Winning Product Development – Grow Wild Student Perspective

Students Alice, Emily, Hannah and Naomi won Design Ventura 2020 with their seed launcher design, Grow Wild (formerly called Sow Beautiful). Here they talk about their experience of developing their design for sale in the Design Museum Shop.

“The process of developing the Grow Wild seed launcher has been a real eye opener. Having the opportunity to work with practicing designers gave us an excellent insight into the importance of carefully considering many different aspects of a design before it can be launched.

At the centre of all decisions is the customer. Ultimately, in order for the product to be successful, the customer must appreciate every aspect of it, from the name, to the packaging and the function of the product.

We were led through the development process by the brilliant duo of Huw and Mark of the Tom, Dick and Harry design studio in Leeds. Our first meeting was focused on the name of the product. We were all in agreement that although our original name of Sow Beautiful worked reasonably well, it didn’t really give an accurate representation of what the product does. To generate a range of potential product names we first recorded numerous words related to the function of the product. We then combined these words in different ways and discussed the most effective outcomes. After discussing the different options with members of the target audience, we concluded that Grow Wild would be the best name as it is a fun play on words and gives the customer a good idea of what the product does.

The next stage of the development process was focused on branding. Huw and Mark mocked up the packaging in a range of different designs from traditional and floral to modern and minimalist. Seeing the hexagonal packaging in these different styles really brought the product to life and gave us the opportunity to talk about which design we thought would be most appealing to our chosen target market. Again, we took feedback before deciding on this fun, hand illustrated style. The main deep yellow colour is not only eye catching and representative of summer and growth, it also ties in well with our school colours. 

It has been an incredible experience to be involved in and we are beyond excited to be launching our product at the Design Museum in early 2022. We can’t wait to see and hold the finished product!

We would like to say a huge thank you to Deutsche Bank and the Design Ventura team, without whom none of this would have been possible.”