Design
focused
on success

Design Anthology was recognised for Excellence in Small Business at the Lake Macquarie Business Excellence Awards.

“It was an honour for me to accept this award on behalf of our awesome team and innovative customers. It really showcases what is possible when the right people work together,” said Josh Jeffress, Principal Designer and Director of Design Anthology.

Design Anthology has spent over twelve years building a set of services that are positioned to assist solopreneurs, small to medium businesses and corporates to get their product ideas to market. Part of that journey has involved identifying the services and areas of expertise that fall outside of the traditional product design discipline.

Streamlining product development
While developing product ideas is their core business, Design Anthology have spent the last few years focusing on finding strategic partners who could deliver additional services based on their clients’ needs. Services including mechanical and electrical engineering, mechatronics, branding, videography, intellectual property protection, business advice, marketing and manufacturing which typically fall outside product designs’ scope of work. Design Anthology identified that a streamlined product development process is really what customers need for their products to succeed and fortunately, the Hunter provides a great hub of cutting-edge businesses to collaborate with.

“By engaging these other service providers, on behalf of our clients, we’ve been able to secure much bigger and more complex design projects,” Mr Jeffress said. “It makes the entire design process easier because there is a single place where the action happens, a single plan, and we manage the process without the client needing to read additional contracts and pay these other services separately.”

Product design hub
Clients and network partners all benefit from the improvement in each other’s expertise. Everyone learns and builds their skills together, further increasing the attractiveness of the region as a design centre. The team at Design Anthology see themselves as a hub for connecting product design with all its related services. Design Anthology offers fixed-price workshops designed to make product design more accessible.

“We essentially remove the barrier to begin by making the initial investment a fixed cost. After that, our clients can decide if they would like to continue or not,” Mr Jeffress said.

It also helps make Lake Macquarie and Newcastle an attractive place to do business. Design Anthology’s experience, once the clients are here, they tend to stay.

“We live and breathe design, and we care deeply about the success of our clients,” Mr Jeffress said. “It’s such a pleasure to work with such a fantastic and capable network of talented people right here in the Newcastle-Lake Macquarie region.”