Five Years of Independent Design

I launched my business in April 2021 during the COVID pandemic. I had always wondered what self-employment could be like & redundancy, gave me an ideal (if not slightly unfortunate) springboard to find out. I was thirty & had eight years experience working in industry. The projects at Oxford Product Design had been complex & the steep learning curve had meant that my time there was transformational. Although COVID forced OPD to make cuts that I was a part of, I could sense I was starting to hit my stride as a designer.

I used the redundancy pay along with my savings to buy a perpetual Solidworks 2021 & Keyshot 10 license, a dell laptop & the Adobe Creative Suite.

Year One

It was an incredibly competitive time in the job market when I started freelancing. COVID produced record layoffs and an over-flowing pool of talent for employers to choose from. That said, companies seemed to favour freelancers over full-time employees as the time, potentially due to risk mitigation. Some of my old colleagues at OPD had also taken entrepreneurial paths & reached out to me. This led to my first client projects with Sygensys, Metaboards and an Oxford University offshoot developing a neurotech device. These products are still some of the most exciting I have developed independently. Unfortunately for various reasons unrelated to the physical design, I cannot disclose them. Twelve years in this is still one of the most frustrating things about working in the industry, if you cannot disclose your work it’s like it never happened to the outside world but you have to balance the opportunity to learn, with the opportunity to publish and often the opportunity to learn wins out for me.

In my first year I also took on a part-time carpentry position to supplement income. My partner & I had brought our first home in 2020 & we had been doing it up ourselves. I had enjoyed installing our kitchen & had learnt enough through this process to secure a carpentry position at a local company. Although I had a passion for design I was curious to explore what a more hands-on career could be like. I enjoyed it. It felt like a more immediate, tactile form of product design. Problem solving in real-time with tangible results. In another life I could see myself as a carpenter or furniture-maker.

Year Two

Although I enjoyed carpentry, after just over a year, I realised straddling both lanes was not sustainable. I was trying to build my freelance design business & learn carpentry from scratch. I quit in January 2023. Now I had no financial safety net but could give the design business my undivided attention. Design is my life’s calling & being able to explore it in more depth with self-employment had reignited the fire for it in me. What proceeded was three months of looking for leads, design training and solitude, followed by the best 12 months of my professional life.

I had become a considerably better industrial designer between 2021 - 2023. Although social media engagement is an imperfect measure of real-world design quality, trying to match or better the best examples of online design with self-directed projects improved my abilities in leaps & bounds. I started to win Render Weekly’s design competitions & was contacted by people curious to learn on a regular basis. As of today, my work has been reposted between 80-100 times by design curators worldwide.

By April 2023, I had spent any savings & was getting nervous that I had no leads. I started cold-contacting design directors at consultancies through LinkedIn & struck lucky, twice. Firstly, WMP Creative employed me on a 6-week industrial design project in April. That project allowed my business to stay afloat. Although I cannot disclose the project details, the product that resulted from the our group effort, won a Red Dot design award, industrial design best in class 2026. Secondly Cornelius Creative, pushed enough design work my way to allow my business to thrive. I cannot thank both of these clients enough for their continued support. The remainder of the year I also had repeat custom from Sygensys, the Oxford University Spinout (ID sprint developing new neurotech device) & a new client, Smith Robotics, developing environmental sensing products. The year concluded with me winning the most consequential contract of my professional life through Cornelius Creative - a month-long design engineering contract for Shark Ninja.

Year Three

My philosophy is that when you come to a fork in the road you can take the brave or the safe path. Although the safe path seems easier, there is often no benefit to taking it & it shrinks your opportunity horizon. Conversely the brave path unlocks opportunities you did not know existed. My experience has been that, if you take the brave path consistently, you to become a more competent, capable person.

The first design-engineering contract for Shark Ninja, was a fork in the road. I had previously branded myself as an industrial designer. However, Cornelius Creative had seen how I worked, and put me forward for a design engineering contract. I had helped to develop complex products at OPD but it’s different being part of the teams that take them to market. I realised I did not have to be an expert in the individual product systems to be useful to Shark Ninja. I had to be an expert problem-solver, which I came to realise I already was. On my first contract I developed a new mechanism that Shark Ninja quickly patented. This opened the door for me there & over the next three years I would work with them many times.

In 2024 I took on four or five 4 to 8 week Shark contracts, helping to develop products spanning from floor-care (vacuum-cleaners) to kitchenware (drink-dispenser). A highlight was designing a parallel-path prototype, for a vacuum-cleaners’ particulate separation chamber that worked first-time with a 99.5% success-rate. I had built this prototype’s CAD solo whereas the primary path had a consultancy working on it. Their prototype only ever hit a 65% success-rate. Doing these contracts for Shark Ninja over 2024, effectively doubled my income. This came in useful as on March 21st, my partner and I, had had our first child.

Year Four

2025 was another big year. Shark Ninja freelance contracts dried up at the start of 2025 due to Trump’s Tariffs. As a US-based company it directly affected the operations. Initially, I was worried what this would mean for my business. Over the years they easily had become my largest and most regular client. But I was lucky. For the first four months of 2025, I had one big project after another land in my lap. These culminated with leading the Industrial Design and Engineering of an acoustic wild-life sensor product for Imperial College London (launching late-summer 2026). Sarab, Imperial College’s Manager on this project’s, gave me this appraisal of my efforts:

“Duncan led work on the enclosure of a low-cost biodiversity monitoring device we are developing at Imperial College London. He led the industrial design & manufacturing from conception through to injection moulding & was a delight to work with throughout. Communication was clear (both with us and manufacturing partners), his insights were nuanced, suggestions creative, and above all the delivered product is of a very high quality. Couldn’t recommend more highly.”

Sarab Sethi, Project Manager, Imperial College London 2025

By April the Shark Ninja cogs were in motion again & I won a two month contract with Shark developing prototypes for a revolutionary vacuum-cleaner attachment.

In June, I commissioned for an office to be built in my garden, with profits from my design business. This was a big deal for me. When I had started I did not know whether my design business would survive let alone make enough profit to do something like that. I had also started developing my own product with a Chinese supplier in 2024. Building the office felt like a marked achievement but the expense of this, coupled with product development & the cost of living crisis put me under financial strain. Then more tariffs hit and Shark Ninja stopped taking contractors on again. The first seven weeks in my new office, I had no client-work, had just spent everything & when it hit 48 degrees Celsius inside, realised I would need to invest in air-con and curtains simply to be able to work in the space.

Freelance is often like this, the highs and lows come in quick succession and you cannot predict when they will happen. I liken it to being in a small boat on the ocean where you feel the immediacy of the waves beneath you whereas working full-time for companies is like being in an ocean liner where you are often insulated from the extremes.

In the end Shark Ninja employed me again for a two month contract. Working for Shark Ninja over the years has expanded my horizons & abilities. I have helped develop Upright & handheld vacuum cleaners & attachments, carbonated drinks dispensers, blenders, air fryers & pizza ovens. I have met some incredible designers and it would not have happened without Cornelius Creative putting me forward. I am incredibly grateful to them both & appreciative of the work.

However, my reliance on Shark Ninja was taking its toll on the rest of my business. Trying to find the balance between securing new client projects and regular work for one client is a constant challenge. Too much of either puts your business in a fragile position.

Year Five

2026 started with back-to-back contracts for the motorised department at Ninja. The product I am developing in China is nearing completion so the last twelve months have been straddled between putting the pieces in place to launch a product-selling company (see blog post on this), full-time freelance & parenting.

The last twelve months have been challenging but honestly, the situation I am in now is something I dreamed about at university all those years ago. I have a successful independent design business and am launching my own product this year. I have always, & still, love physical product design & count myself lucky to be part of the few who get to do it every day.

Here are my three key learnings about what it takes to be a successful independent designer:

1). Reach out to people. Make connections. Good design cannot happen in isolation & you never know where working relationships may take you. Working for Cornelius Creative took me to Shark Ninja, then connections at Shark Ninja got me on Dimplex’s books. Be bold & reach out.

2). Social media coupled with self-directed projects is a powerful formula for improving your skillset but be careful about the types of project you choose. Each project should be conducted to improve an area of your skillset, not to win likes and followers. If you are not winning the type of work you want to, demonstrating that you can do it first with self-directed projects gives you a more powerful bargaining position. You are never to old to stop doing this type of work and I believe the more time you spend actually designing, the better you become at the craft.

3). Ideally you want more than one big client for security. Although I have been fortunate that I have always had enough work, at times it has been close, so spread your services between large clients if you can.

There have also been countless design specific lessons I have learnt that I will detail in additional blog posts. If your from an SME, Hardware Startup, Engineering Team, Multinational or Design Consultancy reading this, consider reaching out. I am always interested to broaden my network, meet new people and discuss design.