Kreate - India's handmade economy
Kreate is a mobile-first buyer app I designed for CrowdPouch, rebuilding a failing WordPress artisan marketplace into a native iOS & Android shopping experience one that helps everyday buyers discover, trust, and buy directly from small Indian artisans, across 100+ screens from sign-up to checkout.
Timeline
Designed end to end in 2020 as the sole designer, from research framing and information architecture through 100+ shipped screens, sign-up to checkout, working alongside one PM and four engineers.
Background
CrowdPouch ran a marketplace for India's handmade economy, potters, weavers, and jewellers in tier-2 and tier-3 towns who make beautiful things and have nowhere fair to sell them. But it lived on a WordPress site so inconsistent and confusing that one or two orders a day was a good day.
It was a two-sided challenge at once: a supply problem and a trust problem.
Around 86% of Indian shoppers had moved to buying online, mostly on their phones. Rather than patch the site, the team made the call to meet buyers where they now were, a native buyer app. I led the buyer experience end to end: research framing, information architecture, every user flow, and 100+ screens from sign-up to checkout.
This category details the step-by-step approach taken during the project, from research and planning through defining, design and prototyping, and testing
Research & Planning
Ran on-the-ground fieldwork with the supply side, artisans the team onboarded across tier-2 and tier-3 towns, plus qualitative conversations with prospective buyers and a teardown of how handmade goods were being sold online elsewhere. The guiding question throughout: what makes someone trust a stranger's handmade product enough to buy it?
Defining
Mapped the buyer's emotional journey, curious, then skeptical, dipping into a trust valley right at checkout, and let the information architecture fall out of it: six primary surfaces and one critical path, discovery to a completed order. Framed four design principles to carry the work, starting with "lead with the maker, not the SKU."
Design & Prototyping
Designed 100+ screens from scratch, onboarding, an editorial home feed, maker-led product detail, cart, and a single reviewable checkout, plus the unglamorous screens that actually carry trust: empty states, the wrong-OTP error, the address form, the confirmation. Product detail and maker profile were built as shared destinations reached from every entry point, so trust got earned in one consistent place.
Testing & Optimization
Shipped to iOS and Android and grew past 10,000 downloads with strong adoption and warm early feedback, refining the trust-critical moments as they surfaced. Honestly, instrumentation was thin, the biggest lesson was to measure buyer behaviour as rigorously as we studied sellers, and let real usage, not just the persona, drive the next iteration.
The resulting buyer app turned a broken WordPress marketplace into a mobile-first shopping experience one where discovery stays alive and buying from an unknown maker feels safe, giving India's small artisans a fair, direct path to a national market.
Discovery Engine
Built Home as an editorial, modular feed, featured makers, curated collections, category shortcuts, and trending crafts. Every scroll stays fresh and there's always a reason to come back.
Six-Surface Architectur
Structured the app around six primary surfaces: Home, Explore, Search, Wishlist, Cart, and Profile with Product detail and Maker profile as shared destinations reached from all of them. Underneath sits one airtight critical path: discovery to a completed order.
Trust Layer
Every product leads to its maker, name, place, photo, a verified badge, reinforced by "handmade" cues, honest fair-price framing, and a single reviewable checkout that even reminds buyers their order supports real makers directly.
The app shipped on iOS and Android and grew past 10,000 downloads with strong adoption, a broken website turned into a product that scaled.
It Shipped and Scaled
Kreate launched on both stores and grew past 10,000 downloads with strong adoption and warm early feedback, 100+ screens designed solo, and a two-sided marketplace finally working: buyers given a trustworthy place to shop, makers given fairer margins on their craft.
My first end-to-end product taught me the small steps.
I was early in my career and built this almost single-handedly, from the sign-up screen to the checkout. That's where the real lessons were.
The product lives in the small steps
Owning every screen taught me that trust is built in the unglamorous places. the empty cart, the wrong-OTP error, the address form, the confirmation. Get those wrong and no hero screen saves you.
Discovery is a content problem, not just a layout one
Making a buyer trust an unknown maker wasn't solved by a prettier grid — it was solved by leading with the maker's story and keeping the feed alive. Structure served the narrative.
Keeping the mission visible kept the design honest
The platform existed to put fair margin back in artisans' hands. Even in the cart summary wasn't decoration, it was the reason a buyer chose Kreate over a faceless marketplace.