A group of pupils from a West Yorkshire school are celebrating the official launch of their award winning design.
The Design Museum has begun selling Grow Wild, a flower seed canon that was the winning entry for Design Ventura 2020.
The team of Year 10 pupils from Heckmondwike Grammar School began the project two years ago and are now proudly able to offer their product for general sale.
All proceeds from sales will be donated to the students’ chosen charity The Kirkwood – a hospice in Huddersfield. 
The student team featuring Alice Cheesbrough, Emily Sharpe, Hannah Rouse, and Naomi Fisayo, 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.
Lareena Hilton, Managing Director, Global Head of Brand Communications & CSR, Deutsche Bank said: “We are proud to work together with the Design Museum on Design Ventura, encouraging students to realise their potential and to develop key skills for future life and employment such as problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity. Over 108,000 students have now taken part in a Design Ventura competition, and I hope Grow Wild will go on to inspire even more students to take part.”
Fiona MacDonald, Head of Learning at the Design Museum said: “In a year when environmental concerns have been brought to the fore through initiatives such as COP 26 alongside our own Waste Age exhibition, it is wonderful to see the students take on board these challenges when designing a product. Grow Wild is a playful and appealing product for families that tackles the real-world problem of bee population decline. It will make a wonderful addition to the Design Museum Shop and will help 2 showcase the importance of design towards a sustainable planet.”
The winning student team from Heckmondwike Grammar School said: “It has been an incredible experience to be involved in and we are beyond excited to be launching our product at the Design Museum. 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.”
