Red Button Design

In 2007 Amanda Jones and James Brown founded Red Button Design. As a social enterprise, Red Button Design was established in order to design, manufacture and supply products exclusively for the humanitarian market. All the designs were to be based on a strict code of ethical best practice that they term 'Design Against Dependency'

The inspiration behind the company was to design instantly effective interim solutions to some of the world's biggest problems. By doing so, Red Button Design hopes to mobilise the resources of international aid agencies away from 'fire fighting' missions long enough to implement truly sustainable infrastructure. Accordingly, the name "Red Button Design" is derived from the idea of an 'emergency stop button'.

For their flagship product Amanda and James elected to prioritise the humanitarian concern of access to safe drinking water; something that almost 1 billion people still do not have. They saw a gap in the market for a solution which covered not just one, but all three facets of the water crisis: purity, collection and storage. They reasoned that without water to drink, other important areas of development, like education and gender equality, all become secondary.
 
Their solution, Midomo (meaning "lips" in Kiswahili) actually began life as 'ROSS' or the 'Reverse Osmosis Sanitation System,' an entry to a University design competition when the founders were 23. From that nascent stage, a highly successful experience on BBC2's hit business programme The Dragons’ Den and a string of industry awards propelled them into the public eye where, over the proceeding two years, the project has gone from brilliant concept to viable solution.

In 2010 Red Button Design closed their second funding round, relocated to London and took that defining step of hiring its first member of staff, Sophie. Recently, they have teamed up with renowned luxury jewellery designer Alex Monroe to produce the 'Midomo Bracelet'; a sterling silver and blue topaz charm bracelet, the sale of which fully funds the donation of a Midomo unit to an African community. Moreover, each bracelet is hand engraved with the serial number of its corresponding Midomo, so that the owner of a Midomo Bracelet can track how and who they are helping, online.

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