The Secrid Talent Podium 2025
7 Visionary Designers and Intellectual Property
This year, seven international talents take centre stage.
Eindhoven 2025 – During Dutch Design Week (DDW), the Secrid Talent Podium is bringing together a selection of groundbreaking designers for the fourth time. This year, seven international talents take centre stage, aiming to transform the industry with sustainable and innovative solutions—from agriculture to construction, textiles, and energy. At the same time, the platform draws special attention to a theme that often remains underexposed in the creative sector: Intellectual Property.
According to research by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, 80% of a product’s environmental impact is determined during the design phase. This highlights that designers play a crucial role in shaping a more sustainable future.
Seven Designers: Design as a Driver of Change
In collaboration with the Dutch Design Foundation, Secrid selected seven designers for their innovative ideas, holistic vision, and entrepreneurship. Each participant will receive, alongside a place on the stage, coaching, publicity, and €7,777 in prize money—a symbolic reference to Secrid’s seven holistic design principles.
The designers demonstrate that a hopeful future is already becoming reality: radical changes are underway in agriculture, textiles, construction, and energy. The selected designers for 2025 are:
Floris Schoonderbeek | Circle Farming (NL) Regenerative agriculture with circular fields where technology, nature, and humanity come together.
Chloe So & Barna Soma Biro | PulpaTronics (UK) Recyclable RFID tags made of paper, replacing disposable labels containing metal.
Auke Bleij | Respyre (NL) Low-maintenance green façades using moss concrete, which purifies the air, cools, and supports biodiversity in the city.
Itika Gupta | Dungse Labs (NL & IN) From cow manure to high-quality, biodegradable construction material as an alternative to wood and plastic.
Marjan van Aubel | Ra (IT) The transition from solar technology to solar design, where the energy source blends seamlessly into daily life.
Sarmīte Poļakova & Mel van Dijk | (un)woven (NL & DE) Transforming textile waste streams into circular biomaterial for the built environment.
Elizabeth Lee, Eden Harrison & Ori Blich | Carbon Cell (UK) A compostable, CO₂-negative foam for packaging, as a replacement for polystyrene.
Intellectual Property: Dilemmas and Responsibility
Within the Secrid Impact Fund, talents are coached on themes that are decisive for the future of design. One of these is intellectual property—often underexposed in the design sector, yet crucial to both protecting and sharing creative value. It is not only about legal protection, but also questions of ownership, ethics, and social responsibility.
Every designer is sooner or later confronted with fundamental questions, such as: what rights and responsibilities come with a design? Dutch pocketwear brand Secrid is familiar with these dilemmas from its own experience: since its introduction, more than a thousand copies have appeared worldwide of the Cardprotector—a design that forever changed the traditional wallet market.
With this theme, the Secrid Talent Podium invites designers to reflect on the choices and dilemmas associated with the protection and sharing of creativity.
"As designers, we bear responsibility for what we bring into the world. Not only for the function and beauty of our work, but also for its impact on people and the planet. Intellectual property is not merely a legal formality, but a means to protect creative value and enable sustainable innovation. By cherishing and openly sharing our ideas, we collectively build a future in which products become not ever more, but ever better," says René van Geer, founder of Secrid and industrial designer.
Impact Fund: Design for Impact
Through the Impact Fund, Secrid invests 1% of its turnover in talents who set sustainable change in motion through design. The objective: transform the Industrial Revolution into an Industrial Evolution; moving from producing ever more to producing ever better. The Talent Podium is an important part of this effort.
In addition to the Secrid Talent Podium, Secrid is a mission-driven partner of the design competitions run by What Design Can Do (WDCD). In this context, Secrid supports three winners of the most recent WDCD Accelerator. The work of one of these winners, Carbon Cell, is also featured within the Secrid Talent Podium.
Practical Visitor Information
Secrid Talent Podium at Dutch Design Week 2025
Klokgebouw, Hall 3Stand 3.01, Eindhoven
(The Netherlands) 18 – 26 October 2025 Daily from 11:00 – 18:00 CET
Our collaboration with sheltered workshops
For 15 years, our teams in sheltered workshops have been central to Secrid’s wallet-assembly operations. But where society tends to fixate on their disabilities, we see their capabilities.
Secrid at Dutch Design Week 2024
Innovative designers show how we can evolve industries to make better products at Dutch Design Week ‘24
Secrid launches three new editions of popular wallet
The Dutch wallet brand Secrid is expanding its collection of luxury wallets with the launch of three new versions: Pebble, Vintage Traceable Leather and Glitter.