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Social Commerce

Designing a vibrant marketplace for influencer commerce — 10 months, one unified platform

A social commerce platform connecting influencers and advertisers — enabling them to connect, collaborate, and conduct business seamlessly through one unified marketplace. A 10-month engagement covering product design, visual strategy, and brand identity from the ground up.

Client
Emerging Tech Startup
Timeline
10 months
Year
2023
Scope
Product Design · Visual Strategy · Brand Identity · Web Design
10 mo
Full engagement duration
2
User types: brands & influencers
Full
Product + brand identity
Influencer Platform — Marketplace overview

The problem

The influencer marketing industry runs on DMs, spreadsheets, and informal agreements. Brands can’t discover the right creators at scale. Influencers spend more time chasing payments and managing contracts than creating content. The infrastructure that should connect them — and make collaboration seamless — doesn’t exist in a single place.

Our client, an emerging tech startup, had the vision: a marketplace that handled discovery, collaboration, contracts, and payments in one unified experience. The challenge was designing a platform that felt right for both sides of the marketplace — brands who think in campaigns and ROI, and creators who think in content and audience.

The design challenge

Two-sided marketplaces are hard to design because each side has a fundamentally different mental model of what the platform is for. A brand sees a procurement tool. A creator sees a portfolio and career platform. The interface has to serve both without feeling like a compromise for either.

  • Brand side — campaign creation, influencer discovery, proposal review, contract management, payment tracking
  • Creator side — portfolio showcase, brand discovery, proposal submission, collaboration management, earnings dashboard
  • Shared surfaces — messaging, contracts, milestone tracking, reviews
“The biggest design risk was making the platform feel like a generic enterprise tool for brands, and a job board for creators. We had to make it feel like neither — more like a creative marketplace with real commerce underneath.”
Influencer Platform — Creator and brand dashboards

Visual strategy

The brand identity needed to signal credibility to marketing teams at established brands, while feeling native and appealing to digital-native creators. We developed a visual system that uses editorial typography and bold colour blocking — premium enough for enterprise brand partners, distinctive enough for the creator community.

The motion language — how components enter, how data updates, how notifications surface — was designed to feel alive in a way that purely enterprise tools never do. This was a platform where creative work happens, and the interface needed to feel like it.

The result

A 10-month engagement covering every surface of the product — from the onboarding flow that gets new creators their first brand enquiry, to the campaign analytics dashboard that helps brand managers report back to their CMOs. The full design system and brand identity were handed off with comprehensive documentation so the startup’s in-house team could build on it.

Product DesignVisual StrategyBrand IdentityWeb DesignTwo-sided Marketplace
Project Details
ClientConfidential
IndustrySocial Commerce
Duration10 months
Year2023
What We Delivered
Full product design
Brand identity
Design system
Web presence
Motion guidelines
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