WHY DESIGN?

How do you spend thirty five years inside hardware giants, take 22 IDEA medals out the door, and still end up best known as the guy who refused to chant “I am GE”?

In this episode of Why Design, Bob Schwartz shares the belief that sits at the heart of his work: design without a strategy is just decoration, and strategy without trust and respect is just paperwork.

Rather than waving his hands above his head about how great design is, Bob spent decades being subversive with goodness in his heart. That decision led to a $50,000 Business Week deal that rewrote how American business talked about the IDEA Awards, a global design organisation rebuilt at GE Healthcare on revenue earned from GE Aviation, and a CEO walking through a movie set in a nurse’s uniform.

This conversation isn’t about how much design has won.

It’s about what it costs to keep your soul while you climb.

Don’t just listen. Go beyond the podcast.

Join the Why Design community → teamkodu.com/whydesign

What You’ll Learn

• 🧭 Why Bob refused to chant “I am GE” inside a 400-person dinner, and what that taught him about the line between giving and selling out.
• 🛠️ How a non-profit and a lobbying job set Bob up for manufacturing, and what it actually takes to convince a hardware C-suite to hire someone from outside their world.
• 📈 What the $50,000 IDEA Awards deal with Business Week did to the conversation about design in American business.
• 🪤 Why “make it about everybody else” beats every clever piece of design propaganda Bob has ever tried.
• 🎭 How the storytelling maze worked: a CMO with 500 useless PowerPoint slides, a CEO in a nurse’s uniform, and 3,000 visitors who saw design differently afterwards.
• 🔍 What the CAR model (Context, Action, Results) reveals about a senior candidate that a polished CV usually hides.

Memorable Quotes

“I will give you my head, heart and hands all in, but I’m not gonna give you my soul.”

“There’s a stranger in my kitchen.”

“God damn it Schwartz, you don’t get it. I need cash now. I don’t have time for this fluffy bunny shit.”

“We were being subversive with goodness in our hearts.”

“You cannot implement strategy if people don’t trust and respect you.”

Resources & Links

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & Amazon → whydesign.club

👥 Join the Why Design community → teamkodu.com/whydesign

📸 Follow @whydesignxkodu on Instagram

🎥 Watch full episodes → YouTube.com/@whydesignpod

🔗 Follow Chris Whyte → linkedin.com/in/mrchriswhyte

🔗 Explore Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design → miad.edu

🔗 Connect with Bob Schwartz

About the Episode

Why Design is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry.

Through honest conversations with designers, engineers and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build, but why they build it: the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work.

About Kodu

Why Design is produced by Kodu, a recruitment partner for ambitious hardware brands, design consultancies and product-led start-ups.

We help founders and leadership teams hire exceptional talent across industrial design, mechanical engineering and product leadership, bringing structure and clarity to one of the hardest parts of scaling.

🔗 Learn more → teamkodu.com

What does it take to solve a problem that everyone experiences and nobody has fixed?

In this episode of Why Design, Floyd Freeman shares the belief that sits at the heart of his work: that the most obvious problems are sometimes the hardest to solve not because the technology does not exist, but because no one has connected the pieces. FlushLocks a smart lock and unattended tap payment system for commercial restrooms is the result of one afternoon in Boulder, Colorado, a nappy emergency and a door with a code that said customers only.

Rather than staying in a secure, well-paid career managing 400 people at one of America's most recognisable convenience chains, Floyd walked away to build a hardware product from scratch. No engineering background, no product experience, no prototype when he signed up to exhibit at CES. That decision led to a van journey to Las Vegas, a prototype that arrived three days before the show, and a booth in Eureka Park where strangers kept saying: nobody has thought of that.

This conversation is not about inventing something new. It is about recognising something obvious and refusing to wait for someone else to build it.

It is not about hardware expertise. It is about knowing what you do not know, finding the people who do, and trusting them enough to let them lead where you cannot follow.

It is not about the perfect founding story. It is about making the same decision twenty-five times a week until it sticks.

Don't just listen. Go beyond the podcast.

Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign

What You'll Learn

• 🔒 Why unattended tap payment certification only became legally possible at the end of 2025 - and how FlushLocks was built in almost perfect timing with the infrastructure that makes it work
• 🧾 How Floyd decided to leave a twelve-year career with nothing but an idea on a Word document and a meeting with a patent attorney
• 🛠 Why choosing the right manufacturer is less about technical capability and more about leadership style, pace, and working relationship
• 📍 What it actually costs to build hardware from scratch: not just money, but the trust you place in people you have never worked with before
• 🏪 Why the hardest part of selling a hardware product into restaurants is not the product or the pitch it is finding the person in a 25-location chain who actually makes the decision
• 🧠 How a general manager thinks about building a technical company: learning just enough of each discipline to direct the people who know more

Memorable Quotes

"I would have been happy to just pay for a restroom. I don't need the soda. This was an emergency."

"We asked ourselves twenty five times a week: is this the right thing to do? Can we do this without falling apart?"

"I have no degree in anything I'm doing right now. I am a general manager that's my mindset, that's who I am as a human being."

"I will be the last person to get money. If I have twenty grand, I'm going to make sure five goes to you, five goes to you, five goes to you and then maybe if there's anything left over."

"You can't have lift if you don't invest in the project. The runway is irrelevant if you don't have lift."

Resources & Links

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & Amazon -> whydesign.club

👥 Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign

📸 Follow @whydesignxkodu on Instagram

🎥 Watch full episodes -> YouTube.com/@whydesignpod

🔗 Follow Chris Whyte -> linkedin.com/in/mrchriswhyte

🔗 Explore FlushLocks -> paidrestrooms.com

🔗 Connect with Floyd Freeman -> [email protected]

About the Episode

Why Design is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry.

Through honest conversations with designers, engineers and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build but why they build it; the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work.

About Kodu

Why Design is produced by Kodu, a recruitment partner for ambitious hardware brands, design consultancies and product-led start-ups.

We help founders and leadership teams hire exceptional talent across industrial design, mechanical engineering and product leadership bringing structure and clarity to one of the hardest parts of scaling.

🔗 Learn more -> teamkodu.com

What does it actually take to get something you designed onto a supermarket shelf at scale?

In this episode of Why Design, Matt Batchelor shares the belief that sits at the heart of his work: that the best design does not stop at the render. It runs all the way through the material choice, the tooling, the supply chain, and the factory floor and the designer should know all of it.

Rather than staying in the comfortable upstream of concept and CAD, Matt and his co-founder Nick Paget built Instrument into a studio that also manufactures what it designs, co-invests in the products it believes in, and builds the machines when no suitable machine exists. That decision led to ten weeks in hotels, a crimping machine that kept stopping, and a refillable aluminium personal care system now stocked across four major UK supermarkets.

This conversation is not about packaging.

It is about what engineering at volume actually demands, and why most design processes are not built for it.

It is not about sustainability as a brand position.

It is about what it takes to give people a genuinely better object and get it made reliably at scale.

Don't just listen. Go beyond the podcast.

Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign

What You'll Learn

• 🔩 Why the hardest part of the Meadow project was not the invention - it was getting cans reliably off a conveyor
• 📐 How ergonomic research from a Sheffield engineering lecturer shaped the torque specification for a refillable closure
• 🔬 Why Matt hired a test engineer into a team of starters, and what a love of statistics does for a product development process
• 🏭 What you learn about design when you also manufacture what you design - and why most consultancies miss this feedback loop
• 🎓 How hiring only from your known network shapes the kind of work a studio attracts, and what it costs in diversity and capability
• 🤖 Why AI has not transformed physical product development - and the difference between embedded intelligence and badly considered tools

Memorable Quotes

"As with any project, it's always the details - like a hinge or a lock or a seal - that take all the time. Most of the machine will look like the first sketch."

"There's no point designing a safety mechanism if someone's grandmother can't open it."

"I was never sat there thinking, what am I doing this? It's like, well, there's this thing I do. How do I get people to pay me money to go and do it?"

"There is still a part of my job which is making myself redundant."

"Good designers are just people who can articulate why that quality is good to someone who maybe can't sense it, but can't see it in definitive terms."

Resources and Links

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & Amazon -> whydesign.club

👥 Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign

📸 Follow @whydesignxkodu on Instagram

🎥 Watch full episodes -> YouTube.com/@whydesignpod

🔗 Follow Chris Whyte -> linkedin.com/in/mrchriswhyte

🔗 Explore Instrument Industries -> instrumentindustries.co.uk

🔗 Connect with Matt Batchelor -> linkedin.com/in/mattbatchelor

About the Episode

Why Design is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry.

Through honest conversations with designers, engineers and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build but why they build it; the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work.

About Kodu

Why Design is produced by Kodu, a recruitment partner for ambitious hardware brands, design consultancies and product-led start-ups.

We help founders and leadership teams hire exceptional talent across industrial design, mechanical engineering and product leadership bringing structure and clarity to one of the hardest parts of scaling.

🔗 Learn more -> teamkodu.com

What does it actually cost to build a hardware brand from inside a design agency?

In this episode of Why Design, Phil Staunton shares the belief that sits at the heart of his work: that product design is only as good as the honesty you bring to it.

Not just the honesty with clients about what their product needs, but with yourself about what you do not know yet.

Rather than staying comfortable in the consultancy model, Phil chose to put his own money into a consumer pushchair brand, take it to John Lewis, and learn everything he did not know about retail, merchandising, branding agencies, and the gap between a product that is well designed and a product that sells. That decision led to some of the most expensive lessons in this conversation, and some of the most useful.

This conversation is not about building a successful design agency.

It is about what happens when a designer bets on their own conviction and what it teaches them when some of that conviction turns out to be wrong.

Don't just listen. Go beyond the podcast.

Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign

What You'll Learn

• 💸 Why spending 126,000 pounds on branding before validating your messaging can destroy a launch before it begins.
• 📦 How the economics of a design agency change entirely at the boundary between eleven and thirty-five people, and why most agencies stay stuck in the most difficult middle.
• 🏪 What John Lewis buyers actually evaluate when they decide to stock a new brand, and what happens on the shop floor that no one tells first-time consumer hardware founders.
• 🔧 Why forty-two post-launch product changes that cost real money moved zero additional units, and what that reveals about the difference between designer instinct and customer reality.
• 📋 The minimum viable approach to validation before tooling: how a fake buy-now button on a basic website outperforms any focus group or agency market research.
• 🧠 Why ignoring alarm bells on hires and new client inquiries never, in Phil's fifteen-year experience, works out.

Memorable Quotes

"We wasted a lot of money on branding. I think we spent 126,000 pounds with a branding company. And it just bombs."

"Never once have I kind of gone, yeah, okay, it'll be all right. I've got a bad feeling about it but I'll offer that person the job. Never has it worked out. It's always been a shit show."

"Set up a website with an ecom platform and get people to actually click buy now and then send them an email saying, really sorry, it's not quite ready yet. If people click buy now, they're genuinely prepared to spend money."

"I made way more money running a design agency that was under 10 than I did when I was trying to run a design agency that was 18 people. And I was a hell of a lot more stressed and I was doing a lot more work."

"I am a startup guy. And that's the bit that gets me excited. D2M doesn't want or need me. It doesn't need that kind of startup energy. It's a mature business. And that just isn't me."

Resources & Links

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & Amazon -> whydesign.club

Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign

Follow @whydesignxkodu on Instagram

Watch full episodes -> YouTube.com/@whydesignpod

Follow Chris Whyte -> linkedin.com/in/mrchriswhyte

Explore D2M Product Design -> design2market.co.uk

Connect with Phil Staunton -> Phil Staunton

About the Episode

Why Design is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry.

Through honest conversations with designers, engineers and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build but why they build it; the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work.

About Kodu

Why Design is produced by Kodu, a recruitment partner for ambitious hardware brands, design consultancies and product-led start-ups.

We help founders and leadership teams hire exceptional talent across industrial design, mechanical engineering and product leadership bringing structure and clarity to one of the hardest parts of scaling.

Learn more -> teamkodu.com

What do you do when the work you're best at starts to feel like the problem?

In this episode of Why Design, Felicity Boyce shares the belief that sits at the heart of her work: that understanding how something is made, at factory scale, under pressure, with the wrong release agent and a cycle time that doesn't add up, is more valuable than any theory you carry out of university.

As Head of Material Innovation at Koroyd, she leads the development of the tubular core technology that is now inside helmets and body protection products used across sports, industrial, motorsport, and defence markets, inside a company just acquired by MIPS for 40 million euros.

Rather than following a planned career trajectory, Felicity built her expertise through saying yes: to factory trips others declined, to project responsibility that appeared during redundancy rounds, to a year inside a nappy recycling facility learning waste streams and polymer chemistry from the ground up, and eventually to a job offer in Monaco from a team she already trusted. That sequence of decisions led her to one of the more interesting material science roles in European hardware.

This conversation isn't about impact protection materials.

It's about what you learn by being physically present when things go wrong in a factory.

This conversation isn't about sustainability credentials.

It's about the weight of making things at volume, and what you do when that weight becomes a reason to change direction.

This conversation isn't about relocating for work.

It's about what it looks like to build a career without a map, and why gut instinct and a good team around you turn out to be the main navigational tools.

Join the Why Design community: teamkodu.com/whydesign

What You'll Learn

• 🔩 Why the best material science careers are built in factories, not labs, and what that means for how you read a CV.
• 🌍 How sustainability shifts from an interest to an obligation when you have spent years watching what gets made at scale.
• 🏗️ What Koroyd's tubular core technology actually does, where it came from, and why the MIPS acquisition is a science story as much as a business one.
• 🧪 Why a year recycling nappies turned out to be one of the most valuable things Felicity did for her career, and what it taught her about the gap between lab-scale proof and real-world implementation.
• 👥 What attitude actually looks like in an interview when you are hiring for a technical team in a company that is evolving faster than its org chart.
• 🏔️ What it genuinely costs and feels like to relocate to Monaco for work, beyond the sunshine, the sea, and the scenery.

Memorable Quotes

"I think I was just at a point of my life and my career where it felt like a bit of an adventure. Sometimes you just have to go with your gut and it just felt like a good move."

"I think I've always just seen challenge as something positive rather than something too scary. You've got to be comfortable being a bit uncomfortable."

"Being in a factory, trying to troubleshoot exactly why you're having trouble running a new material or a new product, you can't get it to mould or demould, that was really where I felt I started to thrive."

"It's okay not to know what the future holds and where the path's going, as long as you've got a good support network and you feel well supported. You'll find your way."

"It's not quite as simple as just getting rid of all plastics and that's going to be the solution to all our problems. It's a much more complex topic than that."

Resources and Links

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & Amazon: whydesign.club

👥 Join the Why Design community: teamkodu.com/whydesign

📸 Follow @whydesignxkodu on Instagram

🎥 Watch full episodes: YouTube.com/@whydesignpod

🔗 Follow Chris Whyte: linkedin.com/in/mrchriswhyte

🔗 Explore Koroyd: Koroyd.com

🔗 Connect with Felicity Boyce: [linkedin.com/in/felicity-boyce/]

About the Episode

Why Design is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry.

Through honest conversations with designers, engineers and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build but why they build it; the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work.

About Kodu

Why Design is produced by Kodu, a recruitment partner for ambitious hardware brands, design consultancies and product-led start-ups.

We help founders and leadership teams hire exceptional talent across industrial design, mechanical engineering and product leadership bringing structure and clarity to one of the hardest parts of scaling.

🔗 Learn more: teamkodu.com

What does it take to solve a problem nobody else is willing to attempt, in a country 10,000 miles away, with a 15-person team and an active fundraise running in the background?

In this episode of Why Design, Sid Shaikh shares the belief that sits at the heart of his work: that the hardest engineering problems are the right ones to go after, and that the difference between a startup that scales and one that stalls is almost always about whether the team is solving the actual bottleneck or just the comfortable one.

Rather than staying in large corporations where the problems were well-defined and the teams were fully resourced, Sid has spent his career choosing the inflection point: the moment a company has something that works and needs to figure out how to make it real. That decision led him to Ocado when it was still thought of as a grocer, through a company administration at Hypertunnel, and eventually to Fieldwork Robotics, where he is now CTO building a raspberry-picking robot designed to operate in polytunnels across three continents.

This conversation is about what honest engineering leadership looks like when the stakes are high and the answers aren't in any textbook.

Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign

What You'll Learn

• Why a reachability analysis of berry height, depth, and obstacles explained six months of performance data that improvements to the vision and motion stack simply couldn't shift
• How Fieldwork moved from project-based trials to Harvest as a Service, charging per kilo picked rather than per machine deployed
• Why Ocado's engineering team broke down at around 50 people, and what the right structure looks like when you need doers more than managers
• What Sid learned from Hypertunnel's administration about solving your own part of the stack brilliantly while the harder problem next door stands still
• How AI is being layered across the pick stack, from ripeness classification to berry-level yield forecasting that tells a farm operator exactly when to come back
• What Sid actually looks for when hiring engineers: not a list of CAD packages or coding languages, but the attitude to work from a blank sheet and the drive to pivot without freezing

Memorable Quotes

"I've never heard anybody say you over-communicate."

"We went to suppliers and they laughed at us. And then the outcomes are there."

"The endless prototype is the sign a robotics startup is heading for trouble."

"If the horse next to you in the horse race isn't catching up, you're not going to be successful."

"People in automation mix very well."

Resources and Links

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon -> whydesign.club

👥 Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign

📸 Follow @whydesignxkodu on Instagram

🎥 Watch full episodes -> YouTube.com/@whydesignpod

🔗 Follow Chris Whyte -> linkedin.com/in/mrchriswhyte

🔗 Explore Fieldwork Robotics -> fieldworkrobotics.com

🔗 Connect with Sid Shaikh -> [https://www.linkedin.com/in/sid-shaikh]

About the Episode

Why Design is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry.

Through honest conversations with designers, engineers and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build but why they build it; the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work.

About Kodu

Why Design is produced by Kodu, a recruitment partner for ambitious hardware brands, design consultancies and product-led start-ups.

We help founders and leadership teams hire exceptional talent across industrial design, mechanical engineering and product leadership - bringing structure and clarity to one of the hardest parts of scaling.

🔗 Learn more -> teamkodu.com

What if the biggest gap in the clean energy transition isn't technology or politics, but simply who the products were designed for?

In this episode of Why Design, Rob Hallifax shares the belief that sits at the heart of his work: that half the country has been left behind by clean energy, and that the right physical product can change that. Rob is co-founder of Windfall Energy, a company building a compact home battery specifically for renters and flat-dwellers, the people for whom solar panels, heat pumps and big home batteries have never been a realistic option.

Rather than building another clean tech product for homeowners with garages and south-facing roofs, Rob and his co-founder designed something different: a 2.5 kWh battery that orders online, arrives by courier, and automatically charges on cheap overnight electricity to power your home during expensive peak hours. That decision, to start with who was excluded rather than who already had options, led to Bethnal Green Ventures backing the company, conversations with major UK energy providers, and a pre-order campaign launching in early 2025.

This conversation isn't about home energy storage.

It's about who clean technology is designed for, and who it quietly ignores.

This conversation isn't about Kickstarter tactics.

It's about what a decade of crowdfunding campaigns teaches you about making products people actually want.

Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign

6c. What You'll Learn

1. Why roughly half of UK homes are structurally excluded from every clean energy product on the market, and what it takes to build for that gap.
2. How the economics of battery cells and electricity pricing have only recently made a product like Windfall viable, and why timing matters as much as the idea itself.
3. Why Rob treats the industrial design of a home battery as a commercial priority, not an afterthought, and how that shapes every decision from designer brief to product form.
4. Why Windfall leads on saving money rather than saving the planet, and what it means that cheap and green electricity are effectively the same thing on the UK grid.
5. How a B2B2C strategy through energy companies solves distribution, tariff integration and end-user complexity in one move.
6. What a decade of Kickstarter campaigns actually teaches you about validating physical products, building audiences before launch, and knowing when to walk away from something that is not working.

Memorable Quotes

"We thought, what can we make for the people who've been left behind? Effectively half the country."

"The making of the thing is kind of the easy bit. The hard bit is always finding customers, making a product that people actually want."

"If you're not embarrassed by your first product launch, you've waited too long."

"In terms of marketing stuff, we lead on saving money and the green thing is more than just a happy bonus. They are definitely tightly integrated."

"You need to know when something's not going to work and be prepared to kill it. That can be hard, especially when it's your own."

Resources and Links

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & Amazon -> whydesign.club

👥 Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign

📸 Follow @whydesignxkodu on Instagram

🎥 Watch full episodes -> YouTube.com/@whydesignpod

🔗 Follow Chris Whyte -> linkedin.com/in/mrchriswhyte

🔗 Explore Windfall Energy -> windfallenergy.com

🔗 Connect with Rob Hallifax -> robhallifax.com , LinkedIn

About the Episode

Why Design is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry.

Through honest conversations with designers, engineers, and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build but why they build it; the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work.

About Kodu

Why Design is produced by Kodu, a recruitment partner for ambitious hardware brands, design consultancies and product-led start-ups.

We help founders and leadership teams hire exceptional talent across industrial design, mechanical engineering and product leadership, bringing structure and clarity to one of the hardest parts of scaling.

🔗 Learn more -> teamkodu.com

What does it take to redesign a surgical instrument that nobody has touched in sixty years?

In this episode of Why Design?, Liz McGloughlin shares the belief that sits at the heart of her work: that hardware problems worth solving are the ones nobody has bothered to solve yet, and that the best place to find them is not a trend report but an operating room.

Rather than following a conventional route into medical devices through engineering alone, Liz brought a clinical lens to a design problem, co-founding Tympany Medical after watching surgeons work around tools that were slowing them down, damaging their bodies, and limiting what they could see.

That decision led to a startup building the first variable-angle, single-use rigid endoscope platform, backed by clinicians at some of the most respected hospitals in the world.

This conversation is not about disruption for its own sake.

It is about the discipline of needs-led innovation: what it means to validate a problem before you fall in love with a solution.

It is about building hardware in a jurisdiction that gives you support but not quite enough, and staying in the game anyway.

It is about what kind of person survives the founding years of a medical device company with two small children at home and no desire to work weekends.

Listen in on this exclusive episode.

Join the Why Design? community - teamkodu.com/whydesign

What You'll Learn

• 🔬 Why needs-led innovation, not trend spotting, produces the problems worth solving in MedTech.
• 🛠 How the MVP model must be reframed in a regulated industry, and what the real test cycle looks like.
• 💡 Why customer conversations in 2023 narrowed Tympany's engineering roadmap and made the product more attainable.
• ⚖️ What it actually costs to be a hardware founder with young children, and why delegation is a pay equity issue.
• 🏥 How to build clinical credibility from Galway with surgeons at Mayo Clinic, UPenn, and Johns Hopkins.
• 🤝 What Liz looks for in early hires, and why character and cultural instinct matter more than CV at the founding stage.

Memorable Quotes

"I fundamentally believe that if we stop developing hardware, we're ghosts."

"Instinct is a combination of knowledge and a community around you. I don't think it happens in isolation."

"The first people in the door are make or break."

"Keep talking to your customers. We were sending prototypes to clinicians, and we still couldn't nail whether we were getting it right. You have to keep going back."

"I sat in the front room of a house with no furniture, on the phone to Rory, and I thought: hold on, this could go anywhere."

Resources and Links

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and Amazon - whydesign.club

👥 Join the Why Design? community - teamkodu.com/whydesign

📸 Follow @whydesignxkodu on Instagram

🎥 Watch full episodes - https://www.youtube.com/@whydesignpod

🔗 Follow Chris Whyte - linkedin.com/in/mrchriswhyte

🔗 Explore Tympany Medical - tympanymedical.com

🔗 Connect with Liz McGloughlin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/liz-mcgloughlin/

About the Episode

Why Design? is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry.

Through honest conversations with designers, engineers and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build but why they build it; the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work.

About Kodu

Why Design? is produced by Kodu, a recruitment partner for ambitious hardware brands, design consultancies and product-led start-ups.

We help founders and leadership teams hire exceptional talent across industrial design, mechanical engineering and product leadership bringing structure and clarity to one of the hardest parts of scaling.

🔗 Learn more - teamkodu.com

What does it take to walk into a deep tech startup as the only industrial designer... Earn the trust of thirty engineers, and...

Build a design identity so thoroughly baked into the product that no one can ever cost-optimise it out?

In this episode of Why Design, Dan Salisbury shares the belief that sits at the heart of his work: that design isn't a layer you apply at the end, it's the structure you build from the inside, or it's nothing at all.

Rather than staying in consultancy, Dan chose to go in-house at Automata with no design team, no established language, and no precedent for what industrial design should mean in a lab automation company.

That decision led to three years of proof.

This conversation isn't about having the right portfolio.

It's about having the conviction to demonstrate value when no one has thought to ask for it.

It's about the specific decisions, a shade of pink, a custom extrusion, a studio photography budget, that turn a product into a statement.

This time we go beyond the fancy gadgets

Join the Why Design community → teamkodu.com/whydesign

What You'll Learn

• Why industrial design in deep tech isn't about aesthetics, it's about trust, proof, and permanence
• How Dan survived almost failing probation by doubling down on his actual strengths instead of copying others
• What presenting to Dieter Rams at 25 taught him about confidence, preparation, and the value of being in the room
• Why form following function is a design philosophy and a strategy for making your work impossible to remove
• How to build a design language when your manufacturing constraints are brutal and your volumes are low
• What a properly considered product launch looks like, and why most B2B companies never bother to try

Memorable Quotes

"Any advice I'd give to anyone is just: stick to your strengths. Don't try and be like other designers because everyone's different in how they approach problems."

"The felt, tip fairy thing, I've heard it more times than I can count. And the answer is always the same: show them. Don't explain. Show them."

"I built the design identity into the extrusion itself. The horizontal lines, the light gap, they're functional. You can't remove them without removing the product."

"The job advert said 'industrial design' in the title. It talked about the impact. I applied within about five minutes of reading it."

"The V2 launch was the proudest moment of my career. I sat there surrounded by studio shots and render posters and I thought, yeah. That's it. That's what this was for."

Resources & Links

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & Amazon → whydesign.club

👥 Join the Why Design community → teamkodu.com/whydesign

📸 Follow @whydesignxkodu on Instagram

🎥 Watch full episodes → www.youtube.com/@whydesignpod

🔗 Follow Chris Whyte → linkedin.com/in/mrchriswhyte

🔗 Explore Automata → automata.tech

🔗 Connect with Dan on LinkedIn → Dan Salisbury

About the Episode

Why Design is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry.

Through honest conversations with designers, engineers, and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build, but why they build it; the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work.

About Kodu

Kodu is a specialist recruitment partner dedicated to physical product development. We connect hardware brands and design consultancies with the very best design and engineering talent, from Industrial Designers and Mechanical Engineers to senior leaders across Product, Technology, and Design.

Our clients range from well-funded start-ups and scale-ups under investor pressure to deliver, through to mature enterprises building new innovation teams. They often face the same challenges: scaling beyond generalists, attracting talent without a recognised employer brand, or struggling with slow, inconsistent hiring processes.

We solve these hiring problems with a proven 7-stage recruitment framework, a proprietary hardware network, and storytelling that builds trust with candidates. This results in a faster, smoother, and more engaging hiring experience.

Kodu consistently delivers results that exceed expectations, with an average time-to-offer of 6 weeks, 97% retention after 12 months, and an all-time NPS of +91 (versus the recruitment industry average of +30).

We act as trusted partners, helping hardware innovators hire better, scale faster, and bring groundbreaking products to market.

🔗 Learn more - teamkodu.com

What if the most important fertility treatment of the last decade wasn’t invented in a clinic, but built from scratch, during a lockdown, by someone who had never worked in medicine?

In this episode of Why Design, Tess Cosad shares the belief that sits at the heart of Béa Fertility: that compassionate, clinical-grade care should be available to everyone, not just those who can afford a private clinic, survive a two-year waiting list, or live near the right postcode.

Rather than accepting the gap between DIY conception and IVF, Tess chose to fill it.

That decision led her through 283 investor pitches, a chronic health condition brought on by founder stress, and a phone call from a user in her hospital bed, the day after emergency surgery, who said she wanted to try again.

This conversation isn’t about fertility as a product category.

It’s about design as access.

Design as dignity.

Design as a force that changes what’s possible for real people, in real pain, right now.

Don’t just listen. Go beyond the podcast.

In this episode we’ll learn

• Why intracervical insemination existed before IVF, and why it took a lockdown founder to bring it home
• How lived experience, not research studies, solved the product’s biggest usability problem in a single session
• Why compassion and levity aren’t soft brand choices, they’re clinical design decisions
• What 283 investor rejections reveal about structural bias in venture capital, and how to keep going anyway
• How Béa is building for the US market, and why it’s already outperforming revenue forecasts by nearly 100%
• Why the hardest part of scaling isn’t the product, it’s the loneliness, the letting go, and the coping mechanisms that actually work

Memorable Quotes

“I want to try again.”

“You can’t do your entire career on level 10 difficulty and not come out of it better at your job.”

“283 pitches to close 15. That’s the fundraising reality of femtech.”

“She flipped the diagram. And that was it. One session.”

“Make decisions fast”, the advice I ignored too long.”

Resources & Links

🎧 Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube & Amazon - whydesign.club

👥 Join the Why Design community - teamkodu.com/whydesign

📸 Follow @whydesignxkodu on Instagram & TikTok

📸 Follow @kodurecruitment on Instagram

🎥 Watch full episodes - YouTube

🔗 Follow Chris Whyte on LinkedIn - Mr Chris Whyte

🔗 Explore Béa Fertility - beafertility.com

🔗 Connect with Tess Cosad - [email protected] / LinkedIn

About the Why Design

Why Design is powered by Kodu, a specialist recruitment partner for the hardware and physical product development industry.

Through honest conversations with designers, engineers and creative leaders, we explore not just what they build, but why they build it, the beliefs, decisions and responsibility behind meaningful work.

About Kodu

Kodu is a specialist recruitment partner dedicated to physical product development.

We connect hardware brands and design consultancies with the very best design and engineering talent, from Industrial Designers and Mechanical Engineers to senior leaders across Product, Technology, and Design.

Our clients range from well-funded start-ups and scale-ups under investor pressure to deliver, through to mature enterprises building new innovation teams. They often face the same challenges: scaling beyond generalists, attracting talent without a recognized employer brand, or struggling with slow, inconsistent hiring processes.

We solve these hiring problems with a proven 7-stage recruitment framework, a proprietary hardware network, and storytelling that builds trust with candidates. This results in a faster, smoother, and more engaging hiring experience.

Kodu consistently delivers results that exceed expectations, with an average time-to-offer of 6 weeks, 97% retention after 12 months, and an all-time NPS of +91 (versus the recruitment industry average of +30).

We act as trusted partners, helping hardware innovators hire better, scale faster, and bring groundbreaking products to market.

🔗 Learn more - teamkodu.com