Leave No Trace
Lifting the lid on death, design and doing better.
A product designer finds his father-in-law buried in plastic handles and printed fake woodgrain, and sets out to build an honest coffin. What follows is a company, a fight with the funeral trade, and a road to the Smithsonian.
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An honest coffin, and the decade it cost.
When product designer Greg Holdsworth discovered his timber-loving father-in-law buried in a coffin of plastic handles and printed fake woodgrain, his reaction was less grief than affront — an inauthentic object, a final dishonesty dressed up as respect. Leave No Trace is the story of what he did about it, and of the decade it cost him.
Part entrepreneurial memoir, part environmental exposé, part meditation on mortality, it follows a single stubborn idea — an honest coffin — as it grows into a company, a cause, and a vehicle for change. Holdsworth is candid and funny about a funeral trade barely changed since the Victorians: exploding caskets, mercury-laden fillings, and the unlikely path from an unknown New Zealand design project to recognition at the Smithsonian.
Beneath it runs a serious claim: that good design answers not just how a thing looks, but the social, environmental, and emotional problems it can quietly solve. When the values he'd fought for begin to slip away, he walks — a dark cloud with a silver lining of reflection and creativity.
Cause & Effect
A New Zealand family, a question nobody will answer, and the long reach of the things people do to one another. In the end, most of them get what they deserve.
My mother wrote Cause & Effect but didn't live to see it in print. This edition puts that right.
Books worth passing on.
Books I keep pressing into people's hands, on death, design, work and doing things properly.
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Stiff
Mary Roach
What happens to bodies donated to science. Curious, respectful and very funny.
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The Design of Everyday Things
Don Norman
Why some doors confuse us and some kettles just work. The book that taught designers to look properly.
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Human Work
Leanne Holdsworth
Leanne Holdsworth on making work more human, for the people who lead it and the people who do it. Full disclosure: she's my wife.
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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Caitlin Doughty
A young mortician's first job at a crematorium, and her case for facing death more honestly.
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Cradle to Cradle
William McDonough & Michael Braungart
Design where nothing becomes waste, only material for the next thing. It changed how I thought about what a product owes the world.
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Let My People Go Surfing
Yvon Chouinard
Patagonia's founder on running a company by its values, and what that costs.
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I'm a product designer from Aotearoa New Zealand. Some years ago, at my father-in-law's funeral, I watched a man who loved timber lowered into a coffin of plastic handles and printed fake woodgrain — and felt less grief than affront.
Leave No Trace is what happened next: an honest coffin, a company built around it, a decade of my life, and a slow argument that good design should answer more than how a thing looks. That first design became the Artisan, and the Artisan became Return To Sender. When the values I'd fought for began to slip, I walked.
Holdsworth Press is where my books live, starting with Leave No Trace and, in November, Cause & Effect, a novel by my mother.
Booksellers
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Media & review copies
For interviews, events or review copies, email holdsworthpress@gmail.com.