Campaigns & initiatives

Since we first started in 2007, we have created and funded our own campaigns, providing free initiatives to support the outdoor community. Find out more here.

Muddy Faces - outdoor champions!

Everything we do at Muddy Faces is designed to support you and your children to be outdoors - from early years and primary school through to adulthood. Our sustainable approach fosters rich, positive experiences that encourage play, learning, and growth.

We believe that spending time outside and connecting with nature is vital for our physical and mental wellbeing, and we are well known for championing the benefits that the outdoors offers people of all ages.

Ethos & approach

At Muddy Faces we truly believe in what we are building and providing. We are constantly learning and evolving. We know that by being outdoors a profound love and understanding of the natural world can occur which, over time, will help nurture a more sustainable and contented way of living. We believe everybody benefits from more time outdoors and we want to help you to access the outdoor environment effectively and sustainably.

Family-friendly workplace

By creating a family-friendly place to work, we have created a flexible, supportive business at Muddy Faces. The majority of our staff, including founder Liz, work part-time with hours to suit their families. The working environment is supportive and everyone is passionate about children, the quality of the products and maintaining an extremely high level of customer service.

Campaigns

Over the years we have created & supported a number of campaigns that have affected the day-to-day experiences of most early years children in the UK and many abroad. Each year we use any profit from the shop to fund these campaigns.

Mud campaign

We created our Mud Play Initiative, now known as the Muddy Faces Mud Campaign, in 2011 and have been promoting play with natural resources and, in particular, mud, ever since.

Booklets promoting outdoor play

Inspired by the remarkable butterfly effect initiated by the Making a Mud Kitchen booklet, we embarked on a collaborative journey with Professor Jan White. Together, we crafted and freely distributed a series of booklets aimed at enhancing outdoor practice.

Valuing the Outdoors Putting Values into Practice About Us 2

Valuing the Outdoors: Shared vision and values for outdoor play and learning in the Early Years.

Putting Values into Practice: Building your approach and pedagogy for playing and learning outdoors.

Reasins to be Outside Loose Parts booklets about us

Reasons to be Outside: Why young children need at least 3 hours of outdoor play every day.

Loving Loose Parts Outdoors: A vision for loose parts as core to outdoor philosophy and pedagogy. New for 2024

FREE Making A Mud Kitchen book

Making a Mud Kitchen has everything you need to know about mud kitchens – all the whats, whys, wheres and hows. Our newly updated 3rd edition (2026) is available to download for free.

Making a Mud Kitchen has been translated into TWELVE different languages and counting! Download your free pdf in • English • Croatian • French • German • Greek • Hungarian • Icelandic • Italian • Portuguese • Spanish • Swedish • Turkish or Welsh below.

The Outdoor Hub

The Outdoor Hub has been developed to provide useful and honest information, activities and events all focused on the outdoors.

Access to the Outdoor Hub and all its content is FREE to everyone, whether or not they are a Muddy Faces customer.

1000s of pages of information, guides, research, links and more
Comprehensive activities section full of seasonal and item-specific activities
Events calendar featuring training & development opportunities & annual events & celebrations to inspire & inform your work & play outdoors
Outdoor Practitioner magazine - themed issues reflecting on practice with outdoor experts.

Outdoor Hub

The Outdoor Hub is a massive FREE resource filled with activities, information and events to support you to get outdoors. Connecting to the elements, nature and each other has incredible positive health and wellbeing benefits.

Product development

The quality of the products we add to our range is paramount to us. We have very few returns due to product issues.

We are always interested in new and useful pieces of kit or any ideas that you may have. Please drop us a line and let us know if there is anything that you think we should be carrying in our product range.

We also manufacture a number of our own products such as palm drills and dragons sneezes and we specialise in UK-grown wood.