Gold Nuggets from Michael Nicholson

Michael is one of the founders of Bòtann, who are on a mission to make wellies in Scotland again. As things stand, no one is making wellies in the UK. But these guys are set to change all that. We worked with Bòtann as part of our Crowdfunding Creativity Pilot with Creative Scotland in 2019.

We chatted to Michael at the start of the year to get his answers to our all-important Gold Nuggets questions!

What inspired the idea for Bòtann?

Bòtann is inspired by Scotland’s welly making heritage, particularly that of my hometown, Dumfries. My dad worked in the old welly factory that now, unfortunately, lies in ruin. So Bòtann is inspired by provenance, but also by company’s like Hiut Denim and Trakke, and by community and all that it means. It’s also inspired by a desire to make a difference by doing something different. We want to make wellies that people love to wear.

Top 3 tips for choosing your co-founders?

1. Complimentary skills

2. Chemistry

3. Robustness

Michael and his robust co-founders David Smith and Robert McCaffrey

What’s the best bit of advice you have been given and by whom?

I’m not sure if it’s the best bit of advice but it’s my favourite. When I was young my dad told me: “It doesn’t matter who starts the fight, you finish it”. If you can see past the violence, it’s about spirit. You’ve got to have spirit.

What’s your ambition for Bòtann?

We want to create jobs in Dumfries & Galloway while rediscovering a corner of Scotland’s heritage. To do that, we need to grow the business into a prosperous and sustainable position. Despite its infancy, Bòtann has already taken us on such a brilliant journey. We’re very excited about the future.

What song motivates you in the studio and why?

I’m not much of an Elvis fan but there’s a version of ‘Burning Love’ that’s been reworked by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, which makes my eyes water with energy and joy. Sometimes I listen to it four or five times in a row. Usually at full volume.

Gold Nuggets from Matt Gilbert

We had the pleasure of working with Matt Gilbert last year on his Kickstarter campaign for the Solstice Clock. The new piece was successfully funded and adds another inspiring item to the Animaro collection of kinetic furniture.

Here’s what inspires Matt as well as some great tips on finding the right manufacturer.

Tell us about yourself and Animaro.

I became really fascinated by kinetic and movable structures during my masters of architecture. I studied a lot of techniques for how they can work. I also love working with beautiful materials, such as hardwoods and polished metals.

Through Animaro, I wanted to marry these two passions and bring kinetic designs to the high end furniture market. It is very common to see 'kinetic art' made as a passion project, or a one-off commission but much less common to see it available to purchase to decorate ones home from a design store.

What’s the one thing you wish you knew in your first year?

That investing time in myself and my own skills is invaluable and can make the whole process much faster. Also that it's important to place myself amongst people whose strengths are my weaknesses to confront these early on.

Top 3 tips for finding the right manufacturer?

1. Work with smaller manufacturers first to have individual parts made at lower risk, potentially during the prototyping phase. Use this process to develop a technique for vetting and ranking manufacturers.

2. You need to be able to speak their language in terms of technical jargon, so you need to have a pretty clear idea of how it will be made before you meet them. A clueless customer will ring alarm bells for them.

3. Look for products similar to the one you are making and try to find out who made it.

What was the best bit of advice you were given and who gave it to you?

To go and exhibit my work in Milan when it was still just a hobby. Getting my work in front of people, and seeing my products validated, gave me the confidence and enthusiasm to move forward.

What’s your ambition for Animaro?

First and foremost I want to develop Animaro to be a brand known for creating beautiful and unusual timepieces, which combine time with art. I want to develop two branches to Animaro, and put more emphasis on one or the other based on success. One will involve creating batches of beautiful products and working with crowdfunding and high end retailers. Another branch will involve creating special editions and much smaller runs, built in the UK, and work with galleries to display these.

What song motivates you in the studio and why?

There are a lot of songs that motivate me! And I tend to go through phases where I will listen to a song continuously until i get bored of it. Right now I am really enjoying 'New Sensation' by INXS, because it has a really catchy guitar riff running throughout which gets the energy going.

Gold Nuggets from Daisy Stapley-Bunten

We were delighted to be interviewed by Daisy last year for Startups Magazine. After meeting her and learning about her own story we knew we had to do the same! Here’s a little on how Daisy launched and grew Startups Magazine.

Tell us about yourself and Startups Magazine.

Startups Magazine is a print and digital bi-monthly publication launched in 2018 which endeavours to help startups connect the dots on their entrepreneurial journeys, I am the editor and founder and couldn’t be prouder of the success our team has had with this new publication and the wonderful feedback we have had from our community of tech startups.

What’s the one thing you wish you knew before you started Startups Magazine?

I wish I could go back in time and tell myself to have faith and not to stress as much, everything will work out and it will be a success, but equally in a way I think that it was the stress that pushed me to work harder towards success. 

What are your top 3 tips for building a community around Startups Magazine?

1. You need feet on the ground and preferably your feet. People buy people, your idea is an extension of yourself, and people can relate to your product if they can get on board with the person it came from. Go forth and meet your audience.

2. Don’t just get feedback, act on it. It’s great to say that you did your market research and got loads of feedback, but just how valuable is it if you don’t put it into action? Listen to what your audience is telling you. When we exhibited at unbound London someone said how they would like to see pictures of the founders, now we include a headshot in every startup interview. This may seem small, but as we grow, we will grow through the support of our community which has nurtured us along the way.

3. It’s not all about you. When working with new contacts and your audience, don’t think first what’s in it for you, this is the Year of Collaboration – work with people and create partners. These working relationships will be far more valuable to you in the long-term. 

What is the best bit of advice you have been given and who gave you it?

The best advice I have been given was from my brother, Thomas Stapley-Bunten, now a Command Qualified Officer in the Royal Navy, he taught me that whatever the situation, ‘use your initiative’. This mantra drives my decisions and has taught me to assert myself and trust my own judgement.

What’s your ambition for Startups Magazine?

I hope for Startups Magazine to be a resource that startups can turn to for inspiration, practical guides and a platform their stories and products to get valuable exposure.

We’d love to know what song motivates you while you’re working and why? 

We have a battle of the radio stations in our office, so it’s really hit and miss what I listen to, I’d rather a cup of tea for motivation than music any day!

Gold Nuggets from Sadhbh Doherty

The wonderful Sadhbh is Product Manager / Designer at the fantastic Tech Will Save Us. We had the pleasure of working with Sadhbh a few years ago on the Mover Kit, and she’s gone on to lead development on loads of new products at the kids tech startup. Just before Christmas we got the chance to chat with Sadhbh about her work, and what to expect in the future.

Tell us about yourself and what you do at Tech Will Save Us.

I've been living in London for the past five years. I came over from Ireland to do an MA at the RCA and have been working at Tech Will Save Us for the last four of those. My background before Tech Will Save Us was quite varied doing everything from exhibition design to costume design which has influenced the work I do and how I go about it. I'm a product manager and designer and I see all of the Tech Will Save Us new products through their entire development from first glimmer of an idea to a product on a shelf that someone takes home (with a great team of people of course). I'll generally be working on four products at a time although they'll be at different stage of their journey. 

Over the year or so it takes to see a product through from end to end I'll be working out the viability of a product with people from across the team. Creating concepts and prototypes with the product team, user testing in schools and homes with children, working with the marketing team to create solid positioning and testing to make sure it resonates. We make sure the components and processes we're using fit the budgets and estimated retail price we have. Then designing the product for manufacture, creating the engineering files, then heading over the China to work with our suppliers. Then making sure everything is in place to launch our product alongside our online experiences. There's always a lot going on and it can be a challenge but it's a really rewarding and as I've already mentioned we have a great team of people.

When designing a product, what’s your approach? Where does the inspiration come from?

We've spent a lot of time creating a process for product design that takes us from idea right through to the product sitting on a shelf. This keeps us focussed but open enough for as much creativity from the team as possible. We begin each project with a loose brief that identifies the price point, how it fits within our range and a wide theme like wearables or craft. From there we get input from around the business; our sales team might have picked up on retail trends, or the dev team may have been playing with a new technology; we take those and begin to create concepts around them. We like to get hands on as fast as possible so will make prototypes and get user testing to see what's working and what gets kids excited. It's really from there that our products begin to form. It's not one big lightning flash but twenty smaller ones that grow into a product we know kids will love.

“ It’s not one big lightning flash but twenty smaller ones that grow into a product we know kids will love.”

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In your spare time do you make + create things, if so any projects we should know about?

I do so much making and creating at work that the things I make at home are really personal things like embroidering t-shirts I want to wear or sketching little illustrations of angry people, I went through a cross stitch phase a while ago that I somewhat regret, at the moment I'm learning to propagate plants. There are a few larger design projects beginning to brew in the background with friends so ask me again this time next year and I might have something to show off.

What’s your favourite design + tech project you’ve seen this year, and why do you love it?

People are doing such great things at the moment. There are incredible things happening with recycled materials, there are robots building robots, there are amazing humanitarian projects happening but my favourites this year are the silly things people are doing with AI. I think it's always important to have a bit of fun with new tech and helps to inspire new ways of thinking about a technology and widen its scope. The highlights for me are the beatboxing AI that live battles a human beat boxer by creating samples from their voice and Pix2Pix which uses TensorFlow to create "realistic" drawings of cats, shoes and Pikachu's from your chicken scratches. Here's a terrifying cat I made today: 

What song motivates you while you’re working and why? 

I have a weird habit when I need to be particularly focussed of playing the same song on repeat for hours, days or even weeks at a time. I'm not sure it's the healthiest thing but it keeps me on task. The last song to get the repeat treatment was Die Young by Sylvan Esso. It's a great song, maybe just don't play it for two weeks straight.