The Beginning - 25 Years of Katapult with Co-Founders Dawn & Phil
- Katapult Team
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
2026 marks the 25th year in business for Katapult and Co-Founders, Dawn Foote and Phil Higgins. To start the celebrations, we've travelled back to the very beginning of the Katapult story in this exclusive interview.
Q: Let's rewind almost three decades. How did you two first meet, and how did Katapult grow out of that friendship?
Phil Higgins: "Psychology A-level in Grimsby, Franklin College. Yeah, I think I sat opposite you in the first lesson... Where we became friends, didn't we? That's the start of our... long-term friendship. Then getting to that point where, you know, apply for university... we both ended up in Derby. Derby is such a small city, but it was the big city to us, wasn't it?"
Dawn Foote: "We never really thought about would we be working together. We just started like doing stuff together as a group. We were a group of people on these different creative courses, we just started working together, doing projects. But they were projects that was in the nightclub industry and scene."
Q: That late-90s Derby club scene sounds like it was a massive playground for you creatively. What were you actually tinkering with back then?
Phil Higgins: "Derby was on fire in terms of nightlife... pretty much every day in the week there was something on. Hip hop and drum and bass, house nights... and we kind of met like-minded people... How can we use our creative skills and talents to contribute and do something with them? So that's where, yeah, we kind of came to a point where we were like, okay, let's start, you know, first elevating the club acts that were already good, but how do we elevate them through visuals, theming, VJing and DJing."
Dawn Foote: "Katapult became like a collective and we were booked in to come and like provide all the visual projection, installation and like basically transform the nightclub space doing kind of live mixing with the DJs... We'd be a mix of like analogue and digital... At one point, one of the student houses we were in, there was an attic in it and we turned it into like the techno room. My bedroom was just like a tech studio. All of our student loans was spent on photography, digital photography equipment, editing suites."
Phil Higgins: "Analogue mixers, we're doing, yeah, recording onto VHS, sort of splicing stuff... Well, we figured out how to make visuals react to audio input. And we were just, it was just a plethora of like mishmash of tech."
Q: Where did the name "Katapult" actually come from? Was it a deep, strategic branding process?
Dawn Foote: "I remember it so vividly... We were sat around and Anthony in our team had a record bag from Nottingham and the Nottingham record shop was called Catapult, but was with a C. And we said, 'Oh, Catapult, that's a really cool name.' We looked at the bag and I said, 'Oh, we've got like Lars in our team and he was like European, he's from Norway.' So we went, 'Well, let's make it sound a bit more like cool.' So we said Katapult with a K."
Phil Higgins: "Really deep strategic process to developing our brand though! But it stuck and... it's brilliant. Dave knocked up a logo. Yeah. On his Mac upstairs. Yeah, we're like, 'We like this. This works.'"
Dawn Foote: "The name was about a good group of people... it was about the spirit of us and that kind of really encapsulated and I always thought Katapult could stick with anything—Katapult cafe, Katapult clothing, Katapult—so we'd have lots of flexibility with his name Katapult about what we might end up doing."
Q: When you graduated, you immediately jumped into a commercial office space with no desks. What was that transition like?
Dawn Foote: "Literally the day after we stepped out of the university gates, we stepped into a commercial office space. Didn't have desks. No desks. We literally had computers on the floor and we're like, 'We've got no desks.'... We made a video for a furniture company who then gave us furniture. That's where we got our desks. That's our scrap, it was early on. But yeah, we did what we needed to do."
Phil Higgins: "Pretty gold CRT monitors sat on the floor. Yeah, it was a strange time because it was like that make or break kind of moment of do we go off and get jobs? I think we knew without saying it that that would probably be the end of Katapult... We didn't pay ourselves at all... for six months."
Dawn Foote: "Six months in getting our first being able to pay each other of the £500 each... Prior to that we lived on our graduate loan and beans on toast."
Over the summer, we will be publishing more updates from Dawn and Phil on the Katapult journey over the last 25 years. Stay tuned!
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