A 2024 study published in JAMA Network Open found that only about 10% of U.S. adults currently carry naloxone, even though it is more widely available than ever. Carrying something new every day can be difficult, especially when that item still carries stigma.
At End Overdose, we are laser-focused on preventing overdose deaths and reducing stigma. One simple way to accomplish both is to make naloxone a normal part of everyday environments. The challenge is getting people to carry it consistently.
End Overdose is excited to announce our partnership with Brendan Mudd, an industrial designer working to change the way people interact with medication. We were moved by the sincerity of Brendan’s personal mission. With looming funding cuts threatening access to essential overdose-prevention resources and leaving communities with fewer tools to respond, we wanted to find a meaningful way to expand support. That is why we chose to work with Brendan.
Together, we believe we can raise awareness, make naloxone easier to carry, and save lives. We are excited to introduce the End Overdose-branded Nove device.
We also wanted to speak one-on-one with the designer behind the device and share his experiences, motivations, and vision with you. Whenever End Overdose enters into a collaboration, we do so with intention and thoughtfulness.
Below, Brendan Mudd shares his perspective on developing the Nove device, the personal mission behind his work, and his vision for changing the way people carry and interact with lifesaving medication.
What inspired you to create Nove?
As a college student I would hear stories of classmates going to parties and or music festivals and accidentally overdose from recreational drugs contaminated with fentanyl. Sometimes these students were experimenting with drugs for the first time. Coupled with seeing the effects of the opioid epidemic through the people experiencing homelessness in my college town of Bellingham,WA, the potential threat of an opioid overdose was an all too real situation that could affect myself, those around me, and the community as a whole. So when I received an assignment in school to “create a device for a first responder”, it kickstarted me into a 4 year journey of discovering and overcoming the barriers preventing people from responding to an opioid overdose through Nove.
How did your background in industrial design shape the product?
As an industrial designer, I have an overwhelming desire to create products that solve real needs and have a genuinely beneficial impact on the world. To meet that bar, you have to understand the people a product is intended for before you start designing it. With Nove, that meant making sure people would actually want to carry it, and enjoy carrying it, two traits that aren't traditionally associated with naloxone nasal spray. Through an extensive research phase that involved interviewing over 500 people, I found that most people don't carry naloxone for two main reasons: it isn't portable, and there's a stigma attached to it. So I looked at consumer products people already carry every day: earbuds, AirTags, and other keychain accessories. Those products share a few key traits: a smooth, rounded body that slides easily into a pocket or sits comfortably in your hand, a shape that won't snag on anything around it, and a sense of quality that makes you want to use it every day. I brought all of that into the design of the Nove case.
I've also worked at some of the best design consultancies and studios in the world, where I learned what it actually takes to design the kind of consumer products people seek out. That experience let me build a product and brand identity that feels more like consumer electronics than something medical, while keeping it at an attainable price. In short, industrial design gave me the ability to understand a consumer and meet them with a solution through good design.
What unmet need did you see in the way people currently carry nasal-spray medications?
I engaged in an in depth research period before building this product. Throughout this research phase I met with hundreds of health professionals, volunteers, college students, families, and workers of all sorts. Often I would lead with “ do you know what narcan is?” and more often than not they would say “yes” in an optimistic tone, as if they encouraged me spreading awareness about the medication. But when I asked them if they had ever carried it, almost everyone said they never had. Many people said they even had the medication, but kept it at home in a cabinet or in their car. In most situations however, if these individuals saw an overdose and were able to respond to it, the naloxone they had at home or in their car would be inaccessible and out of reach to be of use in the situation. The medication was only useful if it was with an individual when they needed to respond to an overdose. With nearly everyone I talked with there was a disconnect between intention and action. My next question was Why? Why does almost no one carry the medication even if they had it? Through continued conversation with my peers and health professionals it became clear that the association of naloxone nasal spray with drug usage discouraged many people from carrying it with them, solely because they didn’t want to be seen carrying it in public, or around friends and family who might assume that they had been using drugs. The second reason was that naloxone was just difficult to carry, especially if you go out without a bag on you, which is often the case for many college students, and festival attendees. These two issues, Portability and Stigma, prevented so many people from having naloxone at the scene of an overdose, and instead it was left somewhere inaccessible. This product was not built off of “what I saw wrong”, but rather the issues that everyone already had and was expressing to me.
Why was it important to design Nove as a lifestyle product rather than a traditional medical accessory?
My goal with nove is to increase the saturation of naloxone so that it is at the scene of an overdose, and not left at home where it can’t be reached.Whether you acknowledge it or not, opioid overdoses are something that affect all of us, and something we should all be prepared and know how to respond to. But right now there is a significant stigma attached to harm reduction that prevents so many people across the United States from educating themselves and being prepared to help. It is crucial that Nove breaks this stigma by straying away from the traditional medical and public health facade that is commonplace in this industry. Nove is a product that needs to resonate with groups outside of the medical space as something that can live with you everyday. Put plainly, Nove is designed as a lifestyle product because being prepared to help those around you should be a part of everyone's life.
How do you hope Nove changes the way people think about carrying lifesaving medication?
I think Nove looks like something people are already familiar with, and know how to use. It looks like something you are meant to carry with you, and not something you have to be told you should carry with you. My hope is that Nove encourages people to not only have the medication on them but also to increase people's awareness about the medication. Oftentimes people who carry the Nove keychain will be asked what it is by their friends. This leads to a natural and educational conversation about the importance of carrying naloxone nasal spray, and how truly easy it is to be prepared to respond to an overdose. Because the context in which someone was taught about naloxone was by their friend who was casually carrying it, that person's perception of the medication is rooted in a positive way, helping to reduce the stigma of overdose education and naloxone one conversation at a time.
What role can design play in making emergency preparedness more approachable and accessible?
Design is the look and feel of everything around us, whether we notice it or not. Every object in the room you're sitting in was designed, and that design shapes how you interact with it, how you use it, and even how you talk about it. Take your phone. It's designed to feel advanced, sophisticated, and dependable, through the materials, the finishes, the small details you only notice once it's in your hand. That's what makes you want it before you've even turned it on. No product in the harm reduction space has ever been approached that way.
When you apply that same level of thinking to a product like Nove, it changes how people see it entirely. Nove is designed to feel familiar, like a piece of technology you already know how to use. It's built to be durable, so you can carry it with confidence every day. And it's designed to be identifiable, giving it a character of its own that people recognize without it feeling out of place. Put together, these choices let Nove stay discreet enough to sidestep the stigma tied to naloxone, while still being unmistakably portable, so it's there and ready when it matters most.
Why did you want to collaborate with End Overdose?
End Overdose is at the forefront of driving social change and public perception of harm reduction within communities that are most susceptible to overdose around the United States. Their effort and contribution to distributing naloxone to college students, health departments, and music festival goers makes them one of the most impactful nonprofits in the United States. With End Overdose's widespread distribution, Nove is able to provide even more individuals with the ability to confidently carry and spread awareness of how to respond to an opioid overdose, and look out for those around them. Our goal is to improve the saturation of naloxone in communities around the country, and paired with the naloxone End Overdose distributes around the U.S., we are enabling thousands of others to be prepared and respond to an opioid overdose on a daily basis long after they first receive the medication. We are also thrilled to be supporting End Overdose's mission by putting 50% of the proceeds of this partnership towards naloxone education and overdose prevention efforts.
Why is overdose prevention personally important to you and your team?
Overdose prevention has been personal for me since before Nove was even an idea, from hearing classmates overdose on contaminated drugs at parties to seeing the effects of the opioid epidemic firsthand in my college town. That's what pulled me into this work in the first place, and it's what has kept me building Nove for the past four years. As I've talked to hundreds of people through this process, health professionals, families, volunteers, people who've lost someone, that personal stake has only grown. At the core of it is a belief that no one should lose someone they love to something as preventable as an opioid overdose. This work is about making sure fewer people have to live with that kind of loss, and that drives everything I do at Nove
What impact do you hope this product and collaboration will have on the community?
Our hope is simple: more lives saved because more people have naloxone with them at the moment it matters. This collaboration with End Overdose lets us reach communities, college campuses, and festival crowds who are most likely to encounter an overdose, and put a product in their hands that they'll actually carry. Beyond the immediate impact of getting more naloxone into circulation, we hope this partnership normalizes carrying it in the first place. If someone sees a friend with a Nove keychain and asks about it, that's a conversation that could save a life down the road. Long term, we want this collaboration to shift the social perception and encourage the cultural adoption of harm reduction, because when you make lifesaving tools something people are proud to carry, you save more lives.
