Soho House / Replatforming, UX & digital brand
A sense of belonging.
Even online.
Replatforming Sohohouse.com to Sitecore, bringing the warmth and character of the Houses into the online experience.
- Role
- Lead product designer
- Timeline
- 3 months
- The work
- Sitecore discovery & delivery · UX · Digital brand
Project outputs at a glance
Distinct creative directions for the digital brand.
User goals prioritised through discovery and mindsets.
A component-based foundation for the group’s digital sites.
Discovery and delivery for the Sitecore move, with two creative directions explored through a brand workshop.
Many ways in.
Research & discovery
UX & reusable templates
Connecting People
A Bastion of CreativityMore than
a new website.
Soho House was moving Sohohouse.com to Sitecore and wanted its online experience to feel closer to visiting one of its Houses. The replatforming was an opportunity to improve the UX and evolve the digital brand, from finding information to expressing the character of the spaces.
As lead product designer, I worked across discovery and delivery over three months, connecting user needs, reusable templates and an evolved digital language. Two brand workshop concepts explored how the warmth, creativity and sense of belonging of the Houses could come through online.
Understand the needs.
Then find the expression.
Start with people.
Give the work direction.
Discovery brought users, contributors and competitor references into the same conversation. A POINT exercise, benchmarking and user mindsets helped establish the priorities for a first release.
The purpose was to give the redesign a clear starting point before moving into templates and visual concepts.
Listen & learn
A POINT exercise with existing users and site contributors.
Look beyond the current site
Competitor analysis and a benchmarking review.
Set the priorities
User mindsets and goals to inform the first release.
A shared structure.
Room for difference.
The next step was to identify templates built from a specially designed suite of components. The intention was a set of patterns flexible enough for the group’s different sites, with a structure that could scale.
The move to Sitecore gave this work a practical foundation. Templates and components connected the discovery priorities to delivery, supporting a more coherent experience across the group’s sites.
Keep what feels familiar.
Open up what comes next.
With the foundations established, the focus shifted to the brand. Existing elements, including the House icons, became starting points for a refreshed digital expression.
Two concepts explored different aspects of Soho House: the connections between people and the creativity found within its spaces.
One brief.
Two ways to feel at home.
Connecting
People.
A visual idea built around the connections made within, and through, Soho House.
A connection that
makes room.
The identity reduces Soho House to its initials, joined by a bar that can extend to fit its space. Connection becomes the organising idea, rather than simply a line in the story.
The applications below explore how that device could carry across the brand and its digital touchpoints.
A Bastion
of Creativity.
A more editorial direction, using photography and writing to suggest the experience of being there.
A few details.
A story of your own.
This direction pairs photography with creative writing. A setting, a detail and an emotion combine into a story, leaving room for the viewer’s own interpretation.
Where the first concept makes connection explicit, this one explores atmosphere. The work below shows how those fragments could become a distinctive digital expression.
From how it works
to how it feels.
The Sitecore replatforming brought together discovery and delivery: clearer journeys and reusable templates, supported by a digital language closer to the experience of the Houses.
The two creative directions remain workshop explorations. They show how the research could inform different expressions of the same ambition: making Soho House feel like Soho House, online.