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ECA: Dragons Den

This year Tayburn have been working  with “Geoff” – a student collective from Edinburgh College of Art. Throughout the year we’ve been setting projects and working as mentors. The latest project we set was designed to get everyone thinking about the commercial side to design.

The brief we set was to create a product that would be suitable to sell in a shop such as Analogue or The Red Door Gallery. It was a very open brief designed to use the students skills and inspiration as a starting point for their products. These products were targeted at the type of people who would buy from these shops as well as the owners themselves.

On the Tuesday 2nd of March Tayburn hosted a “Dragon’s Den” style evening. All 11 students each gave a short presentation of their products to a panel of 4 “dragons” which consisted of Russell from Analogue, Nicky & Kate from the Red Door Gallery and Malcolm from Tayburn. The panel quized all the designers on the commercial realities of their products and the potential for expanding their ideas further. The panel were extremely impressed by all the products, and when pushed to pick a winning product for the evening the top front runners were Freddy Taylor’s “Geoff stamp set”, Kari Yoshime’s “Wee pop-up houses” and Roy Luo’s “Type mugs”. Ultimately it was a unanimous decision that the “Type mugs” were the stand out winner of the evening and we hope Roy will go on to see if this great idea can become a reality with all three retailers showing great interest!

A great evening was had by all. Thanks to all the “Geoffersons” for all their hard work and a particular thanks to Russell, Nicky and Kate for giving up their valuable time and feedback.