Most design studios start with a designer. CHRISPS started with a product, a shop counter and a trade-show floor.
Chris, the founder of CHRISPS, didn’t come to design through an agency. He came to it by doing the thing his clients do: inventing a product, getting it made, persuading retailers to stock it, and standing behind his own shop counters on the south coast of England. Now he has brought that experience across the Atlantic to a new design and development studio in Cambridge, Ontario. He wants to show Waterloo Region what happens when British craft meets Canadian ambition.
One small idea, sixty-two countries
It began with something most people would overlook: the wrap on a vape battery. The accessories market was full of plain, interchangeable products. Chris’s bet was simple and slightly reckless: make the design so good that people would want to collect it.
The brand he built, ODB Wraps, was organised around creative intellectual property rather than the product alone. That meant illustrated artwork, a streetwear-inspired look and marketing that grew out of the community who used it. The same visual language ran from the product to the packaging to exhibition stands designed to stop people across a crowded hall.
It worked further than anyone could have planned. By the brand’s own records, ODB Wraps:
- reached 62 countries,
- sold close to 12 million products,
- was stocked in more than 3,000 retail locations,
- took part in more than 500 brand collaborations, and
- achieved an exit valuation of more than £1.1 million.
Those figures belong to ODB Wraps, the business Chris built before CHRISPS, not to the studio. They’re the proof behind the studio’s approach, not a claim about it.
The parts nobody puts in a portfolio
Behind the numbers was the unglamorous work that teaches you how products really succeed. He developed a new battery line, the ODBXT 21700, with manufacturing partners. He prepared artwork that had to survive production. He designed packaging that carried bold illustration and safety information with equal clarity, in an industry where compliance isn’t optional. He showed products at trade expos in the UK, Denmark and Spain, and picked up awards for products, branding and packaging along the way.
Behind the counter
He didn’t just sell to shops; he ran them. His own store on England’s south coast, Dirty B’s Vape Bar, was named Vape Store of the Year at the South England Prestige Awards five years running, from 2021 to 2025, each year in a different category: retail design, customer experience, display and merchandising, and best retail experience. In 2024 he was named Managing Director of the Year in a UK business award.
Running a shop teaches lessons that are hard to learn any other way: what makes someone stop at a shelf, what a confusing price does to a sale, how staff feel about the systems they’re handed. Those lessons now shape everything CHRISPS builds. A website is a shop window. An online store is a shelf. The question is always the same: will the right person stop, understand and buy?
The full list of awards is on the CHRISPS recognition page. Chris is characteristically blunt about them: awards aren’t the mission. They’re evidence that the thinking holds up in front of judges who didn’t have to be kind.
Why Cambridge
CHRISPS was built in the UK. Its home is now Cambridge, Ontario. The studio is clear that this is an expansion, not a relocation: it still works across both markets. The move also brought Chris’s wife, Rebecca, home: she’s Canadian, and Cambridge is where the couple chose to build their life and their businesses. Alongside the studio, they run NTHBD, an event photo experience company that’s also based in Cambridge. You can read how the two businesses arrived here together.
For Waterloo Region, it’s an unusual mix to land in a mid-sized Ontario city: someone who has negotiated with factories, sold through international distributors and run award-winning shops, now designing websites, Shopify stores and brands for local businesses.
“We don’t just want to build businesses here and call ourselves local. We want to become part of the community, meet people, support other businesses and hopefully contribute something positive to the area that has made us feel so welcome.”
— Chris, founder of CHRISPS
The British way, the Canadian way
Ask what the move brings and the answer is a combination. From Britain: a craft tradition that sweats the details, a dry dislike of overpromising and a habit of designing for how things are actually used. From Canada: openness, warmth and a willingness to back new ideas. CHRISPS wants to be both: exacting about the work, straightforward with people.
That shows up in how the studio runs:
- Every price is published, in Canadian dollars, on the pricing page, from a $750 landing page to monthly care plans. That’s rare among design studios.
- Free website tools let any business check its own site’s speed, SEO, accessibility and AI-search readiness, with the evidence shown for every finding.
- No ranking guarantees. Nobody can honestly promise search rankings or how AI assistants mention a business, and CHRISPS says so.
- Senior hands on every project. Chris leads brand strategy and creative direction; lead developer Sam Newhouse leads the WordPress, Shopify and technical builds. The people a client meets are the people who do the work.
- Clients own what’s made: the website, the store and, on final payment, the brand files.
The ambition
CHRISPS isn’t arriving quietly. The ambition is to become the studio Waterloo Region businesses think of first when they want their brand, website or online store done properly: the local manufacturer that deserves a site as good as its machining, the Kitchener product brand ready for national shelves, the Cambridge shop that wants to compete with anyone online.
It’s starting where it means to go on: helping local businesses with free tools, plain-English guides on everything from what a website costs in Ontario to what the AODA requires, and prices anyone can see.
Built on having been the client
Product first, shops second, studio third. It’s an unusual path into design, and it explains why CHRISPS talks about websites the way a retailer talks about a shop window, and why its case studies, like ODB Wraps and Plankz, spend as much time on the shelf as on the screen.
For a Cambridge business owner, that means working with someone who has sat where they’re sitting, and who has proved, sixty-two countries over, that good design can take a small idea a very long way.
Media enquiries: to speak to Chris about CHRISPS, NTHBD or the move to Cambridge, contact the studio. More about the team is on the About page, and our work for local businesses is on the Cambridge page.