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 — 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. What she didn’t have yet was the product. That’s where we came in.

A diamond to keep us honest.

Five of us, three weeks, one founder with funders to impress. An open brief like that will happily eat a sprint if you let it, so we ran the Double Diamond — the framework that forces you to widen before you narrow, twice. Go broad to find the real problem, squeeze it to a sharp one; go broad again on solutions, squeeze to the one worth building.

Here’s the map of what’s coming — four phases, and what we did in each. You’ll watch it unfold over the rest of this case study; for now, just hold the shape.

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. This wasn’t a sketch of a quiz. It was the whole brain of the machine, mapped out: variations of questions, the possible answers to each, and the branching logic that routed every combination to a tailored product recommendation. Years of knowing this hair, turned into 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. The breadth was honestly breathtaking. The raw thinking wasn’t missing; it was waiting for us.

That changed our job. Not “invent the idea” — sharpen it, and make it real.

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, we recruited a few more interviewees of our own, 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.

“Synthesising” sounds tidy. In practice it was every observation onto its own sticky, then sorting and re-sorting until the noise organised itself into nineteen themes — the lenses we’d come to understand these women through:

Underneath all nineteen, the same three words kept surfacing — in different accents, different words, the same ache: trust, overwhelm, control. Those clusters, and the jobs-to-be-done that fell out of them, are what we’d later distil into one woman: Danielle.

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

We mapped her journey — and found a loop.

Plotting the emotional journey we’d heard across the interviews, one thing jumped out: she wasn’t moving forward, she was 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 her all the way back to discovery — every time. That single note is why a subscription later became non-negotiable.

The existing path had a terrifying dead end.

When we mapped the current user flow, one terminal state said everything you need to know about the stakes. If nothing worked — if the loop never broke — the journey didn’t just stall. It ended in “fail / cut off hair.”

That’s what we were designing against. Not a conversion metric. A woman cutting her hair off because nothing helped.

The real problem wasn’t products. It was self-trust.

Underneath every “there’s too much choice” was something quieter and far more telling. These women had 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 reframed everything. We weren’t building a product finder. We were building a confidence rebuilder — and every feature that survived had to earn its place by rebuilding that trust.

Fifteen women became one: Danielle.

A persona is a decision-making tool, not a stock photo. Danielle is the woman behind the journey and the dead-end flow you just saw — one character carrying every pattern the interviews surfaced. From here on, every feature had to earn its place by working 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 wasn’t to copy the mechanic — it was to understand it 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.

Read together, those two lines set the bar: not a shop with a quiz bolted on, but guidance over transaction — something useful enough to open on a Tuesday and trust enough to return to. Every feature that survived from here had to earn its place against them.

Before it was beautiful, it was grey boxes.

Out of the design studio came a structure, not a skin. 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 white shop stock 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, looping video for the community join. The little touches — attention to detail. It had to feel real.

Then I took the grey boxes and made them real.

This is where I came in. Over the Christmas break I rebuilt the structure the team had set into a fully-branded, high-fidelity prototype — and fixed the flow and visual problems on the way up. 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. Guidance over transaction, exactly as the design studio set out.

Four features. Each one earned by a sentence.

Once the quiz was working, the design studio gave 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? None of these shipped in the MVP. They were the roadmap — the version of KA the quiz would earn its way toward, built only once there was traction to justify them.

01SubscriptionInterview insight

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

That’s not an upsell — it’s an emotional need. 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. Confidence, made visible.

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 surfaces people with similar hair, their routines and what actually worked — peer proof over 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.

Then we tested it — 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.

The payoff: the clickable prototype, driven end to end — one continuous loop that carries Danielle from first-time visitor to hooked regular. Here’s her path through it, screen by screen.

Final reflections.