Marketplace / E-Commerce✦ Innovation

FloraLoop

Product designer and engineer on a two-sided local marketplace that moves surplus and time-sensitive floral inventory, with seller onboarding, verification, trust signals, escrow-protected pickup, and Fern, an AI assistant that guides buyers and sellers.

Duration

1 month

Team

Small start-up group

Scale

Marketplace MVP

Scope

United States

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Overview

FloraLoop is a two-sided marketplace that connects floral sellers (farms, wholesalers, and studios sitting on surplus or time-sensitive stock) with local buyers (event florists, planners, and consumers) who need fresh flowers quickly and affordably. Designed and built end to end, it tackles a problem unique to perishable goods: inventory that loses value by the hour, on both sides of the transaction.

The product covers the full journey for both sides: seller onboarding and verification, listing creation for perishable stock, buyer discovery by location and freshness, escrow-protected payment, and pickup confirmation that releases funds only once both parties are satisfied.

The Problem

Fresh flowers are one of the most perishable categories in retail. A grower or wholesaler with surplus stock has days, sometimes hours, before that inventory is worthless. Existing channels are slow, relationship-bound, and not built for time pressure.

Local florists and event planners overpay through traditional wholesalers and have little visibility into nearby surplus they could buy at a fraction of the cost.

Trust is the core barrier in any local, high-value, time-sensitive transaction. A buyer paying for flowers they have not yet seen, from a seller they do not know, needs protection. A seller releasing stock needs assurance of payment.

Both sides are time-poor and mobile-first. Onboarding, listing, and buying all have to be fast, clear, and confidence-building, or the transaction does not happen in time.

Seller Experience

Designed a guided onboarding that gets a floral business listing in minutes, not days:

Sign up and email verification, then a short, conversational setup: what type of business you are, details about your business, and where you are located.

A review step that confirms everything before going live, building seller confidence and reducing setup errors.

A seller dashboard organized around what a perishable-goods seller actually cares about: active listings, pending pickups, and payouts.

Listing creation built for speed and reuse. Because sellers relist similar stock constantly (fifty red roses this week, fifty more next week), a seller image library lets them reuse photography and republish in seconds instead of reshooting every time.

Per-unit inventory, so a seller can list a bundle once and sell multiples individually, matching how floral stock actually moves.

Buyer Experience

Discovery organized around proximity and freshness. A Near You view surfaces local sellers first, because pickup speed is everything with perishable stock.

Clear, photography-forward listings with grade and freshness signals (Premium Grade, Farm Direct) so buyers can judge quality and decide fast.

A streamlined checkout: product, payment details, order summary, and a clear pickup confirmation, all designed to remove hesitation from a time-sensitive purchase.

A buyer dashboard centered on active orders and pickup details, so the next step is always obvious.

Trust and Escrow

The defining design challenge was trust in a transaction where money changes hands before goods do, under time pressure. The solution is an escrow-protected pickup model:

Payment is captured up front but held in escrow, not released to the seller immediately.

Funds release only when pickup is confirmed, protecting the buyer from paying for stock that never arrives and the seller from non-payment.

Trust signals run throughout (verification status, clear seller information, live order and pickup state) so both parties stay oriented and confident at every step.

This is the same problem at the center of any marketplace where people make high-stakes decisions with incomplete information and real time pressure: give them accurate information, clear next steps, and structural protection, so they can act with confidence.

Fern, the AI Assistant

A two-sided marketplace lives or dies on whether new sellers and buyers find their footing fast. Fern is FloraLoop's built-in AI assistant, designed to guide both sides through onboarding and through the platform itself.

For sellers: Fern walks a new florist or farm through listing surplus stock, verification, and payouts, answering questions in context so they go live in minutes rather than getting lost in a help center.

For buyers: Fern helps people discover the right flowers nearby, understand freshness and pickup, and move through checkout and escrow with confidence.

Available throughout the experience, not only on the landing page, so help is one tap away wherever someone gets stuck.

Fern turns a two-sided marketplace's hardest problem, getting two different audiences productive quickly, into a guided conversation. It is the same human-in-the-loop, trust-building approach to AI that runs through the rest of this work: AI that supports the person, surfaces the right next step, and never gets in the way.

Building It

Designed end to end in Figma and code-first prototypes, then built as a responsive web application.

Payments and escrow implemented with Stripe (Connect for seller payouts, payment holds released on pickup confirmation).

Onboarding supported by short, silent walkthrough videos (produced programmatically with Remotion) that orient buyers and sellers right after sign-up.

Accessibility and mobile-first throughout, since both sides operate on their phones, often on the move.

Status

FloraLoop is a working marketplace in active development, with the full two-sided journey designed and built: seller onboarding and verification, listing and inventory management, buyer discovery, escrow-protected checkout, and pickup confirmation. It demonstrates end-to-end ownership of a trust-sensitive, time-critical, two-sided marketplace, from problem framing through shipped product.