Hoop Industries ltd.

Hoop is a search marketplace built around a simple belief: amazing things happen when families get out of the house. The app helps parents discover, book and attend activities for children from babies to school age, while giving organisers a free platform to list and promote their sessions. Hoop lists around 90,000 activities a week, has 1.2 million installs, and is named one of Apple’s best apps two years running. Institutions like the V&A and the British Museum use it to promote their family programmes alongside solo operators running baby music classes in church halls.

The product has two sides. Hoop for Families is a consumer iOS and Android app. Hoop for Organisers is a web platform where activity providers create listings, manage sessions, and eventually take bookings. Getting those two sides to work together, at different scales and with different levels of technical confidence, is the central design challenge for most of my time there.

I joined as Lead Designer in January 2015 and left in November 2019. In that time I designed the brand identity, the consumer app, the organiser platform, the marketing site and emails, internal tooling, design guidelines, and pattern libraries. I recruited and mentored a junior designer as the team scaled. Hoop wound down in early 2020 when COVID hit.