CIRCULAIRE
Scaling discovery and engagement in a second-hand marketplace.
Circulaire is a Swedish startup with a single mission: bring fragmented second-hand retail under one digital roof and make sustainable shopping the easy choice. During its 2024 to 2025 consumer chapter, I worked at Ministry of Programming as the product designer on the team that took Circulaire from a bare-bones search website into a personalized, mobile-first marketplace, designing the watchlist and notification system, the onboarding and recommendation flows, and the sustainability layer that became the product's emotional hook. I owned the design decisions and partnered closely with backend and mobile engineers to ship them within real platform constraints.
Role
Product Designer
Industry
eCommerce · Marketplace · Sustainability
PLATFORM
iOS & Android
Year
2024
The problem
Second-hand shoppers face a fragmented, frustrating experience. Inventory is scattered across dozens of independent shops with inconsistent filters, non-standardized sizing, and no way to track an item or get told when it drops in price or sells out. Buyers lose pieces they wanted simply because discovery is slow and there's no recovery path.
Circulaire had a starting point, a website with Lucene-based search but no user layer at all: no accounts, no watchlists, no way to save a favorite. And despite a sustainability mission, the product gave buyers no visible reason to choose used over new.
The brief was to turn a passive search directory into an active, personalized shopping companion without losing the simplicity that made the original usable, and within the constraints of an early-stage startup's roadmap.
What was done
Discovery & framing.
Workshops with the founders plus an audit of the existing search site surfaced the real problem: Circulaire didn't need more search power, it needed a reason to return. I reframed the work around three jobs, help me find the right thing, tell me when it changes, show me my choice matters, which guided every feature decision.
Defining who we were designing for
I mapped the friction into four problems, scattered inventory, inconsistent filters, no sustainability visibility, and missed purchase windows, and tied them to one segment: the values-driven buyer who already wants to buy used but keeps losing out to slow discovery.
Onboarding
I designed a low-friction onboarding that captures categories, brands, and sizes, seeding recommendations from session one and standardizing messy store-by-store sizing into one system.
Watchlist & notifications
The heart of my work: pinning, watchlists, and a notification model of real-time drop and restock alerts, daily pinned-item updates, and lighter weekly nudges. The real challenge was cadence, enough to drive returns, restrained enough to never feel like spam, tuned with engineering against the Firebase setup.
The Recommendation experience
Recommendations prioritize pinned items and watchlists, then onboarding preferences, with a curated default list so new users never see an empty feed, and a natural place to reinforce sustainability.
The Sustainability layer
Rather than a separate "eco" tab, I embedded CO₂ and water savings directly into product details, motivating rather than preachy, a quiet, factual nudge at the point of decision. This became the feature that set Circulaire apart from a generic resale app.
Designing for constraints & scale.
Everything shipped against real limits: Firebase auth, the existing Lucene search, an MVP scoped for around 200 stores and 6 million products. Key calls on notification frequency, recommendation fallbacks, and onboarding length were tradeoffs made with engineering, which is why the system held as inventory grew.
The result
Circulaire moved from a simple search website to a personalized mobile app: accounts, watchlists, real-time alerts, recommendations, and an embedded sustainability layer.
The personalization and notification work gave users concrete reasons to come back, lifting return visits and engagement. The sustainability metrics gave eco-conscious buyers a tangible reason to choose used over new, reinforcing both retention and the company's core mission. And the architecture was built to scale: millions of products at MVP, structured to expand across multiple countries.
Other work
CIRCULAIRE
Scaling discovery and engagement in a second-hand marketplace.
Circulaire is a Swedish startup with a single mission: bring fragmented second-hand retail under one digital roof and make sustainable shopping the easy choice. During its 2024 to 2025 consumer chapter, I worked at Ministry of Programming as the product designer on the team that took Circulaire from a bare-bones search website into a personalized, mobile-first marketplace, designing the watchlist and notification system, the onboarding and recommendation flows, and the sustainability layer that became the product's emotional hook. I owned the design decisions and partnered closely with backend and mobile engineers to ship them within real platform constraints.
Role
Product Designer
Industry
eCommerce · Marketplace · Sustainability
PLATFORM
iOS & Android
Year
2024
The problem
Second-hand shoppers face a fragmented, frustrating experience. Inventory is scattered across dozens of independent shops with inconsistent filters, non-standardized sizing, and no way to track an item or get told when it drops in price or sells out. Buyers lose pieces they wanted simply because discovery is slow and there's no recovery path.
Circulaire had a starting point, a website with Lucene-based search but no user layer at all: no accounts, no watchlists, no way to save a favorite. And despite a sustainability mission, the product gave buyers no visible reason to choose used over new.
The brief was to turn a passive search directory into an active, personalized shopping companion without losing the simplicity that made the original usable, and within the constraints of an early-stage startup's roadmap.
What was done
Discovery & framing.
Workshops with the founders plus an audit of the existing search site surfaced the real problem: Circulaire didn't need more search power, it needed a reason to return. I reframed the work around three jobs, help me find the right thing, tell me when it changes, show me my choice matters, which guided every feature decision.
Defining who we were designing for
I mapped the friction into four problems, scattered inventory, inconsistent filters, no sustainability visibility, and missed purchase windows, and tied them to one segment: the values-driven buyer who already wants to buy used but keeps losing out to slow discovery.
Onboarding
I designed a low-friction onboarding that captures categories, brands, and sizes, seeding recommendations from session one and standardizing messy store-by-store sizing into one system.
Watchlist & notifications
The heart of my work: pinning, watchlists, and a notification model of real-time drop and restock alerts, daily pinned-item updates, and lighter weekly nudges. The real challenge was cadence, enough to drive returns, restrained enough to never feel like spam, tuned with engineering against the Firebase setup.
The Recommendation experience
Recommendations prioritize pinned items and watchlists, then onboarding preferences, with a curated default list so new users never see an empty feed, and a natural place to reinforce sustainability.
The Sustainability layer
Rather than a separate "eco" tab, I embedded CO₂ and water savings directly into product details, motivating rather than preachy, a quiet, factual nudge at the point of decision. This became the feature that set Circulaire apart from a generic resale app.
Designing for constraints & scale.
Everything shipped against real limits: Firebase auth, the existing Lucene search, an MVP scoped for around 200 stores and 6 million products. Key calls on notification frequency, recommendation fallbacks, and onboarding length were tradeoffs made with engineering, which is why the system held as inventory grew.
The result
Circulaire moved from a simple search website to a personalized mobile app: accounts, watchlists, real-time alerts, recommendations, and an embedded sustainability layer.
The personalization and notification work gave users concrete reasons to come back, lifting return visits and engagement. The sustainability metrics gave eco-conscious buyers a tangible reason to choose used over new, reinforcing both retention and the company's core mission. And the architecture was built to scale: millions of products at MVP, structured to expand across multiple countries.