Our Story: About Nottingham Spirk

John Nottingham and John Spirk, standing in front of the Innovation Center

For 40 years, Nottingham Spirk has a track record of delivering thousands of successful new products and businesses for the top 100 CPG and medical device companies with proven ROI — Return on Innovation™.

John Nottingham and John Spirk first met in the Industrial Design Department of the Cleveland Institute of Art. They quickly became the star students of Viktor Schreckengost, founder of industrial design education in the U.S. Upon graduation, after turning down lucrative job offers from Fortune 500 companies, they started their own product design firm, Nottingham Spirk.

One of the first clients to take a chance on the eager young designers was Rotadyne which primarily manufactured bed pans but also used their rotational molding process to make toys. John and John focused on innovating industry-changing children’s products and designed the logo for the new company name, Little Tikes. Over time Nottingham Spirk’s creative designs helped Little Tikes sales to grow a thousandfold. So too did the Nottingham Spirk reputation as a world-class innovator.

Early client relationships that have benefited from years of Nottingham Spirk innovations include Invacare, Dirt Devil, the Duck Tape brand among several others. In the last four decades, Nottingham Spirk has developed hundreds of patented products that have generated tens of billions in sales for industry leading businesses as well as fast-growth entrepreneurial firms.

Today the experienced Nottingham Spirk staff is based in a state-of-the-art facility known as the Nottingham Spirk Innovation Center, where researchers, product designers, engineers and prototype technicians work side by side through every step of the company’s unique, vertically integrated open innovation process, developing products that change the game in their respective markets.