Leave
No Trace
Lifting the lid on death, design and doing better.
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.
More books are coming.
On people, places, design, and possibly more about death culture, and what it says about us. Leave your email and I'll write when the next one's ready.
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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.
I'm now writing about people, design, and the New Zealand funeral trade. Holdsworth Press is where those books will live.