Circulate’s goal was to make sourcing sustainable packaging as simple as shopping online, while solving the complex operational and data challenges behind the scenes.
Working asynchronously with a team spread across Europe and Vietnam, I collaborated with the founder, product manager, and engineering team to define product direction and deliver new features. My role spanned product strategy, UX design, and design systems, ensuring that every release improved usability, supported business goals, and reflected a consistent brand experience.
This environment required constant prioritisation. I partnered closely with the founder and product manager to plan the roadmap, evaluate trade offs, and focus design effort on the most impactful initiatives.
Packaging procurement is a very fragmented process. Businesses often rely on manual sourcing, inconsistent data, and outdated catalogues to find suitable materials. For suppliers, the challenge lies in presenting their products clearly and managing orders at scale.
Circulate was founded to solve this problem. Whilst the platform had grown quickly, the user experience hadn’t kept pace. Buyers found it difficult to navigate the catalogue of packaging materials and configure bulk orders, particularly when each product required multiple variables (size, finish, quantity, sustainability rating, etc.).
Therefore, Circulate needed a design framework that could support both sides of the marketplace while enabling fast iteration, experimentation, and integration with AI powered tools that recommend sustainable alternatives and automate packaging suggestions.
The challenge was to design a system that felt familiar and efficient to professionals, yet still human and easy to use, bridging the gap between industrial data and everyday decision making.
The project aimed to establish a scalable foundation for Circulate’s next phase of growth. Beyond improving usability, the redesign sought to reduce operational friction and create a unified experience for buyers, vendors, and internal teams. The goal was not just to deliver a more intuitive interface, but to design a system that could evolve with the business, support ongoing iteration, and empower teams to move faster with confidence.
Leading product design across multiple initiatives
I defined and delivered product design for several parallel workstreams, including search and discovery, product listings, and order management. Each feature had its own set of users and business rules but needed to feel unified within the broader Circulate experience.
I worked end to end, from framing requirements with the founder and product manager, to designing wireframes, to supporting engineers during implementation. Every design decision was tied back to user behaviour and business outcomes, ensuring that we built features that were not only functional but meaningful.
Iterative design and agile collaboration
Circulate evolved quickly, so our process had to match its pace. We operated in short design sprints, using lightweight documentation and asynchronous communication to keep momentum.
I regularly partnered with product and engineering teams to identify any bottlenecks in our process, make informed recommendations, and implement improvements that streamlined our workflow. By reducing friction in our design to development process, we accelerated releases while maintaining consistency.
Data and empathy in decision making
Although much of our research and testing was founder led, I stayed close to insights and data to understand how users interacted with new features. I used this context to refine flows, prioritise improvements, and balance the needs of both sides of the marketplace.
Our goal was to make the interface feel effortless even when the underlying systems were complex. Every refinement, from filter logic to empty states, was guided by empathy for real users managing high stakes B2B orders.
Advocating for systems thinking
I introduced a structured approach to design components and UI patterns that reduced duplication and improved coherence across the platform. This design system became the foundation for new features, enabling the team to iterate faster without compromising quality.
Along the way, I helped the founder and engineers understand best UX practices, explaining the reasoning behind each decision and building a shared vocabulary for good design.
Circulate has been one of the most dynamic projects I’ve worked on, a fast moving, collaborative environment that demanded clarity, adaptability, and strategic thinking.
The experience reinforced my belief that great product design thrives on communication and iteration. By staying close to the data, navigating ambiguity, and maintaining empathy for our users, we built something functional, elegant, and scalable.
This project strengthened my skills in agile delivery, cross functional collaboration, and product strategy, and reminded me that good design is as much about how teams work together as it is about what they create.
empathy / trust / collaboration
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scale / alignment / transformation
Redesigned an established B2B brand into a modern, two sided marketplace. Delivered system wide improvements across vendor tools, search, and dashboards, bringing teams together around a unified design vision and scalable design system.
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