Most people imagine “inspiration” as a lightning-bolt moment at a desk.
For me, it’s usually the opposite.
My best ideas arrive when I’m playing, properly playing and my brain has the space to connect dots without trying. I’m at my most creative when I’m sat in a sea kayak off the coast of Anglesey, nowhere near work, with salt in the air and time moving at a different pace. That’s when the noise drops, the problem I’ve been turning over quietly snaps into place, and the solution suddenly feels obvious.
It doesn’t mean I don’t show up and do the hard graft at the studio. I do. But I’ve learned that “play” is part of my design process. Freedom isn’t a reward at the end, it’s a tool that lets the mind do what it does best.
At heart, I’m drawn to the non-obvious challenge.
I love connecting dots that don’t look related at first glance. I love the moment a messy, complicated problem turns into a clean physical solution you can hold in your hands. And I love it when it’s hard, when the first answer isn’t good enough and you have to go deeper.
That’s a big part of what we do at Mouse: design that gets made isn’t just about styling. It’s about making sure the product works, can be manufactured, survives real life, and delivers value to the people who use it.
I’m dyslexic, which meant I learned early at school that my brain worked differently. While other kids were flying in English, I found my confidence in the physical subjects, Design & Technology, making, problem-solving.
Over the years I’ve learned how to work with dyslexia rather than fight it, and I’m now comfortable writing blogs, funding applications, and product descriptions. In a strange way, dyslexia was the first real design challenge I had to solve. I had to find routes around how my brain worked, and develop tools that helped me get through school and university.
I started building those tools at school, then refined and honed them at uni and graduating with a First Class Honours degree from Brunel University is still one of my proudest achievements. It proved (to me more than anyone) that I’d developed my dyslexia toolkit to the point it wasn’t holding me back anymore.
University also gave me another toolbox: a set of methods for turning ideas into outcomes through design thinking a way of working you can apply to just about any concept. Early in my career I loved shaping products and building on the skills I’d learned at uni. These days, I get just as much joy from the bigger picture: the business reasons behind a product, and the human reasons behind the business. That’s definitely something I’ve grown into over the last 13 years of running my own business.
When someone comes to us at Mouse, they’re often not just asking for a product. They’re bringing a story, a pressure, a challenge to solve, a goal, a dream. Unpacking the “why” behind the brief is one of the most important parts of getting the design right.
And honestly, I love that part. I love getting to know our clients, understanding who they are and why they’re on this journey of product development, because that’s how we can serve them best, and help them move forward.
My design journey started in outdoor kit, first in the kayak world, then camping equipment like tents, rucksacks, sleeping systems and cycling kit. I was lucky enough to blend personal passion with professional work, and one of the best feelings in the world is seeing something you helped create out there being used, not on a shelf, but in the wild.
Outdoor products are brutally honest. If something is weak, you find out quickly. If something is fiddly, you hate it quickly. Outdoor environments demand:
That’s a mindset I’ve carried into every sector since.
One skill I developed early is listening to feedback and translating it into the right design response.
Users will often describe a problem and suggest a fix. Sometimes they’re spot on. Often they’re not, not because they’re wrong, but because they’re describing symptoms, not root causes.
The fun (and the challenge) is interpreting what’s really going on, then making changes that solve the underlying issue in a way that feels effortless to the user.
If you ask who I’m designing for, the answer is simple: the person who will use the product. I will always consider all the key stakeholders on a products journey but I think that if you take your eye of the end users, then the product will become unstuck at some point.
Seeing people using things we’ve designed still gives me a massive kick, whether that’s athletes, outdoor enthusiasts, or professionals using specialist equipment. It’s pride, but it’s also responsibility: our decisions affect someone else’s experience, performance, learning, or safety.
And when something doesn’t work? That’s where the biggest learning happens.
I don’t pretend we get everything perfect first time. Design is iterative. The toughest moments, the awkward feedback, the unexpected failure, the misuse scenario you didn’t predict, are often where the product improves most. We don’t shy away from it. We stick by our work, have the difficult conversations, and get it right.
I firmly believe necessity is the mother of invention. Some of the strongest work happens when you’re up against it:
Necessity forces you to connect dots at a higher level. It creates an urgency that sharpens your focus and lifts the quality of your decisions. You stop fiddling around the edges and get straight to what matters: what will actually work.
Two moments stand out for me.
The first was in South Sudan, visiting a refugee camp. Seeing first-hand how poorly shelter was constructed and what that meant for people living with the consequences, which hit me hard. It led to several years of work on shelter design and exploring practical ways to improve the kits supplied to refugees. When the need is that real, you don’t have the luxury of overcomplication. You’re designing for dignity, safety, speed, and reality.
The second was during the pandemic, when PPE was in short supply and my wife, who’s a doctor, couldn’t get hold of the safety equipment she needed. So I set about designing a UK-made, plastic-free face visor that could be produced at a rate of 100,000 per week, cost the same as Far East versions, and be fully biodegradable.
Within six months, the idea went from a rough cardboard-and-sticky-tape prototype on the kitchen table, built by me and my son, to a fully realised design, manufacturing partners lined up, and CE certification for safety performance.
That’s what necessity does. It strips everything back and demands a solution that’s simple, scalable, and solid.
I’m a big believer in getting materials in your hands. You can feel behaviour, wear, stiffness, sound, things you don’t fully learn from a datasheet. Prototyping is where the truth shows up, and yes: I’m very good at breaking things.
That’s not a flaw. It’s part of the process. If we can break it in the workshop or out field testing, we can redesign it before it breaks in the real world.
One of the things we do well at Mouse is borrowing good ideas from one sector and applying them to another: outdoor thinking into medical training tools, packaging design into PPE, connecting details from one product into another, manufacturing lessons that transfer across industries. We often say at Mouse we are great at blending hard goods (metals, plastics, composites) with soft goods (fabrics, foams) but this is a material level outcome, the reality is we love blending different industries together to create nonobvious solutions that go on to challenge and sometime define industries.
And I’m always inspired by biomimicry, nature has been solving, form, function, efficiency, strength, and circularity to name a few, problems for a very long time. It rarely wastes effort. There’s a lot we can learn from that.
What inspires me most is helping people succeed, clients who care deeply, users who rely on the product, and teams trying to make something work in the real world. I’m passionate about working alongside people to deliver outcomes that genuinely move them forward. Because when the people we work with are succeeding, it means we’ve done our job properly, and that makes me properly happy.
If you’re building a new physical product and you want a partner who’s excited by the hard, non-obvious challenges, we’d love to hear from you.
