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There is a unique kind of resilience you build when you are standing on a freezing school playing field in the middle of a Staffordshire winter, pelted by rain and snow. For Will Morris, who left NULS in 2010, those biting mornings on the rugby pitch weren’t just about sport, but the foundations of a lifelong lesson in camaraderie, determination, and the sheer joy of working hard to achieve.
Today, Will is a first-class honours graduate, an accomplished product designer, and the co-founder of Kiln Design Studio: a Stoke-on-Trent-based consultancy helping visionary founders bring innovative products to market. Looking back at his journey, the path from NULS to pioneering sustainable medical tech and running his own business is paved with lessons in hard work, great friendships, and a constant curiosity.
Joining NULS was a major transition for Will: “I was the only one out of my friendship group from primary school that went to Newcastle. And I think joining the rugby club early on and the team just helped me make loads of friends, I had about twenty lads that I was just immediately mates with.”
That early plunge into team sports paved the way for his absolute highlight of school life. “Winning the rugby County Cup with the team was such an amazing experience. I think it was mostly because it was five years’ worth of friendship summed up in one final rugby game.” He adds with a smile that “all the rugby training in the freezing cold and the rain, wind, and snow was completely worth it. It’s character building!”
Alongside finding his feet, school was also where Will’s academic ambition was ignited, thanks to a healthy dose of friendly peer competition.
“I remember this really difficult moment where I was in Maths,” Will laughs. “I had done this little mini maths exam in the class, and I thought I had scored well—it was like 60% or something. And then all my classmates were scoring like 90%. I was like, ‘Oh man, I really need to get my head down and work hard.’
“At NULS, it was cool that you were intelligent, and it was cool that you were getting good grades. Surrounding myself with other people who are ambitious and want to work hard has stayed with me to this day, whether it be my business partner, my friends, or my fiancée. It was that attitude towards work that I got from school, rather than just the educational quality.”
While at school, Will was fascinated by technology and the rapid evolution of consumer electronics in the 2000s. “I knew that I was interested in design because I was interested in technology. Smartphones were just coming out at the time, like the first iPhone.”
Looking back, the clues of his future career were scattered across his GCSE choices. “At school, we didn’t do product design as such, but we did do Design and Technology, and I also took Ceramics. Taking both of those to GCSE really helped me understand that what I wanted to do was a mixture of those two things.”
He also notes that NULS gave him a head start in physical design when he eventually went on to study Industrial and Product Design at the University of Wolverhampton. “I remember learning how to use SolidWorks, which is a CAD tool, in DT at NULS. Even just those early lessons at school really gave me a bit of a head start when I first joined university.”
Midway through university, Will was determined to get a foothold in the industry. During his second year, he landed a job at Renishaw in their additive manufacturing department, working with industrial 3D printers that manufactured high-precision metal components, for top tech or Formula One companies.
“Because I was one of the only product designers, and the rest of the company was made up of brilliant mechanical and electronics engineers, I was the only one who could sketch and come up with visual ideas for new designs,” Will explains. “They trusted me with designing the next-generation machines. It was all about rapidly working through ideas in sketch form, CADing them up, designing the parts for manufacture, showing them to the directors, and saying, ‘What do you think?’ It was a really cool opportunity, and I learned a lot about engineering there over three years.”
Will then moved to Stafford-based medical design consultancy Haughton Design, where he spent nearly eight years, working on life-changing medical devices, eventually leading several high profile projects and then on to managing business development.
These projects refined Will’s perspective on the creative process. “When you’re creating products, it’s a tricky process because you have to change your approach depending on what you’re designing. If you’re designing a medical device, you have to follow strict medical device requirements and safety directives. Everything you design has to be to be the best quality of output, there are no commercial or time shortcuts, because it’s all based on safety and efficacy.”
When it comes to commercial products, however, Will applies a strict ethical boundary. “I always question whether it should be a product at all, and whether it deserves to exist, or whether you’re just outputting more rubbish into the world. You try to prevent doing that from the get-go. You go on this really cool discovery journey of trying to understand the problem you are trying to solve, because ultimately, a product is just a tool to solve a problem. You have to understand the user, the technology, the business, the manufacturing, how the product might be used, and how it might be abused as well—for example people accidentally drop their phones, you don’t mean to do it, but it happens, and you don’t want it to completely break if you dropped it the slightest, so you have to design for that. As a designer, you are an ambassador for bringing products into the world that are designed responsibly and sustainably.”
This philosophy culminated in a major career milestone: working on a revolutionary project for Regent Lifesciences & Neucin Design, developing the world’s first reusable dry powder inhaler.
“Standard pressurised metered-dose inhalers output propellant, but dry powder systems are way more environmentally friendly per dose,” Will explains. “We didn’t want to have an inhaler that you throw away at the end of its life after 30, 60, or 120 doses, because there’s a lot of energy and effort that goes into manufacturing it. We thought: what if you could reuse the main core of it and just swap in a new drug container?”
The resulting design was launched at the DDL Conference in Edinburgh. “The reaction from the market and the industry was overwhelmingly positive. Inhalers have been around for over a hundred years, and they come in all different shapes and formats, but no one had really cracked a safe, reusable inhaler. It was incredibly interesting to work on that because, from the very core, it had a sustainability focus rather than just something added in as a marketable feature.”
This year, Will co-founded Stoke-on-Trent consultancy Kiln Design Studio with his business partner, Phil.
“Phil and I both had this recognition that there are so many great ideas, and so many great local companies, who have brilliant ideas for new products but just didn’t have the capacity or the capability to action them,” Will says. “I remember going to the pub with Phil before we formed Kiln. We were thinking about this, saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could help these people out?’ The next time we went to the pub, we chatted about it a bit more, and after a few drinks, we had a business model and the realisation, ‘Okay, maybe it is feasible that we can do this.’ We were at this inflection point in our lives where we were stable enough to take a leap of faith.”
“Starting Kiln has been one of the best decisions I’ve made in my life,” Will reflects. “It has been such a thrill, such a fun experience working with amazing companies and entrepreneurs. It’s like playing with Lego every day where I’m just having fun designing products, getting them out there in the world, and seeing our clients and users happy.”
He’s also had the pleasure of finding the journey come full circle back to NULS through fellow Castilians.
“We’ve got some clients who are Castilians, or parents of children who go to Newcastle. With people who have been to NULS, there’s this immediate shared understanding, with a shared history and a common background. It makes building relationships a lot easier. You can laugh and joke about the house sports events of Myatt versus Kitchener, the different teachers we had, or all the games we played. It’s just nice to reflect on.”
Being your own boss brings immense freedom, but when you are naturally driven, switching off can be the hardest task of all.
“The catch-22 of school inspiring me to work hard is that it really followed me into adult life,” Will admits. “I accidentally end up working over a lot of the time, but my fiancée is fantastic at telling me when to stop. In business, we schedule our diaries to the minute, and I think you have to apply that same drive to your personal life. When it hits 6 o’clock, that’s a hard deadline. Work stops.”
When he does switch off, Will loves to travel, though his designer brain never truly stops. “I love going on holiday and just people-watching from a cafe window. It’s fascinating to see how different cultures interact with everyday objects. In our job, one day we are designing a massive five-metre-wide fabrication, and the next we are designing a tiny, intricate injection-moulded plastic component. Swapping between the two is brain-melting, and having a break is what keeps the creative cogs turning.”
When asked what advice he would offer to a student walking through the NULS gates for the first time, Will’s answer is simple:
“Just be yourself. Don’t try to pretend to be anyone else, and don’t be intimidated by what others might think. Go out, enjoy yourself, and make as many friends as you can.”
And for those current NULS pupils looking at Will’s career and wondering how they might follow in his footsteps into the world of design and entrepreneurship?
“If it’s your passion, pursue it with everything you’ve got. Stay curious. I used to think that when you finished school, or college, or university, that learning stopped. But there is no ceiling to learning. You have to love the process of figuring things out.”
“Also, don’t be afraid of failure; use it as a tool to learn. You learn far more from things going wrong than you do from them going right. Be resilient. If you want to go into product design, start building and tinkering now. If you have an old, broken toaster in the kitchen, take it apart and try to understand how it works! If you are truly passionate about what you do, work won’t feel like work; it will just feel like an extension of you.”
A huge thank you to Will Morris for taking the time to participate in our Castilian Spotlight series. We wish him and Phil the very best of luck with Kiln Design Studio and all their future endeavors!
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