About PostPods
I am Daniel Brown. I own and run PostPods, and that is not a figure of speech: I breed the animals, pack the boxes, answer the emails and write every care guide on this site. If you are about to have a living animal posted to you, you should know whose hands it passed through.
In July 2026 I left my job and took PostPods full time. It had been a side project for five years, run around shifts and evenings, and it had quietly grown past the point where that was fair to anyone waiting on an order. It is now what I do.
Twenty-three years of animals, five of isopods
I have kept exotic animals for more than 23 years. Reptiles mostly, and for a good while I bred leopard geckos as a hobbyist. Isopods came late, and by accident.
In 2020 I had not heard the word isopod. I knew what a woodlouse was, but that was the extent of it. At the time I had a Burmese python called Seth, and Claire, my partner then and my fiancée now, had a veiled chameleon called Pascal in a full bioactive setup. Seth was making a mess of his enclosure, and Claire suggested isopods as a cleanup crew. I laughed it off. I could not see how something that small would make a difference to an animal that size.
I got some anyway, in January 2021. Dairy Cows, as it happens. For the first few weeks I barely saw them, and then after a couple of months there were suddenly a great many, and the enclosure was spotless. They had done exactly what Claire said they would.
What actually hooked me was something sillier. I did not like the grey of a Dairy Cow against an albino Burmese python. It looked wrong. And that made me wonder whether isopods came in other colours.
They do.
The part where someone helped
I found the answer through a Facebook group, where I met Tom Marsh of Exotic Empire. He took me under his wing and introduced me to the exotic species, which until then I had not known existed. I asked him a great many questions. He eventually traded me some isopods for a leopard gecko, and that was that.
I owe Tom the start of this. I still ask him things, though rather less often than I used to.
What I got wrong first
I had read that isopods do well in small tubs. I did not have any, but I did have a lot of 32 litre boxes, so I used those instead. That turned out to help more than I expected. The extra volume made humidity far easier to hold steady, and gave the animals room to hide and forage.
The mistake I made was fussing. I was so interested in the colonies that I kept opening them, moving things, checking on everything, and my numbers started falling. The fix was to leave them alone. Isopods breed and feed best when they are not being disturbed, and learning that changed how I keep every species. It is why so much of the advice on this site amounts to setting the conditions well and then having the patience to stop interfering.
Who else you might meet
PostPods is mine, but it is not quite a one-man band.
Claire started all of this, and she has never once let me forget that I laughed at the idea. She is my fiancée, and she works every show with me. If you have said hello at a stand, there is a good chance you spoke to her rather than me, and she is usually the one who remembers your name the following year.
At home, my daughter and my brother pitch in. Between them they pack a good share of the drygoods orders and help with the maintenance that keeps several hundred colonies fed, watered and clean. It is genuinely a family effort, and on a busy week it is the reason your order still goes out on time.
How PostPods works now
The collection kept growing until selling and trading was the obvious next step, and PostPods came out of that. It has always been two things at once: a shop, and somewhere to explain how to keep these animals well. There are now over three hundred care guides and articles on this site, and they are free.
Everything is bred or grown on here in the UK. Nothing is drop-shipped, and nothing goes out that I have not seen. If a colony is not thriving in my care, it does not get sold, and it will sit as out of stock until it recovers rather than go out as an order I would not want to receive myself.
What you get from us
- 20% more than you order. Every isopod order goes out with at least twenty per cent over the stated count, because counting live animals is imprecise and I would rather the error ran in your favour.
- A live arrival guarantee. If your animals do not arrive alive, tell me and I will put it right.
- Packing built for the weather. Ventilated deli tubs on damp sphagnum moss, inside insulated double-walled boxes, with a heat pack when it is cold.
- Sensible dispatch days. Monday to Thursday only, by tracked Royal Mail next-day delivery, so nothing sits in a depot over a weekend.
- A care sheet for the species you actually bought, not a generic one.
Why I write the guides
A lot of isopod care information online is copied from other isopod care information online, and some of it is simply wrong. Temperature ranges get repeated from American sources without conversion. Species get sold under names that were reclassified years ago. Advice written for one genus gets applied to another that needs the opposite conditions.
I would rather be straight about what I do and do not know. Where I have kept a species for years, I say so. Where the hobby is genuinely uncertain about something, I say that too. If I get something wrong and you tell me, I will correct it.
Where to start
If you are new to this, the beginner's guide to keeping isopods in the UK is the place to begin, and dwarf whites or Dairy Cows are the species I most often point people towards.
If you already keep them, the Cubaris are where most of my own attention goes, and new arrivals is worth watching.
You can browse every isopod species we stock, or the wider ranges of springtails, millipedes and cockroaches.
Questions
If you want to ask something before you order, please do. I answer these myself, and no question about keeping an animal alive is a daft one. Get in touch here.
The longer version of this story, with rather more about Seth, is on the blog: PostPods, how it all started.