A B2B gifting platform, designed from zero

Swish helps companies give gifts to their employees and customers. Before this project, that meant a manual, fragmented process: HR managers working through Swish’s account managers by phone and email, with no self-service and no visibility into where their gift campaigns stood. Competitors were starting to offer digital alternatives, and the business case was clear: build a platform that lets companies run gift campaigns themselves.

I was the sole product designer, working closely with the product manager who owned the brief and a UI designer responsible for the illustration system. The platform has launched and is being used by its first wave of business clients.

Designing what does not exist yet

This was a true 0 to 1: no prior product, no internal reference point, and no existing users to interview. Research meant a competitive benchmark of gift and reward platforms internationally, walked end to end from both the admin’s and the recipient’s side. The pattern across competitors was consistent: they either oversimplified the admin experience and lost important controls, or buried HR managers in complexity. The opening was a flow that felt guided and lightweight while exposing the right control at the right moment.

The PRD was a starting point, not a script. Translating it into real flows surfaced edge cases and logic conflicts that were not visible in the written brief, and several structural changes I proposed were adopted back into the product brief.

One interface, three personas

The platform serves three fundamentally different users: Swish account managers, who run activities and budgets across many client organizations; HR managers, who build their own gift campaigns within pre-allocated budgets; and employees, who receive a branded gift selection website and pick their gift.

The strategic decision was one unified flow rather than two separate products. Every screen was designed for both admin tiers at once: account managers get extra controls (budget creation, a multi-client dashboard, an advanced configuration panel), while HR managers get a focused version of the same interface that feels complete rather than restricted.

Campaign creation itself is a six-step flow: selecting gifts, designing the page, writing a greeting, confirming the budget, choosing recipients, and scheduling delivery. The steps carry heavy interdependency, since the gifts chosen in step one constrain everything downstream, from the budget confirmed in step four to the delivery schedule, so mapping and communicating that logic was the core of the design work. Budget gating got the same treatment: instead of blocking HR managers up front, the flow lets them explore and build first, with budget as a natural checkpoint rather than a wall.

Outcomes

• A B2B SaaS platform designed 0 to 1, now live with its first business clients
• One flow serving multiple organizational personas, with permission levels that feel natural rather than restrictive
• A six-step creation flow handling complex budget, recipient, and scheduling logic
• A product brief reshaped by design: structural changes that started as flow explorations