8 ans d'expérience sur 2 pages A4
Pour les conventionel∙les et les procédurier∙es, mon CV est dispo là , en échange de ton petit mail 👉
Pour les conventionel∙les et les procédurier∙es, mon CV est dispo là , en échange de ton petit mail 👉
Influencer marketing in the UK runs on spreadsheets, email threads, and WhatsApp voice notes. Chanelle Mauricette, Blvckbook's founder, lived this firsthand, as both a content creator and a social media agency owner, she watched gifting collaborations collapse under weeks of manual back-and-forth with no infrastructure to hold them together.
Existing platforms either catered exclusively to mega-influencers, locked creators into frustrating credit economies, or ignored the UK market entirely. There was no tool built around the operational reality of mid-tier creators and the brand managers trying to work with them.
I was brought in before a single line of code was written. My first job wasn't to design screens, it was to interview a six-person tester panel (three brand-side, three creator-side) assembled from Chanelle's industry network, extract their frustrations, and translate raw insight into the product's first PRDs, Jobs-to-be-Done, user stories, and Information Architecture. The design would follow the thinking.
Three months in, the business model cracked.
The original MVP was built around a credit economy: creators would receive digital tokens weekly and spend them to unlock brand collaborations. It felt intuitive on paper. In practice, it was a trap. Legally, a pseudo-currency exposed the startup to HMRC compliance risks around taxable gifting. Behaviourally, creators hoarded their tokens out of loss aversion, killing transactional liquidity before the platform had even launched.
The entire architecture had to be rethought. This wasn't a screen-level fix, it was a structural pivot that touched monetization, onboarding, user psychology, and the core loop of the product. We moved from a credit economy to a flat-fee subscription model, and critically, shifted product restrictions from the creator side to the brand side. Creators would have unrestricted access. Brands would be capped by active deal volume. The supply side, creator quantity and profile health, became the platform's most protected asset.
This pivot set the real design challenge in motion: build a premium, equitable, two-sided marketplace for two very different users, with one developer, no research budget, and a hard launch deadline.
Chapter One: Before the First Screen, There Was the First Question
With no budget for external research and no existing product to test, every insight had to be earned. I ran structured interviews with six testers, three from the brand side, three from the creator side, probing the exact moments where gifting collaborations broke down. What I found shaped every decision that followed.
Creators didn't want their raw metrics public. Forcing performance data onto profiles would have killed onboarding before it started. The profile design was stripped back to a punchy two-line bio, closer to Instagram than LinkedIn, with detailed analytics reserved for the private deal environment.
Availability calendars, which I had initially designed for creators to manage their own schedules, were inverted entirely. Instead of creators listing free slots, brands would attach specific date and time windows to each offer. One insight, one structural flip, one less point of friction.
These findings became the product's first PRDs, the document that handed the engineering team something concrete to build against before a single screen existed.
Chapter Two: Every Elegant Idea Met a Hard Constraint
I brought in a specialist logo designer to execute the primary mark, a fluid handwritten signature logotype. Alongside it, I developed a secondary geometric stamp, the BLBK wordmark, for restricted surfaces like the app icon and navigation headers where the full script couldn't breathe.
The color system followed: deep blacks, clean whites, editorial whitespace, one red accent for transactional moments only. Nothing competed with the creator imagery that would fill the interface. The brand's job was to frame the content, not fight it. The system extended to every touchpoint: pitch decks, HTML creator invitation emails, the landing page, and App Store graphics. Blvckbook looked like an established authority before the app was live.
The hardest design calls weren't aesthetic, they were architectural. When brands needed guidance on deliverables, I designed a Recommendation Matrix: a single screen that auto-populated content packages based on offer value and creator tier. Getting the logic right required restructuring the database. Getting the UX right meant building in a custom bypass, because a locked system would have alienated the exact brands we needed to retain. Shipping this meant pausing the subscription paywall entirely. A platform cannot ethically charge for features its backend cannot yet deliver.
Chapter Three: Shipping Is a Design Decision Too
The aesthetic pivots were just as defining. Progressive transparency blurs across scrolling headers caused lag and crashes on older devices in TestFlight. I stripped it, replaced it with a performant solid blur layer. Premium feel preserved, engineering timeline unblocked. The navigation defaulted universally to slide-right transitions, functional, but cheap-feeling. I audited the entire information architecture and mapped explicit transition rules across every screen: fades for modals, bottom-sheets for actions, slides reserved for true navigation. Invisible work. It changed everything.
In May 2026 I took on QA, stress-testing the app against rapid, high-intensity interaction patterns. I documented over 40 critical bugs, swipe-gesture overrides, tap target failures, multi-platform crashes — every item logged with reproduction steps and priority rating. Every item resolved before submission.
The App Store assets were the final surface. The instinct was to use AI-generated imagery. I pushed back, Blvckbook's credibility is rooted in real faces and real community. I redirected toward authentic human imagery with Chanelle as the anchor, structured around the card-swipe mechanic as the core visual hook. Of the brands pitched using the deck I designed, roughly 70% signed an onboarding agreement. Ten cornerstone brands contracted. Fifteen creators briefed and ready. The build was submitted in June 2026. The app launched into a room that was already full.
Months before the app hit the App Store, Blvckbook needed to prove it was worth betting on.
I designed a pitch deck that became the sales team's primary closing asset. It was used across every brand outreach meeting in the six months leading up to launch. Of the brands Chanelle pitched directly using this material, roughly 70% progressed to a signed onboarding agreement, a conversion rate that would be strong for a live product, let alone a pre-launch startup. By submission date, 10 cornerstone brands were contracted and ready across London and Amsterdam. Fifteen curated creators were onboarded and briefed, so the app could launch into a room that was already full.
