Project: Thread Role: Product Designer & Front-end Web Developer Date: 2014–2016 Website: thread.com Description: Thread is an online styling service, currently only for men in the UK, that joins the world’s best fashion stylists and Artificial Intelligence in a single platform to give users personal styling for free. Thread is a YC’11 start-up founded by Kieran O’Neill, Benjamin Phillips and Ben Kucsan. I joined the team in 2014 as a product designer and worked alongside some of with the smartest people I’ve met so far.

At Thread, we defined the long term vision for the company and broke it down into product, operations, styling and marketing goals. While I was part of the Thread product team, I would take on one of these challenge every week and set it as a weekly goal.

A typical week at Thread would include brainstorming and sketching on Monday, visual design and critics on Tuesday, prototyping and testing on Wednesday, development and testing on Thursday and Friday. Every Friday we would demo the work done and some of these solutions would be shipped on Monday the following week.

Thread users visit Thread from their mobile more and more over time devices, however internally we always had the habit of designing thinking on the desktop browser first. So in this project we looked at what the ideal mobile experience would be like and how we could reshape our design and development process to fit a mobile-first approach.

We started by tackling this challenge by designing a native iOS experience of Thread. We built a wireframe prototype and asked users to visit our office to use it. After a few interviews, everyone in the team felt like this was an improvement over the current experience.

We also explored a different direction, that focused on systematizing our web experience to be more modular and targeted for mobile browsers. We called this new system Thread Whitechapel. It included new type styles, new touch interactions, new guidelines for flows and page content, and a new set of standard HTML components.



This resulted not only in a better mobile experience, but it also allowed us to design and develop faster while keeping our visual language consistent.

Thread has a powerful recommendation engine that helps match the outfits each stylist makes to each client preferences, but when the stylists are away we can’t generate these recommendations for the users. So how should Thread work when this is the case?

At the time, stylists could use the Thread engine to find clothing items and users could receive recommendations from stylists. But a channel between the user and the Thread engine was missing. During the first week, myself and Dan Palmer explored how an experience of using Thread’s engine without having the stylist involved would look like to users.

We developed the concept of a curated store. Imagine a clothing line, made of the amount of items a person can realistically own. A curated wardrobe. We wanted an experience similar to walking to a clothing store and seeing only new items that you would love. This became Thread Browse.



Thread has thousands of items and there are thousands of online stores with thousands of items that are irrelevant to their users. Thread Browse is the curated shopping experience for when your personal stylist isn’t available. Designs show the items categorized by outer to inner-most clothing, and a limited number of results is displayed below. All matching the user preferences.