The story

Candide Gardening combines several key features:

• A ticketing system for garden attractions (including major venues like The Eden Project)

• A community forum for horticultural advice, plant care troubleshooting, and success stories

• A plant identification tool within the mobile app

• A growing base of amateur and professional gardeners across the UK

Within the forums, users were naturally organising informal plant swaps - exchanging cuttings, seedlings, and rare varietals. This organic behaviour revealed a bigger opportunity:
people wanted a way to exchange value, not just tips.

To explore the opportunity, I conducted extensive user interviews with UK growers, ranging from hobbyists to specialist cultivators.

What we learned:

• Expert growers are deeply proud of their work.
  They invest years in propagation, grafting, and caring for rare plants.

• They do not want to associate their craftsmanship with low-value, mass-produced plants found on Amazon, eBay, or imported wholesale from Europe.

• They dislike spending time on admin-heavy online sales.
  Their passion and expertise live in their greenhouses, not behind a keyboard.

• Their biggest unmet need:
  A way to reach committed, appreciative buyers without undermining the value of their plants or diluting their personal reputations.

Our challenge was to create a marketplace that respected:

• their craft

• their time

• their dignity

• and the uniqueness of what they offer

- while still supporting hobbyists and encouraging community interaction.

We had an informal swap culture already flourishing:
people requesting plant IDs, exchanging tips, solving diseases, and trading cuttings.

But with the rise of indoor gardening during COVID-19:

• Demand for rare and unusual plants increased sharply

• Professional growers had no foot traffic

• Many enthusiasts wanted to support local, high-quality growers

• People were spending more time online, but growers didn’t want to run stores

This presented a clear opportunity for Candide to:

• connect a growing buyer demand with

• a struggling but passionate seller base in a way that

• preserved growers’ reputation and product value.

The goal was to transition from a simple community swap into a purpose-built marketplace that:

• Maintained the warmth and friendliness of the forum

• Elevated professional growers rather than flattening them into a generic market

• Made it effortless to sell without intensive admin

• Offered a trustworthy shopping experience for buyers

Key design principles:

1. Respect the grower
   Present their work as high-value, hand-nurtured, and unique.

2. Reduce admin friction
   Make listing, pricing, and messaging extremely lightweight.

3. Preserve community culture
   Keep the forum spirit alive - storytelling, advice, beautiful photos.

4. Support discovery
   Allow users to browse by rarity, care level, seller expertise, and location.

As Lead Product Designer, I owned the end-to-end process:

• Conducted user interviews with growers, home gardeners, and buyers

• Synthesised insights into opportunity areas

• Created journey maps, marketplace workflows, and forum-to-marketplace transitions

• Designed the complete marketplace experience (web + app)

• Facilitated cross-functional workshops

• Collaborated with engineering, business stakeholders, and community moderators

• Defined a tone of voice that communicated premium quality while remaining friendly and accessible

For Growers

• Quick listing creation with minimal data entry

• Optional “premium grower” identity badges verified by Candide

• Profile pages featuring their story, growing methods, and plant specialities

• Automatic price suggestions based on plant rarity

• Integrated messaging with templated responses

For Buyers

• Browsing by rarity, size, light requirements, difficulty, and seller expertise

• Plant care guidance integrated with the marketplace listing

• A story-driven layout (“Meet the grower”, “How this plant was raised”)

• Seamless transition from plant ID (“What is this plant?”) to marketplace recommendations

For the Community

• Forum posts could be instantly linked to marketplace listings

• Encouraged a culture of sharing → trading → purchasing

• Kept local and ethical growing at the heart of the brand

For Growers

• Provided a new revenue channel during lockdown

• Elevated the craftsmanship of UK growers

• Reduced reliance on foreign-imported plants

• Gave pride and visibility to expert growers who had never sold online

For Buyers

• Access to rare and ethically grown plants

• A trusted, curated alternative to mass-market retailers

• A sense of connection to growers and to the wider gardening community

For Candide

• Increased time-on-platform

• New business model and revenue stream

• Strengthened market differentiation through authenticity and community

• Increased cross-channel usage between app (plant ID) and web (marketplace)

This project was an exercise in:

• community-centred product design

• sensitive marketplace positioning

• and designing for users with deep pride in their craft

By respecting the needs and values of both growers and hobbyists, we built a marketplace that was not only functional - but culturally and emotionally aligned with the people it served.

It transformed Candide Gardening from a passive community forum into an ecosystem where people could share, learn, support, and trade, all within one platform.