Zayndu. Seeds in the post, science on the screen.

Zayndu first got in touch in November 2021. Its machines were treating seed in the lab at Loughborough, and it wanted growers and seed companies to try the treatment on their own seed: send a sample, have it treated and tested, and get it back with a report. What it needed from the website was a simple way to take the order and the payment.

A full online shop would have been more than the job needed, so we built an order form with card payments, using Jotform and Stripe. Its emails told each customer exactly what to do next, and told Zayndu that an order had come in. When Zayndu asked for the word “trial” to go, since this was a paid service, the form and every email said seed processing service the same day.

The form went live on 7 January 2022, and the first orders arrived within days. That April Zayndu asked whether the form could make the label for the parcel, too. It could: the confirmation email now gave Zayndu’s address under the order number, came with a label to print, with the customer’s name on it, and made one simple request:

By the spring of 2022 Zayndu wanted a new website for the CEA 4.0 conference, where it was launching its Aurora Z25 system. Its marketing was then in the hands of a designer, Emma Fletcher, who drew the new pages herself in Adobe XD: greyscale layouts in mid-April, then the full-colour design.

Our job was to turn her layouts into a site that worked on every screen. Before building, we suggested a few changes to the first visuals: the logo and menu across the top, where people look for them; words rather than icons in the menu; a burger menu on phones; and fewer columns on smaller screens.

We built the site in WordPress with Oxygen and Automatic.css, a design system that keeps every size and space consistent. Zayndu’s products became entries the team could update, the home page had an events panel they changed themselves, and the opening film, compressed to about 650 KB, played on larger screens, with a still photo on phones. Before launch the site scored 97 out of 100 for speed on a phone in Google’s PageSpeed test, and 100 on a computer. It went live on Friday 6 May 2022, the first day of the conference, with every old address pointing to a new page.

Over the next year we added Zoho forms and a newsletter sign-up, a Research & Development section, a scrolling strip of partners’ logos, and an Aurora Protocols page with Zayndu’s crop photographs in purple duotone. Then we showed the team how to post their own news.

In the spring of 2024 Zayndu brought in Seeded Marketing, an agricultural marketing agency, and the three of us began with a landing page for Zayndu’s free trial programme, live that May. Over the summer Seeded wrote a brief for a new website, drafted Zayndu’s brand guidelines, wrote all the copy and ran a film and photo shoot: portraits in July, and a herb grower’s glasshouses in Lincolnshire in August. Our proposal promised to make the most of those photographs, with as little stock imagery as possible.

We designed the site in Figma, with a note beside each decision. Seeded chose Inter for the type, a free web font, after we explained the licences behind the other candidates. The design kept to Zayndu’s new colours, gave the photographs room, and made one invitation stand out: the free trial, in a straw-coloured button at the top right of every page, because trying it without obligation or cost was the most useful message for growers.

Seeded’s verdict on the first design came back the same day:

We built it in Bricks and Automatic.css on Rocket.net, kept every address the same so nothing needed redirecting, and sent every enquiry into Zayndu’s Zoho CRM. Templates let Zayndu and Seeded make landing pages, posts, team profiles and case studies without any design skills. Seeded and Zayndu left their comments on the pages themselves with Markup.io, and the site went live on Wednesday 4 December 2024.

Zayndu’s plant scientists test the treatment crop by crop, with research partners such as the National Institute of Agricultural Botany, and photograph the trays side by side. On the trial results page each pair became a single photograph with a divider to drag, untreated on one side and treated on the other, next to Zayndu’s own charts.

The same idea works for websites: drag the divider below, between the 2022 site and the 2024 one.

The new home page opens with a film and ends its first screen in a teal peak. When Zayndu and Seeded saw the first draft, they noticed it looked like a glasshouse roof, and it stayed. Under the roof sit Zayndu’s logo and, faintly, the arcs of its symbol; further down, Zayndu’s own figures count up as they scroll into view.

The films came from the 2024 shoot. We cut a looping background for the home page from Zayndu’s corporate film, with a still photo while it loads, and took stills for pages across the site. Zayndu’s longer film explains how the treatment works: seeds turn in a drum while the machine’s plasma creates, in the film’s words, “an environment similar to a lightning strike”.

Since the launch the site has grown with the business, and most of what’s added now, Zayndu and Seeded add themselves. Customer stories go into a case-study template written in the ordinary WordPress editor, on purpose. The Resources page gathers Zayndu’s crop spotlights, datasheets and protocol packages. Team profiles fill the Meet the Team page, and anyone in the commercial team appears on the contact page automatically, with a button that emails them without showing their address to spammers and, if they like, a link to book a meeting.

Seeded sends new films as Zayndu’s story moves on, and we fit them to the home page, with a little advice on what makes a good background loop:

Under thirty seconds is plenty for a loop, and the first frame should look good on its own, because it’s also the still that shows while the film loads. We look after the hosting, the updates and the monitoring, and the requests keep coming: the latest list arrived in September 2026.

Zayndu’s achievements are its own, and it has been a pleasure to watch them from close by. The years since 2021, as Zayndu has published them:

1. 2021The Aurora Z10 launches at Agri-TechE: in Zayndu’s words, “the world’s first commercially-available plasma seed disinfection system”.
2. 2022Innovation in Manufacturing and Engineering at the Leicestershire Live Innovation Awards, recognition at the ICURe awards, and the Aurora Z25 launched at CEA 4.0.
3. 2023The Manufacturing Innovation Award at the Insider Made in the Midlands Awards, whose judges praised innovations using “only electricity and air”.
4. 2024The Digital Technology Award at Made in the Midlands for SeedCloud, the system Zayndu’s machines report to, and ActivatedAir™ seed priming introduced, with a film of its own.
5. 2025ISO 9001 accreditation, and further investment from Foresight Group: £1 million of a £1.5 million round.
6. 2026Zayndu publishes the story of JEPCO, a third-generation Lincolnshire salad grower, and its shift to growing indoors.