Kinky
Apothecary

First, meet Nibi.

Nibi Lawson calls herself the “Chief Hair Obsessive,” and she earned the title the hard way. She moved back to Nigeria in the late 2000s, in her words “a kinky-haired oddity in a sea of shiny weaves,” and found a country with no products for hair like hers and plenty of opinions about it. So in 2010 she built the thing that didn’t exist: Nigeria’s first one-stop natural-hair shop.

A decade of community followed — events, collaborations, advice, a brick-and-mortar shop in Lagos. Then the pandemic, and a realisation: the KA family didn’t need another shelf of products, they needed a more personal way to choose them. She spent lockdown building KA 2.0 — the idea of an on-demand, AI-driven haircare concierge.

By the time the brief reached us, she wasn’t pitching a hunch. She’d taken KA 2.0 to the NEF+ accelerator’s Pitch Week and finished runner-up; she was pre-seed, with investors to convince and a Nigerian business ready to grow into the UK. The brief was blunt about the job: a demo-able MVP, good enough to put in front of funders.

She had the vision, the brand and ten years of data, but not yet a product she could demo, and that’s where we came in.

A diamond to keep us honest.

Five of us, three weeks, one founder with funders to impress. With a brief that open, we could easily have lost the whole sprint, so we ran the Double Diamond: widen, then narrow, twice.

Here’s the map of what’s coming — four phases, and what we did in each.

Turns out the client had done her homework.

Before we sketched a thing, we got Nibi on a call — less a kick-off, more a download. We expected an idea-stage founder. We met someone who’d been living the problem for ten years and had the receipts to prove it.

Then she opened her Miro boards, and the scale of it landed. It was far more than a quiz sketch. She’d mapped out the whole brain of the machine: variations of questions, the possible answers to each, and the branching logic that routed every combination to a tailored product recommendation. Ten years of knowing this hair, written down as a decision tree. Alongside it: the brand, the products, and the customer-discovery work to back the logic up.

And the kicker — twenty-plus recorded user interviews she’d already run with women about their hair. I was blown away by how much she’d already done; it just needed shaping.

That changed our job. Nibi already had the idea; we had to sharpen it and build something she could demo.

So we put her interviews to work.

Nibi’s twenty-plus recordings were the gift — but a pile of audio isn’t insight. I transcribed them, and then came the slow part: synthesising fifteen of them in real depth. No mean feat, and a deliberate one. Rather than skim the lot, we chose to take a smaller set apart line by line and actually understand it. Later, with Nibi in Nigeria and time of the essence, we didn’t want to trouble her to arrange more interviewees. Instead, we found our own through our networks, for testing and follow-up questions.

“Synthesising” sounds tidy. In reality it was the mother of all affinity maps: nearly a thousand stickies, one observation each, sorted into a first version, then sorted again into a second, until we had nineteen themes, the ones we’d come to understand these women through:

Across all nineteen themes, three things kept coming up: trust, overwhelm and control. Those clusters, and the jobs-to-be-done that fell out of them, are what we’d later distil into a single persona.

“I’m buying it based on what it says on the bottle. So, trial and error.”

We mapped the journey — and found a loop.

Plotting the emotional journey we’d heard across the interviews, one thing jumped out: the women we’d spoken to weren’t moving forward, they were circling. Trial and error → seek advice → try again → back to trial and error. Stuck near the bottom, never climbing.

And there was a trapdoor. When a product changed or went out of stock, it sent them all the way back to discovery — every time. That single note is why a subscription went straight onto the roadmap.

The existing path had a terrifying dead end.

When we mapped the current user flow, the magnitude of it all struck home. If nothing worked, the journey didn’t just stall. It ended in “fail / cut off hair.”

That’s what we were designing for. A conversion metric was the last thing on our minds; we wanted to save a woman from cutting her hair off because nothing helped.

The real problem was self-trust.

When these women said “there’s too much choice”, what they really meant was that they’d stopped trusting their own judgement about their own hair.

“Not really trusting yourself to know your hair well enough to know what to do.”

That changed how we saw the whole project. A better product list wouldn’t fix much if these women didn’t trust their own judgement, so every feature had to help rebuild that trust.

Fifteen women became one: Danielle.

Danielle is the woman behind the journey and the dead-end flow you just saw — one character carrying every pattern the interviews turned up. From here on, every feature had to work for her.

Two questions to design for.

First, I studied everyone already doing this.

Plenty of brands run a quiz that recommends products — so before designing ours, I cast the net wide. Not just haircare rivals, but skincare too, to see how the mechanic worked across categories. I mapped how each one structured their flow, where they genuinely helped the user, and where the experience fell short. The goal was to understand the mechanic properly, then find the gap worth owning.

The afternoon we decided what to build.

We now knew who we were building for and what hurt — but not yet what to build. So, with the research synthesised, we ran a design studio: six of us, Nibi included, sketching solutions independently and dot-voting on what mattered. By the end of the afternoon the fog had turned into two clear project goals — the brief we’d hold everything else against.

Put together, those two goals meant advice first and selling second, so it couldn’t be just a shop with a quiz stuck on. It had to be useful enough to open on an ordinary day, and trusted enough to come back to. Every feature from here was measured against them.

Before it was beautiful, it was grey boxes.

The design studio gave us a structure to build on. The team split into two pairs — Vikram and Ben, Helen and Livia — and wireframed the whole flow in low fidelity: welcome, quiz, recommendations, basket, dashboard, calendar, hair journey, community. No colour, no photography, no brand. Just the bones of the thing, argued over screen by screen until the journey held together.

Then, before the Christmas break, they handed that low-fi prototype to me to take to high fidelity. Everything you see after this point started its life as one of these grey boxes.

I sprinkled some Christmas magic onto the prototype.

We broke for Christmas. It should have been rest. No one expected the course to be as intensive as the word bootcamp promised — it was everything and worse, and we'd burned the candle at both ends since the very first assignment. This was the last one, the one we'd been building toward: a real client.

So I took the quiet — no classes, no distractions — and went to town on the one prototype I had sole ownership of. This had to look a million dollars.

I'd been handed stock photography, but it was useless in a clean UI: pink-smoke backdrops, reflections, inconsistent angles. I wanted clean product shots on a white background for the MVP, so I rebuilt the entire PURE range from scratch as 3D renders in Adobe Dimension, each one colour-mapped to its place in the regimen. Then I used them to produce an in-app looping banner.

None of this was on the brief. It was the extra mile: re-rendering stock I could have left alone, building a banner that followed the brand guidelines to the letter, and making a looping video for the community sign-up. It was a labour of love, I enjoyed it too!

Then I took the grey boxes and made them real.

We shared responsibilities across the project, but the hi-fi was mine alone. Over the Christmas break I turned the team’s low-fi into a fully branded, high-fidelity prototype, and corrected the user flow and navigation problems that came up along the way. Two screens carried the most weight: the recommendations page, where the quiz pays off in a five-step routine, and the dashboard, the home a returning user opens on a Tuesday.

The research kept saying the same thing: people need to see people like them. So the brand work leaned hard on real photography — not 3A-to-4C hair charts, but actual women — and on my own product renders, so the shelf looked like a real shop.

One loop: quiz → results → routine → back again.

Every screen had to earn its place on a single journey. Danielle takes the quiz, meets her recommendations, buys or subscribes, and lands on a profile that keeps pulling her back — her routine saved, her hair journey building, the community a tap away. Advice first, selling second, exactly as the design studio set out.

Four features, each traced back to an interview.

The design studio had given us a longer list of things KA could become. We cut it to four — and the test for each was simple: did it trace back to something a real person actually said?

01SubscriptionInterview insight

“When I find something that works, I’m someone who just sticks to it. I panic if I run out of it.”

For her, running out is a real worry. The subscription lets Danielle save her routine to a calendar and have products arrive before she runs dry. Never caught short again.

02Hair JourneyInterview insight

“I’m developing my relationship with my hair now.”

The Hair Journey lets her log progress photos month by month, see how far she’s come, and — if she wants — share it. Seeing that progress builds her confidence.

03CommunityInterview insight

“There’s so much marketing noise. I trust products proven to work on people with hair like mine.”

So we let her find them. Community shows her people with similar hair, their routines and what actually worked for them: proof from her peers instead of marketing claims.

04HelpInterview insight

“I don’t swim because of my hair, which is really sad. I’d love to start.”

When life changes — swimming, pregnancy, travel, hard water — the routine has to flex. Help gives targeted advice and the products to match, so her hair stops being the reason she says no.

We tested the low-fi first, and it humbled us.

Before I built the hi-fi, the team put the low-fi greyscale prototype in front of users — and learned the usual hard things. Two problems stood out, and both got fixed on the way up to high fidelity.

Don’t take my word for it — watch it work.

This is the clickable prototype, driven end to end in one continuous loop that carries Danielle from first-time visitor to hooked regular. The MVP was the quiz; the rest shows where KA would go next. Here’s her path through it, screen by screen.

Final reflections.