09 / B2B marketplace
Hippy Market.
The problem
Cannabis accessory and hemp wellness brands sold wholesale the slow way. A brand might have hundreds of retailer relationships, and each one lived in a spreadsheet, an email thread or a phone call. Orders were typed in by hand. Inventory sat in one system, invoices in another, and nobody could see how the whole business was doing.
Payments made it harder. Cannabis adjacent businesses have legal and operational limits that general B2B platforms were never built around, so the tools brands could buy off the shelf did not fit. Retailers had their own version of the problem: finding vetted brands and ordering from several of them meant repeating the same checkout again and again.
A good result needed a seller tool a small brand could set up without a developer, and a buying experience a shop owner could use in a few minutes.
The approach
I started with the paper trail brands already used, then designed the seller and buyer sides together so one order could pass cleanly between them.
- 01
Mapping the wholesale routine
Before drawing screens I wrote out what a brand actually did to take one wholesale order, from the email that started it to the invoice that closed it. That map showed where hours went: re-keying orders, chasing payment, answering inventory questions. I used it to decide what the first version had to replace and what could wait.
Mapping one order from email to invoice showed where the hours went. That became the test for what the first version had to replace and what could wait. - 02
Brand storefronts
A brand page had to work as both a shop window and a place to reorder. I gave it a banner and logo for identity, then put rating, delivery window and ship-from location next to the name, and a free shipping threshold above the products. Reorder and Message sit beside the title so a repeat buyer needs one click.
A brand storefront. - 03
The retailer marketplace
Retailers needed to browse across brands without feeling lost, so the marketplace groups products by brand, each with a link to more from that brand, under a single row of category filters. I kept the cards plain, with price and MSRP side by side, so the margin is visible without opening anything.
The retailer marketplace. - 04
One cart for many brands
The multi-vendor cart was the hardest screen to get right. Each brand keeps its own block with its own minimum, shipping and delivery estimate, and an order can pass the free shipping line for one brand and not another. I put the minimum and shipping status in small tags so a buyer sees what is blocking checkout before pressing it.
The multi-vendor cart. - 05
Insights for brands
The dashboard started from the questions a brand owner asked me: how much came in, how much of it was profit, and who keeps coming back. I put total revenue and a comparison line at the top, then single figure cards for profit, profit rate and customer growth, with a time range switch above all of it.
Insights dashboard for brands. - 06
Marketing site and pitch deck
Because I was also writing the front-end code, I built the marketing site from the same components as the product, so the screens in the hero are the real ones. I then used the product screens to build the pitch deck and the go-to-market materials, which kept the story the same everywhere.
The pitch deck.
The solution
Hippy Market has two faces on one design system. Brands get an automated storefront they can set up in minutes, a place to manage orders, invoices and retailers, messaging, and an insights dashboard. Retailers get a marketplace of vetted brands, one cart that holds orders from several of them, and Net-30 payment terms processed in a compliant way.
The idea that held it together was treating the brand page as the unit of everything. A brand's page is its storefront, the thing retailers browse, the block inside the cart and the source of its analytics. Once that was settled, the seller tools and the buyer marketplace could share layout, labels and components, and a change on one side showed up correctly on the other.
What I delivered
- Brand identity and logo
- Seller tools with automated storefront creation
- Buyer marketplace and multi-vendor cart
- Analytics dashboards and messaging
- Responsive marketing site and front-end code
- Pitch deck and go-to-market materials
Value added
For people using it
Brands stopped running wholesale out of spreadsheets and inboxes and could open a storefront in minutes. Retailers could find vetted brands and place one order across several of them, with payment terms that suited how shops actually buy.
For the business
A platform built for the legal and operational limits of this market gave the company a product that general B2B tools could not match. The pitch deck and marketing site told the same story as the product, which helped with brands and with investors.
For the team
Writing the front-end myself meant fewer handoff questions and a build that matched the designs. Backend engineers could work against screens that were already settled, and the API integration moved without long design reviews.
The result
Hippy Market is live with customers. Before launch, 280+ brands joined the waitlist and 1,000+ retailers expressed interest, and over 90% of all brands in the space have since joined.
Results
- 280+brands on the pre-launch waitlist
- 1,000+retailers interested
- 90%+of all the brands in the space have joined
What I took from it
Doing design and front-end together shortened every decision, because I could see at once what a layout would cost to build. On the next marketplace I would draw the cart and the payment states before anything else, since that is where trust is won or lost.