About Us
Original Organics, established in 1988, are one of the UK's leading manufacturer and distributor of home composters, water butts, wormeries and sustainable gardening products. We launched our Irish operation in 2006, forging closer ties by incorporating an Irish company with the CRO in 2012.
As pioneers of worm composting in the domestic sense, we invented the first commercially available 'Wormery' even devising the very word itself. We remain the home of Wormeries and our range comprises the highly acclaimed classic models; The Original, Midi and Junior Wormeries; as well as the newer Tiger Wormery multi-tray Wormery.
Our offices are based in Hitchin which is located in Hertfordshire. We supply our unrivalled products not just in the UK and Ireland but worldwide. Everything we do centres around concern for the environment and sustainability. We employ a great team of local people and we even heat our facility using the warmth generated by our Rotational Moulding machines!
We started developing our business back in the 1980’s with initial designs for, and trials of, an innovative product – a domestic worm composter.
The idea was borrowed from nature and informed by the writings of Jack Temple and others. At the time interest in the concept was largely confined to small numbers of keen organic gardeners and limited to a few basic and somewhat problematic DIY ideas and designs.
Early LeafletsWe developed our first practical design – first named The Merlin Bin - and after some design improvements we re-named it to The Original Wormery. This design has been modified, improved and developed ever since to the proven, simple, effective, efficient and highly-acclaimed product we have today. It beats the rest because it’s simple, works so well and is excellent value for money.
As the inventors, we successfully filed for UK and European patent rights. We even invented (or is it 'devised'?) the word 'Wormery' and were granted trademark rights on the word. Sadly (for us) it is now widely used by others as the generic name for Worm Composters (a bit like Hoover for Vacuum Cleaner but in a smaller way!). We simply didn’t have the rather significant financial resources required to defend our rights at law (we still don’t - but it’s possibly too late now anyway!).
Still, as the saying goes, ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’.
Our first major break came when the late great TV gardener Geoff Hamilton featured our Wormery on the BBC’s Gardeners World programme and later wrote about it in Gardeners World Magazine. As it turned out this was the first of many TV appearances (including Professor Chris Baines on ‘That’s Gardening’ and Dr. Stefan Buczacki on ‘Good Morning') and countless positive press articles about our new product. Carol Vorderman even presented our Wormery on the Channel 4 series, 'How 2?'. The rest, as they say, is history. Wormeries are now a proven and established product in the armoury of hundreds of thousands of gardeners – we just want to make it millions!
Our development of the Wormery led to orders from a number of
major Local Authorities keen to reduce the volume and disposal cost of the household waste they have to collect and to positively benefit the environment.
Rotol Composter LeafletOur small business grew a little and we soon added a simple and effective garden composter – the classic Rotol Compost Converter - to our offering. These have since been further supplemented with our bestselling Garden King Models (with ‘easy slide’ access hatches); a Junior Wormery, ideal for children or single person households; The Tiger Wormery, a multi-stacking Wormery; and more recently, The Midi Wormery. We also retail a range of handy garden accessories, water butts and home recycling products. 
In January 2016, Original Organics and its other brand names were acquired by Gutter Mate Ltd.