I build businesses, the products they sell and the brand those products wear.
I'm Lucas Williamson. I made my first product, a line of wrestling gear, at eighteen, and I haven't stopped taking things apart since. Fifteen years later I've helped launch more than 100 consumer products, from the first sketch through tooling, packaging and the campaign that sells them, and I've started a few companies of my own along the way. The part I'm best at is the stretch between a sketch and a real object, where most ideas die.
01 Introduction Three ways I show up
Creative director. Designer. Teacher.
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Creative Director
Strategy and design leadership. Fifteen years setting the direction and holding it across every surface.
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Designer
Brand and product. The object, the identity it wears, the box it ships in, carried through tooling to first article.
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Teacher
Workshops and the classroom. Rose-Hulman, CSEA, MSJ, the Pay It Forward Fund. I give the hours back.
Portrait pending
I'm a father first. I'm an organic homesteader, and I'm usually happiest somewhere with no cell signal. I like my hands busy, in the shop with a prototype or on a factory floor halfway around the world.
I spent five years travelling Asia building the supplier network behind my studio, and the best decisions I've made on a product came from standing next to the line. I grew up wrestling. At 36 I'm back on the mat for Mount St. Joseph while I finish my BFA.
- Father
- Homestead
- No signal
- In the shop
- On the line
- Back on the mat
- 2008
It started with headgear
I launched a custom line of wrestling headgear and apparel at 18. I was a wrestler, the gear was bad, and I thought I could make it better. What I actually learned was how many decisions sit between a drawing and a finished object. Hundreds of them, and most of them are not aesthetic.
- 2009–2013
CCAD, then Ohio State
I studied Industrial Design at Columbus College of Art and Design, then Industrial Design and Entrepreneurship at Ohio State. I was designing the sports gear line the whole way through, which meant the coursework and the business were the same experiment.
- 2013
Juiceboxx
A hard case for MacBook chargers that stopped the cable fraying at the strain point. My first Kickstarter, and back to back wins at Ohio State's Undergraduate Business Plan Competition. It was the first time I took something from a real problem all the way to people paying for it.
- 2014–2015
Launch Labs, and what it taught me
I built a creative firm to do for other people what I had done for Juiceboxx. It did not work. What had been hundreds of touchpoints on one product became thousands across many, and we could not meet what the market was asking for. I keep this one in the story because the lesson is the reason everything after it worked.
- 2017–2019
Funded Today
Senior Designer at one of the fastest growing firms in the country at the time. I designed dozens of crowdfunding campaigns, which is where I learned that the image selling a product is not separate from the product. It is the same design problem, one step later.
- 2018–2019
Grypmat, and the work that followed
Grypmat was one of my first clients on my own. A non-slip tool mat for aviation mechanics, over $125,000 in Kickstarter presales, then Shark Tank, then a Time Best Invention of 2018. Around the same period I led design on Kong and JoGo, and architected the kiosk housing and mechanical system that carried PopCom's software to market, which helped them raise over $5 million in equity crowdfunding.
- 2019–
Product Refinery
I founded Product Refinery in 2019 to put every one of those capabilities under one roof. Since then I have helped over 100 founders get products made. I spent five years travelling Asia building the supplier network behind it, which is where the manufacturing judgment on this site actually comes from.
- 2019–2024
MSJ wrestling, and the camera
I had been volunteering with the Mount St. Joseph wrestling program for years when its creative media quietly became my job. Season schedule graphics, match and results pieces, media day, video. Nobody was paying me and nobody was art directing me, so every decision was mine and every mistake was public. It sharpened my photography and video faster than paid work ever had, and it pulled me further into graphics than I had gone before. That is the work that made me consider a graphic design BFA. I stepped back from it when I went back to school.
- 2025–
Back to school, at 35
I went back to finish the degree I left twice, a BFA in Graphic Design at Mount St. Joseph, alongside an MBA. Classes in typography, branding, web design and business ethics have sharpened tools I had been using on instinct for a decade. I also got two years of NCAA eligibility back and am training to compete as a Division III wrestler at 36, after tearing an ACL a week before my first tournament last season.
Make it real
Every venture I've run ends in a physical shipped thing, not a deck. It makes me biased toward prototypes, samples and first articles, and suspicious of ideas that have never been built.
Do the reps
Wrestling from youth through a Division III return at 36, after an ACL tear. Iteration over inspiration, volume of exploration, and comfort losing in public.
Name the tradeoff
"It only has to be good enough to sell, Luke." A mentor's line I've carried fifteen years. Decisions get stated with their cost, and perfection is treated as a progress killer.
Give without strings
Give your time, your experience, your energy, with no expectation of return. CSEA judging, two years of Rose-Hulman, the Parks Foundation. Free for students and nonprofits.
Deferred, tracked as decision 16. Product Refinery, Pawmento, NeuModern Creations. Name, one line, one link, one role each.
I give time to students and early founders through what I call the Pay It Forward Fund. Judging, keynotes, mentorship, and two years of monthly cleanups with the Cincinnati Parks Foundation.