horizontally, you create a platform. Suspend the ceiling with poles and you get a 3D shape, all whilst using that spider web as the inspiration to create a strong, lightweight and liveable structure”.
This also gets around one of the major problems with pitching a conventional tent – finding flat ground. Whereas with a tree tent, you can camp right next to a lake, over a stream or river, on the side of a mountain or even in the middle of a dense forest. And it really doesn't matter what the ground conditions are – lumpy, bumpy, wet or muddy – you can still set up your tent. It's much more versatile than traditional camping.
And, just like the silk threads of a spider’s web, Tentsile tents offer incredible strength for their weight. Alex says: “Our tree tents use a sophisticated polyester composite mesh, with a nylon hexagon thread through it to create a rip stop material. Then we reinforce that with a thin PU coating, which is not only waterproof but acts like a glue that holds the whole lot together. Then the tents are reinforced with seat belts, which have a five-ton breaking strain. This essentially creates a frame, then the fabric is stretched between the seat belt frame”.
The whole system is also adjustable to stop two people from rolling inwards. That’s essential, because it's very unlikely that the occupants will weigh exactly the same, so you’ve got to have a way to calibrate the tent in order for the lightest person to not always be rolling towards the heaviest one, or the heaviest person not to be thrown onto the lightest one.
The idea was a hit. For the first five years, Tentsile’s growth was completely organic. The company didn't really pay for any marketing, nor any ad spend. They had no marketing budget. They didn't need it, because the company’s reputation was growing through word of mouth. The first outlets to pick up on Tentsile were green design forums, followed by mass market outdoor publications.
At first, the brand aimed its products at families with kids: portable dens in the trees that you can climb into, hide away in, even sleep out in, without any creepy crawlies. But actually, it found it was really the dedicated adventurers that picked the concept up first – people that wanted to go a little bit further, trek a little bit harder, camp in places no one had ever camped before. They were slackliners, tarp-and-hammock campers and kayakers, people that really did use the outdoors for adventure and who already understood how to use ratchet straps or tie knots.
Soon, Tentsile started to create new models that targeted different markets in different ways. Your lone hiker needed a super lightweight, super quick solution to pitch up. Enter the Una, a one-person hammock tent that weighs just over 5lbs (2.3kg). Menawhile, the 2-person Flite and Connect, as well as the 3-person Stingray, cater to adventurous couples and smaller groups of friends, who might load up a truck or van and head off into the woods for the weekend.
Families came back into the wider demographic after adventurers and campers, because they are the people who want tree houses in their backyards. That’s when Tentsile started stacking their tents and creating modular systems, so you can build them up over time, and enclose them to make them weatherproof on all levels. There really isn't a limit apart from your imagination as to how you can use the products – just take a look at the Trilogy 6-person super stack or the Trillium XL giant hammock.
There were other unforeseen buyers for tree tents too. One example is wheelchair users and people with back or spinal problems. Alex explains: “Because you're off the ground, you don't have any of those hard ground issues. Plus, for wheelchair users, because the tents are raised up you can actually pitch them at the same height as a wheelchair, so it's easy for wheelchair users to manoeuvre themselves from their chair into the tent and back again, rather than down onto the ground. So, we really are reaching demographics that we hadn't targeted, but are nicely surprised that we do”.
Today, Tentsile continues to innovate and to make headlines. The brand collaborates with activists on the ground in endangered areas earmarked for deforestation to resist the bulldozers. There are Tentsiles in use right now to protect these fragile ecosystems. As Shirley-Smith remarks, it might just be the perfect blend of capitalism and conservationism.
The need for heavy-duty tree tents also inspired the Safari range, which are designed as more permanent structures to further promote engagement with the natural world. Built with a hardcore 8,000mm hydrostatic head waterproof rating, and with a fly sheet that is resistant to 3,500 hours of UV exposure, plus a thicker, more abrasion-resistant base and heavier duty insect mesh, these are some of the most robust and durable expedition tents on the market. In fact, Tentsile says that with a little care and some regular checks, these models can be left up for months at a time. And happily, even if you’re not on some far-flung eco expedition or a humanitarian mission, this also makes them the perfect summer backyard hangout.
Nor is that the extent of Tentsile’s social ambitions. They work on wide-ranging projects from disrupting social media echo chambers to organising mass campouts across the world. Their blueprint is built on social collaboration – which is another reason why so many of their tree tents can literally be connected and stacked to form communities in the canopies.
Ultimately, it always comes back to saving the trees. So far, Tentsile has helped plant over 1,000,000 trees in Madagascar, India, Zambia, and the United States. Their latest tree planting partnership with veritree even enables customers to find out exactly where their trees are being planted. And unlike a lot of other brands’ reforestation or carbon-offsetting schemes, this isn't just lip service.
Alex says: “We picked our partners very carefully, so we know that our new trees have an 80 per cent survival rate. Nobody's just planting trees, then walking away within a month and letting the seedlings die because no one's looking after them. We work with long-standing partners who plant a mix of indigenous species. They know how to nurture them, how to create circular economies within the developing world where these trees are mostly being planted. So, what we're trying to do is engage with the people who are cutting trees and pay them the same or more to encourage them to plant trees instead and heal the landscape”.
Tentsile is literally planting the seeds of a more sustainable, engaged relationship between human beings and trees, without losing sight of the fun and enjoyment at the heart of their mission. Suddenly, saving the world doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
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