London Design Festival 2021: Making Designs A Commercial Success (Video) – Intellectual Property

What can designers do to ensure their designs and innovations
are a commercial success?

For our ninth consecutive year as a London Design Festival
partner, UK Head of Brands & Designs, John Coldham, was joined
by a panel of leading designers for a webinar discussion on how
they’ve successfully established their businesses and protected
their designs:

• Martin Darbyshire, CEO and co-founder of tangerine and trustee
  of the Design Council, joined our panel once again, this time with
  Eleanor Humphrey, CEO and co-founder of TOPL, to talk about the
  story behind bringing TOPL’s innovative non-spill cup to market
  and the measures taken to protect the designs.




• Simone Brewster, an artist and furniture and jewellery designer
  with an architecture background, has been exhibited at the British
  Embassy during the London 2012 Olympic Games, but has also had
  issues with people taking her designs without permission;




• Phoebe Gormley, founder of Gormley & Gamble, the first ever
  womens’ tailor on Savile Row talked about her experience of
  establishing her modern, design-led business in a traditional and
  often old-fashioned sector;

These leaders of design-led businesses joined Gowling WLG’s
UK Head of Brands and Designs for a discussion on how they’ve
successfully established their businesses and protected their
designs.

self

Transcript

John Coldham:  Welcome to those of you who
have joined us already. We are just waiting for a few more
participants to join as they are still joining thick and fast and
we will start in a couple of minutes.

People are still joining but I’m keen to keep to time and
get started if that is alright with all of you.

Welcome to those who have just joined and those of you who
joined a bit earlier. It is a lovely day out there today so thank
you for tuning in despite the weather being so lovely outside.

Now, I know I said this last year, but it is our sincere hope
that the world is sufficiently back to normal so that next year we
can have this event back in person as we used to do and we can
welcome you to London in person and finally give you the long
promised drink that I said that you could have, overlooking the
Thames a year or two back but the Coronavirus is still getting in
the way.

My name is John Coldham and I am the head of brands and designs
at the law firm Gowling WLG.

We have a particular specialism for design law, helping
designers through the legal stages of setting up their businesses,
getting their work to market and protecting it and dealing with the
things that come along as things go along such as being copied,
wanting to licence the product or indeed to sell the business that
you have created.

This is now our ninth annual event as part of London Design
Festival. Those of you who are new to the event I will just explain
that we first started doing this event when the organisers invited
us to provide a more commercial perspective on the world of design.
Lots of people this week at London Design Festival are showing off
their shiny and beautiful new designs so why would you want a law
firm there? Well it would certainly lower the coolness rating! But
those who work in design, be it art, products, fashion,
architecture or one of the other hundreds of specialisms in the
sector need to ensure they have a solid base to ensure that their
creativity is rewarded. It is not a dirty word to ensure that you
are able to make some money from your work. If you do not, somebody
else will.

Each year we invite people from the world of design to talk
about their experiences on the business side of design.

Last year we talked about the experience of being copied and how
to turn what could be on the face of it a dreadful experience to
your advantage provided you have laid out the groundwork to make
sure that you can.

This year we are focussing on the question of how to make a
design a commercial success.

I am so delighted with our panel this year. I will introduce our
speakers properly as we go along but just to wet your appetite we
have Phoebe Gormley, who is the founder of Gormley and Gamble, the
first ever women’s tailor on Savile Row; Simone Brewster, an
artist and furniture and jewellery designer with an architecture
background; Elle Humphrey, the CEO and founder of TOPL, which is a
new innovation in the reusable cup market and last, but not least,
Martin Darbyshire, co-founder of leading design agency Tangerine,
trustee of the Design Council, and long standing speaker at this
event having put up with me each one of the last nine years.

Now this event is studiously not about law. It is about
introducing you to these fantastic people and letting you hear
their stories. Each speaker will give a brief talk and we have
allowed time for questions at the end. We really feel that the
questions we get at this event are what makes it special so please
do send them in to me using the Q&A box which should be on your
screen. We might answer them as we go along if it works but more
likely we will save them for the end. If we do not get to your
question, although we have allowed quite a lot of time for
questions, if we don’t get to your question then please
don’t worry we will follow up with you afterwards if you leave
us your name.

Now if you are wanting to know more about the legal side of
design law or any other aspect of the business of design then
please do get in touch with me or visit out dedicated website where
there are lots of materials such as recordings and podcasts from
previous London Design Festival events and other materials. That
website is gowlingwlg.com/designsforlife.

It is to Elle and Martin that we turn to first, as I mentioned
Elle founded TOPL having launched it late last year. It is hard
enough taking a new product to market but when you factor in the
pandemic, issues with global supply chains and all the rest of it,
it is a miracle that she has found the time to join us today.
Martin has worked with Elle on aspects of her design and I will let
them explain more about what they have done. Suffice to say that I
am delighted to say that they have agreed to join us today. Over to
you.

Eleanor Humphrey: So hi guys. I am Elle
and I am one of the founders of TOPL. So we are a start-up and we
make smart sustainable drinkware and TOPLcup, as you can see behind
me, is our first product and it is a spill safe reusable coffee
cup.

So I guess the initial catalyst to start the business was a
split coffee and another ruined laptop, which I am sure everyone
can relate to.

We began wondering if it was possible to capture the energy of a
spill. Our initial research was sort of inspired by the explosive
effects of hot liquid and whether it was possible to capture the
energy of a spill. We studied seat belts and airbags and the way in
which they activate on impact to protect passengers and this is
what eventually led us to create our bi-stable valve which is the
key to our patented spill safe technology.

We explored the sensor experience of coffee drinking and we also
began to realise that taste was being stifled by traditional
disposal cup lids because these lids do not allow you to sip or
smell your coffee. Basically when you are drinking from one of
those traditional slot hole lids your mouth is covering it which
means that you cannot smell what you are drinking and most of taste
is actually sense through our nose.

We looked at the evolution of lid design and the very first lid
is actually patented in the 60s in the States when on the go
drinking culture really began to kick off and we realised that
nothing much had changed since then. So it seemed like café
culture had just been evolving rapidly with the times but the
takeaway cup seemed to have just been left behind.

At this point we knew that there was a real problem to be solved
here so we carried on looking at the reusable cup market in a bit
more depth and a statistic that really validated our thinking was
the fact that only one percent of coffees are sold on a daily basis
in reusable cups. That was just something that we could not get
over especially with the knowledge the people have today about the
destructive environmental impact that disposable cups pose for the
environment.

We also did a lot of market research and we felt that when we
were asking around no-one had any particular loyalty or association
to any of the market leading brands. So I think unpacking that a
little bit more we just realised that nothing in the disposal space
would, nothing in the reusable space rather, was offering more in
terms of design than a disposal cup and we thought that that must
have something to do with the really slow adoption rate of
reusables into our daily lives.

We carried on asking people questions and another pain point
which kept coming up for people was that even when people were
using reusable cups and there was only a tiny amount of residue
left in the bottom of the cup, and it had one of those clip on lids
and you just chuck it in your bag, the residue would end up leaking
out all over people’s bags.

I think it was at this point that we started to rethink the
design and realise that potentially there was something else we
could add and it was at that point that we filed for our second
patent which is the novel locking mechanism and I think for us at
that point the importance of being a design led business became
really paramount as it was those two patents that were really going
to enable us to stand out from the competition.

Since then our mission has been to create a better, safer
alternative to the traditional disposal cup and we thought if we
could pull this off and people no longer needed to compromise when
drinking on the go then maybe a world without single use cups could
exist.

So I am just going to show you a quick video now to show you how
the product works.

Basically you will see in a minute that the lid is opened by
just a simple quarter turn anti-clockwise until a point of
resistance. So we wanted the user to know really intuitively that
the cup is open. So they just get that initial feedback and at that
point you push down on a central disc and you can sip from any
angle. When the cup is in this state, you could knock it over or it
can just be bumped from any angle and the magnetic disc in the
middle will just jump shut and that seals the vessel completely,
just meaning that no liquid can escape and hopefully it protects
the user and their tech from spills. Once you are done drinking you
can just give it a simple quarter turn and then just chuck it in
your bag.

As you can probably imagine the technical challenges on this
project were vast. Our team put in thousands of hours to refine and
perfect a working lid system and this was especially challenging
with a tight budget and a really small team.

Designing the spill safe feature which was capable of performing
with boiling liquids with a mechanism compact enough to fit inside
a really slim lid, was definitely the hardest thing to overcome
because we were working with such fine tolerances. So something
that you do not see from the outside is that hidden in here is a
really complex system of multiple internal seals. It took a lot of
hard work to create something that could cope with the pressure
that hot liquids create when they are agitated, especially when the
cup is knocked over which is obviously one of the central
components of our patented bi-stable valve.

Obviously the core concept of TOPL is simplicity and ease of use
so it is that simple twist to drink and twist to lock so we knew we
had to find a way to make it work really smoothly and intuitively
for the user.

We worked with a team of industrial engineers in the UK, we
tested materials and then we also built prototypes and at that
point we instructed a factory in China. So it was a couple of years
down the road and we encountered some really complex challenges
with our design. It was at that point that we contacted Tangerine.
We ended up working together for about a year before we eventually
had a commercially viable product which Tangerine have helped
support us in bringing to market.

We knew that to create a long term viable business we would need
that ongoing design support and the ability to diversify our
product range and bring to life all of those new ideas that we
had.

So I will hand over to Martin now and he will explain a bit more
about that.

Martin Darbyshire : So thank you very much
Elle.

Maybe John you can take that slide off now I think people have
seen the cup in its detail.

So just to give you a quick introduction to Tangerine and thank
you John for the glowing introduction about being connected with
the talk over a series of years.

Tangerine is a design consultancy, so we are normally working
with clients who are paying us fees along the way to do design work
for them and obviously they are then taking commercial advantage of
the work that we have completed.

In part, my background and one of the reasons I am involved in
the LDF talks is I have worked together with Gowling WLG as an
expert witness on a key case of theirs but also I have become more
immersed in understanding the requirements of both patenting and
providing design registration and protecting designs, partly
through this work and also through working in many different
fields.

In terms of the link to TOPL, we are very frequently approached
by clients who like TOPL, are start-ups. They are beginning on a
journey, they have got a really strong idea and they are passionate
about taking that concept to market but there are many, many
challenges along the way.

We began in 2016 working together with a company called Kenido
launching the first ever smart baby monitor. A complete monitoring
system for babies and since then we have become sweat equity owners
in the business so part of the business and they have not been
paying us fees to do the work but we have been doing the work for
free and we own part of that business.

Part of our strategy as a consultancy is to move away from
selling hours because like other businesses we want to earn money
whilst we sleep rather than just earning money between 9 and 6 or 9
and 7 or 9 and 10 in the daytime.

We were struck as soon as we met Elle and we saw the TOPL
concept, we fully appreciated that this was a fantastic opportunity
to support a young business that really wanted to develop and had
the potential to be successful. In terms of how do we chose who to
work with because as I have mentioned we are approached quite
frequently by people with ideas but I think there are some really
key things that are very important.

I think number one is that the company has to have a great idea.
It has got to stand out, it has got to be unique and it has got to
be own-able. We have to have a good sense that it has strong
commercial viability because we are spending our time and looking
to build a close relationship with that team, become part of their
team but also be responsible for sharing in the success, if and
when the company becomes successful but also making sure that we
try to mitigate risk and limit the risk that might exist and try to
prevent any failures.

The other key thing is that we have got to have a sense that
there is a robust team within that group and certainly within TOPL
there was a strong understanding of design, clearly an
understanding of the technical problems that existed but not
necessarily clarity on the best way to overcome or to solve those
things and very very importantly, and one of the reasons I like
taking part in this talk is that they had already patented the
system, it was a clear and strong idea that was being well
protected and they thought not just about patents but they had
thought about trademarks and projecting the TOPL name and their own
name.

They had completed some design registration work around the
different variants of the different TOPLcups that would exist and
they had also developed a business model which involved co-branding
so that leads to complexities in the sense that they are not just
presenting their own brand but they are presenting the brand of a
client they are then selling the product to.

So it feels like a robust and complete business that is on the
beginning of what could be a very big and strong journey.

John if you could just got back to the slide, the last slide
again, not the last slide but the one before last, showing the
different variants please.

So we have had a broad involvement with TOPL, spanning from, I
think as Elle spoke about detailed engineering and design for
manufacture. We looked to help some of the problems of the core
engineering that would make the lid, which is the key component of
the design and the very own-able component of the design enabling
that to function reliably.

The risk in the business potentially from product failures in
the future and we obviously want to continue working on that
because there needs to be a constant evolution in innovation and
development of that side of it.

We have also been supporting them on new product development
opportunities. We cannot show those things here but we are
developing a variant which is like a cocktail shaker where you can
have iced drinks inside the flask and then you can shake that so
that you can make something nice and cold, be it coffee, be it a
cocktail, and then still be able to open the lid and drink reliably
from any direction.

We are supporting them with the development of packaging design
and graphic design for the ways in which the cups are being
developed, as you can see here, to suit a range of different B2B
customers, so there are specific requirements from particular
clients to meet the needs of their business and those clients are
often providing these cups to their employees to use within their
business to help them limit the use of paper and plastic cups and
others within the company and also at the same time help promote
and develop new brands.

So I think what we have is a complete view of design working in
sympathy with the needs of this business, solving problems as we go
and helping the business scale in an appropriate way. If anyone has
particular questions around the aspects of IP we can certainly
discuss those later. John is the expert, I’m sure he can chip
in and provide some very helpful advice to you if you have some
questions around things that you are doing and you are in an early
stage of development.

Thank you very much, back to you John.

John: Thank you very much indeed Martin
and Elle and we will certainly have some questions at the end.

For the moment we will move on, we next turn to Simone Brewster.
Simone really is so talented. Having worked in art, architecture
and product design. Simone does have experience of another company
trying to run off with her design. I will not name the company here
but Simone discovered that her product had been shown on a major
retailers’ website when she was actually just shopping on the
site and it was being sold by them without her permission. Simone
tried to resolve things behind the scenes and when that did not
work she took to social media which was incredibly successful and
quickly sorted it out. So much so that Simone is not allowed to
talk about this. I can because I have taken everything I have told
you from things I have found out on the internet rather than from
Simone. She cannot talk about that issue specifically but what that
has done is teach her a lot of the things that maybe she did right
and did wrong about the way she looked after her designs, protected
herself and so on.

So Simone will talk about the lessons that she learnt rather
than the experience directly with the company involved and that
insight into the commercial side of design is no doubt going to be
fascinating. So Simone, over to you, would you like me to put your
slides up straight way?

Simone Brewster:  No I will come to them
in just a second but thanks for the great introduction and hi to
everyone who is with us right now.

I was actually really interested in talking about this when I
heard the topic that we were talking about is how do you make
design a commercial success and that to me is such a multifaceted
thing that does feed in greatly to what I had experienced and how
as an independent designer how we can kind of use our specific
position to make our designs commercial successes against bigger,
more well-funded people on the market let us say. I would start
with the really basic thing that we sought that everyone here today
has actually done an initial groundwork and created the design. So
actually one of the hardest things when you are trying to make a
design a commercial success is to do what is your passion, to
follow that passion to try to take it to market, to try to meet
people who can produce your ideas if you are not making them
yourselves, overcoming your procrastination, overcoming your fear
and in many ways when you do do that, if things don’t go to
plan it can be really crushing but one of the things that I learnt
on my journey was the importance of using my voice. I am going to
just say it again, it is really important, as an individual,
starting a company, you are not going to be a big name, people
might not know you, it is going to be so important to use your
voice and to try to connect with the people out there.

So what does that even mean?

Other than obviously speaking, what does it actually mean? Even
in that kind of concept there are many levels.

Firstly I would say you have to know who you are and what your
values are and what you stand for.

So one of the things that I felt has worked in my favour
throughout my career has been that my pieces have not just got a
narrative they are very visual, actually maybe now is a good time
to bring up my work and I can kind of talk through why using your
voice should actually also live in the work that you do. If it is a
problem that you are solving or even if it is not, we have to bring
our voice into our work.

I would call myself a jobbing designer. For the last ten years
or more even I have been working with private clients and making my
own pieces. So you can see the piece on the left is the negress,
sorry the mammy table, its solid wood and I made that piece in 2010
and it was really the start of me putting some narrative into my
work, defining my visual style, my visual language and the image on
the right is ten years later, last year, November 2020 I was
invited to be in Vogue with my jewellery and this is the image that
they used. I was so proud, it was an amazing experience but it took
me ten years to get there and a wide body of work.

Let us see the next image please.

During lockdown last year I started painting and I incorporated
that into my practice as well. So one of the other things I would
say is how do you make your design a commercial success is to keep
creating and making connections along the way.

Can we go to the next slide please?

So you can see this is a commission that I was asked to do after
I had made that initial image on the front, the mammy table. What
happened was I had put my voice, my narrative, my concepts into my
work, people saw it and they approached me to come up with a
collection for them based on, you know, they had a brief and I
responded to the brief but they wanted something in the theme that
I had already started to explore and the visual language and
narrative that I had already created in my initial pieces. From
there I started, I designed this bespoke collection for my
client.

Next slide please.

And this, the female form is a very strong narrative. It is a
very strong part of my values in my work, it is throughout
everything that I do. This was a stool based on lips, very bold,
out there piece, and again approached by a client who knows my
values and what I stand for and very much interested in those
themes so they knew that when they approached me they could give me
a brief and I could make something that would still be within my
interest and remit and something that would also fit what they
wanted which was a bold statement piece of furniture.

Next image.

This goes back to earlier in my career.

Again though it, this is called Tropical Noir, this collection
of vessels. They are quite big, people do not normally realise that
they are kind of 50cm and quite big turned pieces of solid wood. A
material that I return to.

So again within my body of work I like to use a sense of
materials and a group of materials that start to be associated with
who I am and what I do and combine them in a certain way that again
is associated with who I am and what I do. This was one of those
collections and again after doing this I have been approached by
people who are interested in basically having a sense of this.
Normally being approached with a brief and then working with this
aesthetic and these interesting narrative that I have already
started to explore independently and create pieces for my clients
that way.

Next image if there is one?

Ok so this kind of harks back to that painting that I had shown
you earlier on. When I couldn’t make it to my studio and make
stuff in the lockdown I started painting and because I had already
built up this body of work around the feminine form and I had
started to share my pieces online, my paintings on line, I was then
approached by a vegan fashion brand Jake to create an artwork that
they would then use in one of their vegan fur coats. So you can see
the artwork in the background that I created and then I had to
learn how to make a repeat pattern from my artwork and it was then
imposed onto the jacket and that is now going to be released I
think next month so I am super excited I cannot wait to wear my own
jacket.

I think that is the last of the slides?

But taking it back to the initial question, how do we make a
design a commercial success and using your voice as part of that is
what I am really interested in.

What I have tried to say in my presentation is that I was
putting a narrative into my work, I was very much bringing part of
myself into the work so I really feel like within the design world
there are different ways that we become designers. We might be more
of an industrial designer which Eleanor has shown us with her lid,
she is solving a problem and sometimes within design the problem is
we want something beautiful, we want something that stands for
ourselves, that is much more where I come in. I am a designer who
fills the gap that I felt was there where there was not really
something in materials that I was looking for, something that spoke
of my ethnicity, these kind of things.

Because I had spent so much time making these pieces and because
I had a career that spanned ten years I had used that time to
basically lay the foundation of what my values were so that when
people saw my work they kind of already knew it is my work if that
makes sense. That is one of the best things in using your voice and
putting your voice in your work is that if you do come up against
bigger people or other people, does not even have to be bigger who
draw on your aesthetic, it almost becomes like promotion because
people have already started to associate that aesthetic and those
values with who you are.

That is one of the things that I learnt the importance of but
beyond that using social media and I am such a convert I have to
admit, I was not the person who was in love with social media, I am
a very private person generally. I do not have an issue with public
speaking, I taught for many years so I am happy to speak but social
media felt to me like a little bit of an itchy thing but the good
side of what I learnt was because I had invested in showing people
what I do, showing my life in the studio, sharing my narrative,
sharing my values that when it came the point to stand my ground,
for example, or to get my message out there, there were feelers
already out there. People were willing to hear what I had to say
and not just hear what I had to say but to amplify what I had to
say.

Now being a small, basically a sole trader, a sole maker, a
practice that has really been built literally from my own hands,
you normally feel quite overwhelmed when things do not seem to,
when you are going against a larger opposition, but the issue of a
larger opposition is that they cannot be a name or a face in a way
that an individual sole trader can. Something again that I heard
Elle say which I thought was really poignant was that when she did
her research into existing lids there was no loyalty to brands. If
you spent time building a network, showing people what you do in
your studio, building a visual language, building a narrative into
what you do, when it comes to the point of calling out for help or
amplifying your voice people are much more emotionally engaged in
the work that you do, often more than you give credit for.

So I found an overwhelming network was therefore me, which I
think is one of the really powerful things within the creative
field that there was a network and there was a base willing to hear
and support me and maybe that is because actually it is much more
common than we think which is probably a downside, but beyond that
it meant that I felt much more powerful and much more able than I
thought I would have, basically than I thought was possible.

What else do I want to say about how do you make your design a
commercial success?

Beyond making the work, beyond putting narrative into the work
and beyond using your voice at all points in time. Never
underestimate the value and magnitude of what your voice can be, I
would say that the ripples that I had one individual moving out to
the wider field was actually magnificent and that meant making my
work a commercial success was actually much closer to my fingertips
than I had actually realised working from within my studio and
being a very work focussed individual in that way. That is it.

John: That is brilliant, thank you so much
that is such a good insight particularly for people just starting
out and actually a lot of what you said is true for everybody. A
lot of what you said about the voice of brands and being yourself
and being true to what you believe in is true even for big
companies actually. It is just so many big companies do not get it
right and so, but obviously it is particularly poignant for those
who do not necessarily have the resources to get their voice out
there in any other way.

Last but not least we turn to Phoebe Gormley.

Phoebe has had a passion for women’s wear and tailoring
since being a child but not every child then decides at the age of
21 to leave university early and set up their own tailoring shop.
Even if they did do that they do not tend to do it on Savile Row
and even if they do do it on Savile Row they do not tend to
historically and hopefully that is going to change now be a
women’s wear tailor on Savile Row. Phoebe was the first
women’s wear, I was going to say first I think you are still
the only one aren’t you, but we are going to say first because
we are going to realise soon we are in the
21^st century, the first women’s wear tailor on
that famous street. It has certainly had its ups and downs and
Phoebe I am sure will tell you some of them, but her success has
been undoubted, being featured in the Forbes 30 under 30 and many
other publications. We are particularly lucky to have Phoebe with
us today because she is actually on holiday at the moment and it is
really kind of her to break off from holiday to join us and Phoebe
I will hand over to you.

Phoebe Gormley:  Thank you so much John,
good morning everyone.

Thank you John and Lucy so much for organising this event today
and it was so lovely to hear more stories from Simone and Elle
about how they have got to where they are today. John, you stole my
punchline, I liked the build-up and then I give that away. It is
fine, I will get over it.

So I thought I would start with a little background on how I got
around to starting my business and before I jump into that yes
apologies there are no slides, I am not as organised as my
wonderful counterparts. I was planning to do this from my studio
but got persuaded to a last minute trip to the Highlands and John
said the weather in London was lovely but I can confirm the weather
in the Highlands is very Highlandish.

So I grew up in a little town in Suffolk which had three pubs,
three churches and a fabric shop, and the least materialistic
mother, which was a great starting point and if you were too young
to be allowed into the pubs and you were not that interested in
going to the churches and the nearest city with decent clothes
shops was an hour away it did not leave many options other than to
start making your own clothes and what I loved about making my own
clothes was it is a form of creativity that to me was a utility as
well, you know I could create something and then wear it or use
it.

I am not a good artist, definitely not, so what I loved about
making clothes was that you could sew something and then unstitch
it and try again unlike a painting where once it is finished or you
have got like the blob of red in the middle that you did not want
to have then it is all panic. What I loved about making clothes was
how you could decide you wanted it this way for a while and then be
like actually I think a bit shorter six months later and change and
change and change.

So I started making my own clothes when I was about 14 and using
my mum’s old 1970s sewing machine and I was promised that if I
got all As in my GCSEs that I would be allowed my own sewing
machine and on results day we drove to John Lewis and I brought the
sewing machine that I had been dreaming of and it was a glorious
day, I can still remember it.

Then I started cutting up some old suits or my dad’s that
were very 80s and that he could not bring himself to wear anymore.
I started chopping them up and swanning around this town in Suffolk
wearing them and someone said if you want to dress like that you
should be in Savile Row not in Suffolk and I had never heard of
this place and I thought to myself well I had never know that there
was scope to be somebody who made clothes that was not in a
production line or in a work room, back room.

I am a people person, I definitely wanted to be with people,
customer facing and engaged in that way and when I found out about
Savile Row, I mean obviously growing up in the countryside all of
London feels glamorous and exciting but particularly a street like
Savile Row which is so historic, prestigious, exciting and unique.
I do not think there is another street in the world like it. I
loved that.

So I started applying for internships in the school summer
holidays, I started interning around there when I was 15. The first
day I wore one of my dad’s suits that I had cut out to make my
own and someone actually spat on me and said you suits think you
run the world and I was not that happy to be spat on but quite
liked the idea of being someone who could run the world.

I carried on with my internships and each year I would come back
and I would say next year I am going to intern with an amazing
women’s wear tailor, next year there will be a women’s wear
tailor, next year, next year.

It kept not happening and I kept thinking ok well any minute
now, any minute now, and it rolled around to university application
times and I should say I went to a really great boarding school
that had a huge textiles department, not just art but textiles and
a really really enthusiastic teacher who if you were interested, if
you were engaged, she was delighted and I do think amazing teachers
make such a big difference on people’s careers and she
definitely had an enormous impact on mine.

So sixth form rolled around and then university applications
rolled around and my dad was an entrepreneur as well and he said
obviously you are going to do economics or business, finance and
going through my teenage rebellion phase and I say no dad actually
I have decided I am going to do costume design. He said oh god
please help me, why would you want to do that?

I wanted to do it because like I said I am not a true creative,
I am not a fashion designer and what I loved about costume was it
was not about let me make this collection and see if someone buys
it. Costume is about who is this person, what are they trying to
convey to the world and what are they trying to hide from the world
and how do they feel about themselves in the morning and what does
their day look like and what are their insecurities and who is this
person and how can I make clothes for that.

I really loved the psychology of clothes and I do think when
people boil clothes down to being frivolous they are missing a
trick because to me I think it is the way that people communicate
everything how they feel about themselves and how they want to be
presented and taken by other people and the only way you can do it
without words on mass to my clothes today, obviously I did not pack
a suit with me on holiday so I am in my pyjama shirt and that is my
holiday sense that I am sharing with you all today. It is so hard
doing a zoom call when you cannot tell if people are laughing or
enjoying it but I will have faith that people are smiling.

Where did I get to, university applications and costume
design.

I was the first year where tuition fees jumped from £3,000
a year to £9,000 which was 2012 and for that I had gone from
a great school with super engaged teachers and loads of facilities
and everything you could need to a university that I got one hour
contact time a week and we had one essay a year and the title was
“an amazing costumie person?”. I just said, it just blew
my mind that we were not being academically challenged, that
university to me was not about fast paced deadlines growing and
growing it just was not enough.

I was keen to seize life and go at 100 miles an hour and
university, which mainly is ironic because most people would think
that was exactly what university is but to me it was not enough,
one hour a week and I had too much time to myself to write a
business plan.

So I wrote a business plan and it transpired that I thought I
could start a woman’s tailoring company and going back to the
theme – how to make a design a commercial success – before I start
wrapping it up is the great thing about starting a business like
mine at the time was that as it is a bespoke business people come
in and they pay me and they place the order and then two months
later I pay my suppliers when they have finished creating the
product for me, so it is a really great business to try to start
from a commercial success point. Definitely does not have the
quantities that a business like Elle needs and where maybe she is
holding stock or she needs a certain volume. The great thing about
mine and that I would encourage people to consider is that the
question how to make a design a commercial success, well what is a
commercial success? I think that completely depends on you and your
narrative of what a commercial success is.

You know we see Elle building a huge business where she is going
to need a lot of scale and I have no doubt she is going to achieve
that, that cup is amazing, I am going to be investing in one for
myself and Simone telling us about how she is a sole trader and a
“jobbing designer” and they are both amazing commercial
successes so it is about I think changing the narrative away from
there is only one version of commercial success and giving scope
for lots of different stories to be true and finding pride in all
of them and I also think something I wanted to add was that your
business cannot be a commercial success without you and your mental
health sustainably lasting throughout the duration of your
business, so I think it is really important that not only we worry
about commercial success for our designs but how founders and
people who run their own businesses can maintain the resilience
needed to last them the duration of time that is needed. As Simone
said ten years, the amount of time that is needed to create your
business from a little flourishing plant to the commercial success
however, you define that.

I think I have gone over my time but thank you so much John and
Lucy for having me and it is a pleasure to be included.

John: You have not run over at all Phoebe,
that was fascinating, thank you so much and you have left plenty of
time for questions so thank you.

Maybe we will stay with you Phoebe for the first one which is
you have obviously got a particularly unique business for having
problems in a pandemic, in that yours is one of the last types of
business which it really is quite hard to do online, it is a very
personal business, it is very much as you were just saying, you do
not need the quantity to make your products a success but you do
need to sell some and have people there sort of in front of you I
assume to make your products.

How have you used social media or online, or anything, have you
used any of those things in order to try to keep your brand and
design profile out there in this last period?

Phoebe: Great question John. I was
actually just feeling really inspired listening to Simone’s
answer about social media because I am still not a social media
person and I want to keep my life very private but I think she is
right in what she says about having a voice and I think part of
that is for me anyway, I want my brand to just be for everyone, so
I do not really want to have such a strong voice but if you try to
appeal too much to everyone then you lose your ability to really
deeply appeal to a specific set of people and I think that is
something that I need to be ok with and some learning that I am
definitely going to take from Simone’s talk but over the
pandemic yes my business was not the business that you wanted to be
running over a pandemic.

Obviously we couldn’t get within 2m of people to take
measurements and we rely a lot on work wear and occasion wear for
our orders so it has been pandemonium but I released a range of
cotton Covid masks which are still available on the website and was
astounded by how well they sold out and the New York Times actually
did a front page piece on the future of Savile Row during the
pandemic and I was featured in that. It talked about what I was
doing to fill the time and I mentioned these face masks and then
for the following few months I was just packing up daily orders to
all across the States of cotton face masks and further afield,
Singapore and Australia and all sort of things and that was a great
learning experience for me to move away from quite an unscaleable
model of I need to interact with every single person face to face
for hours towards more of this is my voice, these are my designs,
this is my ethos and my business and people being invested enough
in that to buy something without needing to meet me and have that
personal interaction and personal exchange and that was a whole new
different skill set that I am definitely going to be taking forward
to make my business more stable in the long run.

So that was a great learning experience actually and not
something that I would have done if the pandemic had not happened
and it forced me into considering alternative ways to make more
stable income.

John: And it just shows that as actually
all of the speakers today have shown that adaptability is really
important and actually putting your face behind the brand and
making it something that people can relate to is also very
important. Thank you Phoebe that is a really interesting answer to
the question.

Ella and Martin I was going to come to you next actually. We
have had one question about whether your cup is recyclable or
whether or not there is anything, you know the extent to which you
have considered those sorts of questions. I do not know Elle if you
want to talk about that? Obviously your product is by its nature
good for the environment because it saves paper cups but perhaps
you can tell us how you went through the process of deciding how to
make the cup from that perspective.

Eleanor: So obviously we put a lot of
effort into trying to source the right materials. Which is
something I talked briefly about earlier and I think one of the
main things that we considered when we were building the cup is we
wanted to build something which was designed for life so something
very durable.

Obviously there are certain limitations with a plastic lid like
this, something like that cannot last for ever but stainless steel
potentially can. We decided to go for stainless steel for the body
of the cups because of its longevity and high end of life
recyclability without degradation so around 90%, I think, of end of
life stainless steel is collected and recycled into new stainless
steel, without too much loss of quality. It also has quite a low
carbon footprint when compared to glass or ceramics and obviously
as I mentioned it is incredibly durable so you could potentially
use it every day and it would last for decades and then the lid is
comprised predominately of free floating parts which was really
important for us because I wanted them to be able to be
disassembled at end of life, so the plastic parts in the lid can be
recycled pretty much in the same way that you would recycle any
other plastic through your household recycling system. We also used
one polymer for the lid and as I mentioned none of the parts as far
as possible, are adhered or bonded for ease of recyclability so
also something that potentially we are working on at the moment is
obviously there is a big issue around sorting black and obviously
the lids are black. Not being recognised and picked when it is
going through the recycling system so something that we do advise
our customers to do is actually return the lids to us and we can
disassemble them and recycle them ourselves.

You know another focus for the future unfortunately we are not
quite there yet but we are working towards getting rid of all
virgin plastic components in the lid and hopefully at some point in
time we can use recycled ocean plastic to form the body of
these.

John: Brilliant, that is brilliant, and
more on the sort of business side of things while you guys have the
floor. You obviously both, the way you work together is really
interesting. I mean Elle for you it must be very hard as a start up
to get help where you need help but without having obviously, you
have got a patent which is obviously an expensive thing to do, and
the right thing to do, but there are a lot of outlays when you are
first starting out aren’t there and obviously the way you are
working with Martin is really, it is not innovative, lots of people
do it but its less common to see people who invest in your business
in return for, I think Martin very aptly quote it as sweat equity
and I suppose the question on that Elle is, what advice have you
got for designers who are tuned in today about how you decide how
to involve different people on what basis to involve them, how did
you decide to go down this route with Martin or perhaps down a
different route with somebody else? If you could briefly just
explain your thinking.

Eleanor: So I think it was so funny I
actually lived just down the road from Tangerine so I think it was
about less than a mile or something crazy like that. So I was doing
my research, as I mentioned we needed someone to come in really
quickly and help us solve some really complex design challenges so
we had already got to a certain point with the factories in China
and we needed someone to basically just step in and take the
reins.

So basically as soon as I went down and I met Martin and the
rest of the team and obviously as he very kindly said you know he
liked the idea straight away so it was pretty easy and I would say
it is really all about people. For us obviously we have worked with
a lot of different people along the journey so even in the last
three years many different people have, I guess come and gone but I
think what was really important about Martin and the team and what
we felt straight away is, we just felt supported so they really
took the time to listen to everything that we were saying and I
think it is just having open channels of communication.

They have been great as in they just picked up where the
previous designed left off and just plugged in and helped us with
any suggestions and knowing that they are there at the end of the
phone or via WhatsApp at any point is really really reassuring so I
think it is probably just about that fit and whether you can work
with people.

Martin: I think it is very much about
trust because with all of the start-ups that we have been working
with from the very beginning we are not being paid for the work we
are doing, we are trying to really find a clever way of helping
them. Obviously, in the most efficient way that we can because we
run a business we have to make a profit, we have to trade. Also we
have to give them good advice around what they are doing along the
way, what to invest in and it is very very important that they
invest in IP at the same time as investing in design because you
need to be making sure that you are protecting what you are doing
as you go and getting good advice.

Also we know when to then pass them on to experts who will give
the right advice around whatever protection of the IP that they are
looking for at the same time as also advice around what
manufacturer to choose or what issues to think about or where to
invest in fixing something and improving something to protect the
viability of the concept in the long term and what to do next as
well, how to take something the next generation thing to market at
the lowest cost in the fastest time to deliver on the
subjectives.

It is very much about working together to get those things to
function properly.

John: And thank you Martin for your
comments on that as well because I think that actually helps the
design agency people who might be in the audience as well or those
who are designing for third parties about how they might be able to
get involved with helping the Elle’s of this world.

It is really good to hear both sides of that and of course I
think in a lot of respects it is the same for both, it is the same
considerations about trust and being able to work together and the
rest of it.

We are coming close up for time but we have got more questions
so for those of us who are able to stay online for a couple more
minutes then please do feel free to do so, if you do need to go on
the hour precisely then thank you very much for joining us and we
will be emailing you if you have attended this live, we will be
emailing you both a questionnaire but also a recording of this
which, feel free to share with any friends or colleagues who could
not join live.

I am going to carry on and Simone we have had a great question
for you, that actually, the reason that it is a particular great
question is it plays really nicely into last year’s topic as
well that we did about when you are copied.

Now I appreciate there are limits to what you can talk about but
do you think that the question is whether you think that in a way
larger organisations might take inspiration or copy your work
whether or not in some ways inadvertently they are helping you
because they are raising your profile and advertising your work.
The topic last year was whether it is ever good news to be copied
which was a deliberately provocative title but what is your
perspective on that sort of topic generally?

Simone: I think that is a really tough
question because on one hand you can see it as a means to propel
your career and your name but that is only going to happen if you
are confident enough to take the case either to court, like lawyer
up, which is going to be a financial investment, a time investment
and actually a lot of the time you can still lose even if you are
well within your rights to take someone to court and it is very
emotionally taxing. It is something that people do not talk about
beyond it being financially going to cost you money it is actually
emotionally very very scary going up against bigger corporations
who seem to have bottomless pits of money.

So on one hand I would say no it is not the best, it’s not
the way that people should plan into their business to make a name
for themselves and also you are almost assuming that people will
automatically do that and what I think I have found is that from
the outreach, I found that this has happened to many people and
they haven’t done anything so people are not going to know
about your designs being you, being behind the design unless you
speak up.

So I think it is, if you are willing to use your voice as I have
said before to call on your network to basically stand up for
yourself, you can get your name out there more and you can stand
your ground and it can be beneficial because it will go towards
people understand that as a creative you have values and that you
are willing to stand by the work that you have invested in making
and invested your time in creating over the lifespan of your career
but as I say it is not the best way and there are definitely better
ways, things that we as designers and creatives are not taught
enough about actually.

Unfortunately, I did not speak about that when I was speaking
but it is something that I really should have is that when we are
going through the educational process the focus is very much about
being creative and making it work and it is not about the business
element of it which is how do I make my work whilst protecting
myself if I am not so for example, the TOPL lid design is very much
easily to protect by intellectual property. You can very easily say
look at this we have designed this system and it has got this ring
and, very easy, how do I protect a shape, you know and we have not
got that built into our educational system so that when this does
happen to us we do feel kind of stranded which is one of the
reasons why I am really happy to do this talk because we do not
actually talk about it enough as creatives and we do not
necessarily know what to do until it is actually too late.

John: That is one of the reasons that
Martin and I have been doing this talk for so many years, sometimes
more about intellectual property and sometimes not and why we have
got those materials together because we have discovered through the
years that actually when people do come to us and “lawyer
up” as you said, they sometimes do not necessarily have all
the right records, the right rights that they could have had and it
is a shame because there are things you can do and it does not have
to cost a fortune, I am obliged to say.

It inevitably does cost money and the less prepared you are for
that eventuality the more expensive it can be frankly because you
do not have the documents all lined up and so on and that is why
hopefully throughout this talk people are realising that you do not
have to go into any fortune just to try talking to a lawyer or even
getting advice from other designers about just making sure that you
can prove you designed it, who designed it, whether if people
helped you design it you have got some records that show that they
gave the rights to you and all that kind of thing. There are some
quite simple steps people can take to make sure that they are
sorted earlier and the more sorted you are the more people will
take you seriously when you have a go at them.

We have had a lot of success with, for example, writing to
people about registered designs, it does not go to trial because
they go, oh gosh did not realise you had that, ok fine we will
stop.

It does not always happen, of course, but it does sometimes
happen and the more you look like you have sorted out your rights,
you have sorted out your records, you have sorted out what is yours
and what is not yours the more people will take you seriously
rather than trying to push you around and so a lot of what you have
said there Simone is absolutely stop on and I am grateful for you
being quite so on topic, its perfect.

I am conscious we have overrun and I do not want to take up too
much of people’s day so thank you to all of you again for
speaking at our event, it is an honour to have such creative and
inspiring people speaking at our event, it makes up for my lack of
personal creativity but it is an inspiring group of people we have
had here today, all of whom have given some really interesting
insights into what they do. I am only sorry that we could not do
this for another whole hours, there is all sorts of things I wanted
all of you to talk about but we have just run out of time so thank
you so much for joining us today and thank you to you in the
audience for joining us as well and we hope you can all join us
next year for what will be our tenth anniversary of our involvement
with London Design Festival and hopefully we can do it in person so
that we can celebrate that properly rather than having to dial in
on our laptops.

Thank you all very much and see you again soon.

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