# What Building the Production Machine Teaches You About the Design | Matt Batchelor

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/why-design-7007437/what-building-the-production-machine-teaches-you-about-the-design-matt-batchelor
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/why-design-7007437/what-building-the-production-machine-teaches-you-about-the-design-matt-batchelor.md
Podcast: [WHY DESIGN?](https://stenobird.com/podcast/why-design-7007437)
Published: 2026-04-29T05:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://why-design.captivate.fm/episode/matt-batchelor-instrument-industries-low-volume-manufacturing-industrial-design
Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/6cafd55a-e288-4361-9ae3-d5a39b17dc07.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/why-design-7007437/episodes/what-building-the-production-machine-teaches-you-about-the-design-matt-batchelor
Duration seconds: 4049

## Resource

What does it actually take to get something you designed onto a supermarket shelf at scale? In this episode of Why Design, Matt Batchelor shares the belief that sits at the heart of his work: that the best design does not stop at the render. It runs all the way through the material choice, the tooling, the supply chain, and the factory floor and the designer should know all of it. Rather than staying in the comfortable upstream of concept and CAD, Matt and his co-founder Nick Pa g et built Instrument into a studio that also manufactures what it designs, co-invests in the products it believes in, and builds the machines when no suitable machine exists. That decision led to ten weeks in hotels, a crimping machine that kept stopping, and a refillable aluminium personal care system now stocked across four major UK supermarkets. This conversation is not about packaging. It is about what engineering at volume actually demands, and why most design processes are not built for it. It is not about sustainability as a brand position. It is about what it takes to give people a genuinely better object and get it made reliably at scale. Don't just listen. Go beyond the podcast. Join the Why Design community -> teamkodu.com/whydesign What You'll Learn 🔩 Why the hardest part of the Meadow project was not the invention - it was getting cans reliably off a conveyor 📐 How ergonomic research from a Sheffield engineering lecturer shaped the torque specification for a refillable closure 🔬 Why Matt hired a test engineer into a team of starters, and what a love of statistics does for a product development process 🏭 What you learn about design when you also manufacture what you design - and why most consultancies miss this feedback loop 🎓 How hiring only from your known network shapes the k…

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## Transcript

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