The Design Museum Shop launches student designed product Grow Wild

Company: The Design Museum

The Design Museum is delighted to launch Grow Wild, the winning entry for Design Ventura 2020 from Heckmondwike Grammar School’s team of Year 8 students. Grow Wild, is a flower seed launcher that will be available to purchase in the Design Museum Shop online from 8 February 2022 and will retail for £6.50. All proceeds from sales will be donated to the students chosen charity Kirkwood Hospice.

The student team, featuring Hannah, Emily, Alice and Naomi, designed the product to be both fun and sustainable and aimed to fulfil the mission to to ‘help save the bees’.

The flower seed canon designed by the students allows users to easily distribute wildflower seeds from a simple, compact, sustainable and playful launcher - helping grow flowers that create a source of pollen for bees. The team impressed judges with their pitch video, and the rationale behind the product to ‘bring the buzz back to Britain’.

The design for Grow Wild was shortlisted from entries from across the UK before the final 7 state school teams pitched their ideas to a panel of leading design and business experts.

The judges included artist and designer Yinka Ilori, Shahidha Bari, Critic, Broadcaster and Professor of Fashion Cultures and Histories at London College of Fashion; Sebastian Conran, Designer and Trustee at the Design Museum; Duncan Sanders, Head of Trading at the Design Museum; and Christoph Woermann, Global Head of Corporate Bank Marketing at Deutsche Bank.

Design Ventura is the Design Museum’s free design and enterprise competition for school students aged 13-16 run in partnership with Deutsche Bank’s youth engagement programme Born to Be. Every year, the competition invites student teams to design a product to improve everyday life and that can retail in the Design Museum Shop for around £10. The competition provides a unique opportunity for young people to respond to a brief set by a leading designer. Participating students must consider ethical, sustainable, accessible and user-centred design principles as well as business considerations such as budgeting and marketing to create an innovative new product.

Since the announcement in June last year, the students have been working with Tom Dick and Harry Studio, a professional design agency based in Leeds to refine the product and bring it to market. Originally called Sow Beautiful the product has been renamed Grow Wild. The students further developed the packaging to appeal to their target audience of families and to fit within the retail environment of the Design Museum Shop.

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