Making the BBQ Block generates offcuts. When you cut a live-edge oak plank to board dimensions, the pieces that come off the ends and edges are too small for another board. They’re not useless — they’re just small. The question of what to do with them came up early in the production process.
The first answer was kindling. Oak offcuts are good fire-starting material. But we’d just built a product celebrating the character of local English oak. Burning the offcuts felt like the wrong end for timber that had taken two years to air-dry and had the same grain and live-edge character as the boards themselves.
The Idea That Started as a Joke
Someone in the workshop suggested making keyrings. It landed as a half-joke — one of those ideas that sounds slightly absurd until you actually try it. We made a few samples. Small live-edge oak tags, roughly the size of a large coin but irregular in shape because the live edge makes every piece different. A steel ring through a drilled hole. Light, tactile, genuinely attractive.
We brought a handful of the prototypes to a Bison Hill Grill event to get a reaction. The reaction was immediate and unanimous: “I want one.” Not a polite response. A genuine one. People picked them up, turned them over, asked what they were made from, asked how much they cost.
Launch and Outcome
The BBQ Block Keyring launched June 2024 at £7. It became one of our most popular stocking-filler and add-on purchases almost immediately. At £7, it’s an easy add to an existing order — someone buying a Gaucho or a BBQ Block sees the keyring, adds it, and ends up with a product they didn’t know they wanted.
What makes the keyring work as a product is what makes the BBQ Block work: the material. Each keyring contains a piece of real live-edge English oak from the same timber used for the boards. The grain is visible. The natural edge is there. It’s a small piece of the same woodland that the larger boards come from. That story scales down remarkably well into a £7 product.
Zero Waste
The practical consequence of the keyring programme: nothing from the BBQ Block oak goes to landfill or unnecessary waste. The boards use the main plank; the keyrings use what the boards can’t. Offcuts that would have been kindling are now products. That’s not something we planned at the design stage of the BBQ Block — it emerged from a workshop conversation about what to do with small pieces of good timber.
The best product ideas sometimes arrive sideways. The keyring is proof of that.
