BIography

EXPERIENCe

Bill More is a designer and craftsman with over a decade of hands on experience in direct product development and business management. He started Thurston-More designs LLC in 1999 as a furniture design/build studio in the Seattle area. Bill is a self taught welder, metal fabricator, furniture maker and woodworker having built hundreds of pieces by hand, each one unique and most of them custom. His work has been displayed in exhibitions, juried art shows (such as A.C.C. San Francisco and Sausalito Art Festival) and art galleries throughout the country. He credits much of his design skill to his years of building furniture in his own studio.

In 2007, Bill branched out from furniture design and crafted a line of bamboo cremation urns. In a market starved of sustainable, well designed and affordable urns, Bill took a fresh approach. He developed an urn line with a modern design approach and did extensive research to minimize its environmental impact. The urn line is the first of its kind to use bamboo plywood as well as a built-in oil lamp into the lid, which is used as a way to memorialize loved ones. Bill managed every aspect of this business;

• Conceptual design and initial sketches
• Market research
• Material sourcing, with an emphasis on environmentally friendly materials
• Custom design and commission work for hundreds of clients
• Creating CAD files for CNC production
• Designing the mechanics of the built-in oil lamp (urns)
• Setting up manufacturing, developing a system to cut parts
• Sanding, finishing and assembly processes
• Packaging and shipping systems
• Graphic design of brochures, rack cards, print ads (InDesign & Quark)
• Website/storefront design and development
• Setting up display booths at conventions and trade shows
• Developing pricing strategies
• Bookkeeping
• Developing relationships with retailers and international distributors
• Finding creative solutions to product development challenges
  

Bill started his design career studying architecture at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY ('93-'95) as well as Boston Architectural Center, Boston, MA ('98-'99). He also worked as an architectural intern at museum planners/IMAX specialists E. Verner Johnson & Assoc., Boston, MA.

Skills:
Sketching, Illustration, drafting, rendering, problem solving, finding creative solutions to product development challenges, sourcing eco-friendly materials, model making, metalworking, woodworking, graphic design, concept development, production processes, quick to learn new software

Experience using:
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe InDesign
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Dreamweaver
AutoCAD
ArchiCAD
Sketch-Up
MS Word