Work

Hedira:
Happy plants, happy people

Branding, design and product innovation to save the world's houseplants

The words 'STOP KILLING YOUR HOUSEPLANTS' in white text above the Hedira logo, superimposed on an illustrated leafy background.

outputs:

  • Brand + visual identity
  • Smartphone app
  • Website

About Hedira

Houseplants are nice, but they die a lot. Hedira helps them stay alive by reminding you to look after them, based on what they are, where in your house they live, what the weather’s like, and a whole load of other inputs.

I helped Jess and Ben, the founders of Hedira, launch the first version of their app as a lockdown side hustle, and we liked each other so much that I ended up joining as a co-founder. We worked together on evolving and monetising the app, then made an early exit in 2021, selling the business to Subpod.

An app screen showing information about a rubber plant, including its Latin name and what it likes and doesn't like.
An app screen showing somebody giving their new plant a name. This is proven to increase plant health.
An app screen showing care actions for three plants - one needs dryness testing, another might need repotting, and a third needs misting.
An app screen with a yellow tick on a leafy background, and the words 'You've completed your plantcare for the day'.

The app had already launched as an alpha when I got involved, so we had plenty of insight around what it wasn't doing that it should, and what it was doing, but should do better.

For the full release we worked hard on perfecting features from the alpha, based on feedback. I designed super-simple flows for onboarding, adding plants, and completing the most important care tasks, so we could be sure our new users’ indoor gardens would flourish.

The Hedira logo, a stylised yellow and orange leaf next to the word HEDIRA in a white, wide typeface. The strapline 'Plants are for life' sits underneath in smaller yellow sans-serif text. The whole thing is on a leafy background.

The alpha also gave us lots of good ideas around how people relate to their houseplants, and where Hedira could fit into that at a brand level.

Most of our users wanted a jungle in their living room, but found it hard to deal with the day-to-day needs of their plants. I designed a brand that brings the jungle of the mind alive through rich, characterful illustration, balanced against crystal clear interfaces that make repetitive tasks feel rewarding and complex ones feel easy.

An app screen showing a healthcheck prompt, giving you an opportunity to say if your plant isn't looking so great.
An app screen for a new journal entry, with a place to add a photo, a 5-segment bar to record general plant health, and a couple of checkboxes for extra details.
An app screen showing a symptom selector. If your plant's sick, you select the relevant symptoms to see a list of possible conditions and care instructions to fix them.

The full launch built massive momentum, thanks to a rapidly expanding plant database, a nuanced care algorithm, a beautiful brand experience, and nobody being able to have any fun because of lockdown

We immediately got to work on phase two, introducing cool new stuff as part of a monetised Hedira Pro proposition. I designed features to help horticulturists automatically ID plants from photos, diagnose health problems, and create stop-motion videos tracking the growth of their babies.

A lot of things about looking after plants are actually pretty boring - there’s lots of touching soil and misting, basically - so it was really important to celebrate success.

Our leafy illustrations came in really handy for creating moments of reward, and marking milestones in our users’ relationship with Hedira and their plants.

An illustration of a Hedira membership card on a yellow lanyard, against a leafy background.
The homepage of the Hedira product site, with a big headline saying 'Hedira helps you remember to look after your plants'.

Obviously we needed a product site too. As a bootstrapped startup we had some tight resource and time constraints, so I designed and built a simple site in Wix (ugh) in two days flat. It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it.

“Robb really took Hedira to the next level. He’s the most talented product designer I know, and I loved working with him.”

Jess Saumarez
Co-founder, Hedira

Honourable mentions

Hedira was all Jess Saumarez’s idea, and she did an amazing job growing our database of plants and marketing the app. Ben Howes was galaxy brain who turned it into a thing that actually worked. And that was it. Three people, sitting in their houses, making magic happen.

See for yourself

Inevitably, there have been some changes to Hedira since it was acquired. You can still download it though - visit the product site, or find it on Google Play or the Apple App Store.

Let's make something

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Whatever it is, let's make it great. 
Get in touch.

hello@orke.design
+44 (0) 7736 459421

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