Why I Started Design for Vitality™

I’ve been thinking about consumption for a very long time.

Long before Design for Vitality existed, I created a business called Wisher.com. It was a wishlist platform, but the idea behind it was really about something much bigger: could technology help us buy less, rather than constantly encouraging us to buy more?

That question has followed me throughout my career.

I spent around twenty years working in strategy and innovation, developing new ventures and working with impact businesses. A lot of my work involved creating labs and environments where new ideas could be tested rather than simply talked about.

I loved that process. You have an idea. You put it into the world. You observe what actually happens. You learn. You change it. You try again.

I didn't know it at the time, but this way of working would eventually become a huge part of Design for Vitality.

Then I started thinking about materials

At another point in my journey, I studied material design in Japan which made me pay attention to things differently.

To the intelligence of a material. To restraint. To craft. To why something had been made in a particular way. To the beauty that can come from simplicity, imperfection and age.

It made me interested not just in what something looks like when it is new, but in what happens to it over time.

Does it become softer? Does it develop a patina? Can it be repaired?

Will someone still want to live with it ten years from now? This idea of making fewer, better things stayed with me.

And then I came to Mexico.

Mexico changed everything

Mexico is now my home and my heart.

Living here brought me much closer to materials, craft and the land they come from.

Through my business Design by Nature, I started working with textiles, weaving, natural dyes, plants, pigments and craftspeople. My work became much more physical. I wasn't sitting around a strategy table talking about innovation anymore. I was touching the materials, dyeing them, printing them, living with them and seeing how they behaved.

And I fell completely in love with it. There is so much knowledge here.

A textile can connect you to a plant, a landscape, a climate, a weaving tradition, a family and generations of knowledge.

It made me realise how disconnected most of us have become from the things we live with. We buy a shirt without knowing where the fibre came from. We sleep in sheets without knowing what has been used to make or finish them.

We fill our homes with materials without really understanding how they interact with our bodies or the environment around us.

For a while, I thought the answer was simply to make things more natural.

Natural fibres. Natural dyes. Organic materials.

But gradually I realised:

Organic isn't enough.

Natural doesn't automatically mean right

This was quite a big shift for me.

Something can be organic and still be completely wrong for the place where you are using it.

A natural textile can be too heavy for a humid climate. A beautiful material can hold moisture. An organic fabric can still irritate someone's skin.

A supposedly sustainable product can fall apart after repeated washing.

And something can have an impressive environmental certification while simply not feeling good against the body.

I started asking different questions.

Not just:

Is this natural?

But:

How does it behave? How does it breathe? What happens when somebody sweats in it?How quickly does it dry? What happens after fifty washes? How does it feel against sensitive skin? Can we repair it? Where did it come from? And what happens to it when we no longer need it?

That was the beginning of a much bigger idea.

My body became part of the story too

For some time, something very personal was happening.

I went through my own health journey with mould exposure and increasing environmental sensitivities. Suddenly I was noticing things I had never really thought about before.

Humidity. Air quality.Fragrance.Heat. Textiles against my skin.The materials inside a room.

The way a place could make my body feel.It changed the way I thought about sensitivity.

We often treat a sensitive person as though the problem is the person.

But I started wondering whether sensitive bodies might actually be telling us something useful.

What if the body is detecting something about an environment that our design process has ignored?

That question became incredibly important to me. Because once you start designing from the body outward, everything changes.

The body, the material and the place

This is really where Design for Vitality began.I started seeing a relationship between three things:

BODY × MATERIAL × CLIMATE

The material cannot really be understood without the body using it. And the body cannot be understood without the climate it is living in.

A bedroom in Tulum shouldn't necessarily have the same materials as a bedroom in London.

What I want against my skin in the Oaxaca mountains may be completely different from what I want in tropical humidity.

A baby has different needs from an adult. Someone with highly sensitive skin may experience a textile very differently from somebody else.

It sounds incredibly obvious when you say it.

But so much of global design has forgotten place.

We make the same products, using the same materials, and sell them everywhere.

I want to explore another way.

I actually want people to buy less

This is probably the strange part about starting a product company.

I don't want people to buy more things.

I want us to buy less. There is already so much stuff in the world.

I don't think we need another brand telling people they need a new version of everything they already own.

I would rather make something that you really need, understand why it was made, know where it came from, care for it and keep it for years.

And when it breaks, repair it. I love the idea that a repair doesn't make an object less valuable.

Maybe it means the opposite - another thing I learned in Japan.

It was valuable enough to keep.

For me, this is where sustainability needs to go next. Not simply “organic.” Not simply “eco.”

But natural, strong, appropriate to place, repairable and genuinely useful.

And this brings me back to the lab

I don't want Design for Vitality to say that a material is good because we think it is good.

I want us to learn. Wash it. Wear it. Sleep in it. Put it in humidity. Put it in heat. See how it ages. Give it to people with sensitive bodies. Repair it when it breaks. Listen to what people tell us. And then make the next version better.

In a strange way, I feel like my twenty years in innovation and everything I have learned working physically with materials in Mexico are finally meeting.

Starting in Mexico, but not ending here

Design for Vitality is being born in Mexico very deliberately. This is my home.

I love this country deeply, and I want the business to contribute to the places and people around it—not simply manufacture things here and send the value somewhere else.

I want to work with regional materials, makers, knowledge and industries.

I want to understand what design means in Tulum. What it means in Oaxaca. 

What belongs to the jungle. What belongs to the mountains.

And what we can learn from the extraordinary material intelligence that already exists here. But over the next ten years, I want to take this thinking much further.

I want Design for Vitality to grow globally. Not by taking one Mexican product and selling it everywhere. Actually, almost the opposite.

I want to take the method to different places.

What does Design for Vitality look like in Canada? In South Africa? In Japan?

In the desert? In the tropics? In a European winter?

The materials should change.The architecture should change.The clothing should change.The solutions should change.

Because the place has changed.The question stays the same:

What does life need here?

I think this is what I've been trying to build all along

When I look back now, Design for Vitality doesn't feel like a completely new idea. It feels like different parts of my life finally coming together.

My fascination with innovation.

My desire to reduce consumption.

Studying materials in Japan.

Building Design by Nature.

My love for Mexico.

Working with natural materials and craftspeople.

My own experience of environmental sensitivity.

And this growing conviction that design needs to become much more responsive to the body and to place.

I don't know exactly what Design for Vitality will look like in ten years. And I actually like that.

Because I don't want to build a brand that already thinks it knows all the answers.

I want to build one that keeps asking better questions.

That tests. That listens. That learns.

And that hopefully helps us make—and buy—far fewer things, but make the things we do choose matter much more.

That, for me, is Design for Vitality.