sugar.fit / The founding chapter
When my thesis became real
A thesis about better care.
A company built to bring it to life.
I took my research to the leadership at cult. Together, we created sugar.fit as a subsidiary. I joined as the fifth employee and founding designer, with a job that reached far beyond the product: help give a new company its identity, its experience and its team.
- Employee at sugar.fit
- 5thFounding designer & Head of Design
- Design team I built
- 0 8Full-time + contract
-
The foundation
My thesis
The idea. The research.
The solution. -
The turning point
The pitch to cult
Taking the work
to leadership. -
The living output
sugar.fit
A subsidiary built
from that work.
- My role
- Founding designer & Head of Design.
- Foundation
- My MRes Healthcare & Design thesis at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London.
- Remit
- Brand, design system, product, communications, physical spaces and team building.
- This story
- The founding chapter. The detailed work will follow.
01 / From thesis to sugar.fit
Not just inspired by research.
Built from it.
My thesis began with the everyday reality of managing a chronic condition. The question wasn’t simply what a health app should do. It was how care could fit into a person’s life.
The research led to a connected service, bringing together daily routines, care and human support. That was the proposition I took to cult’s leadership.
sugar.fit was based entirely on my thesis: the original idea, the research, and the solution.
Creating the subsidiary gave that work a life beyond the thesis. Now the challenge was to build the company around it.
The thesis behind sugar.fit
Life between the check-ups
My MRes Healthcare & Design research at RCA and Imperial.
Read my thesis-
The idea
A better way to support people managing metabolic syndrome in everyday life.
-
The research
The understanding of people, routines and gaps in care developed through my thesis.
-
The solution
The service I designed in response, brought into the world through sugar.fit.
Open the full thesis and working boards in Figma (opens in a new tab)
02 / Designing a company into being
Not just the product.
The world around it.
As the fifth employee, I wasn’t stepping into an established design function. I was building one.
The job was to make sugar.fit feel like one company wherever you met it: in its identity, its product, the package in your hands or the office we worked in. I designed across that whole world, and built the design system that held it together.
Give the idea a form.
The identity, the product and the language connecting them.
-
Branding
Give it an identity.
Building sugar.fit’s brand from the ground up, shaping how a new company introduced itself.
-
Design system
Build the whole language.
Creating the complete design system, connecting visual foundations, components and interaction patterns across the product.
-
Product
Turn research into a service.
Carrying the thesis solution into product decisions and the experience people would actually use.
-
UX design
Connect the experience.
Designing the journeys and interactions that made up the service, not just a set of screens.
Take it beyond the screen.
Every expression of sugar.fit belonged to the same story.
-
Packaging
Make the physical matter.
Designing packaging as part of the experience, carrying the brand into what people could hold.
-
All collaterals
Carry the story everywhere.
Designing the full range of brand and communication collaterals, not just the digital product.
-
Office design
Make the brand a place.
Designing the office, bringing sugar.fit’s identity into the space where the team worked.
Build the team around it.
A founding role meant helping shape the company, too.
-
Investor meetings
Bring design into the room.
Being part of investor meetings as we built the company around the original idea.
-
Hiring the team
From no team to eight.
I built the design team from 0 to 8 people, across full-time and contract roles.
-
HR practices
Shape how we worked.
Setting HR practices as the company took shape, alongside hiring and design delivery.
The product was one part of the job.
Helping a company take shape was the bigger one.
03 / A few moments along the way
The people. The place.
The beginning.
The identity, the office and a few moments with the team.
Hover or focus to pause. Swipe to explore, or open a photo for a closer look.
-
A team moment -
The sugar.fit identity -
Meeting rooms -
A place to work -
The pantry -
A corner to pause -
Values on the wall -
Celebrating together
Use the left and right arrow keys to browse. Home goes to the first photo and End goes to the last. Manual navigation pauses automatic scrolling; use Play rail to resume.
04 / A beginning, not the whole story
It started with my thesis.
There was a whole company to design.