Hoala

Dating apps have a strange way of failing even when they work. Hoala’s founder, Dezzi McCausland, had watched the same pattern play out for years: you swipe, you match, you meet in a pub, and if you’re lucky one of those drinks turns into a relationship. Nothing else in your life gets better along the way. The idea was a date just as likely to be yoga, pottery or a bike ride, inside a community that helps people grow whether or not they find a partner.

That ambition came with a trap. Wellness tips easily into cheap, cutesy or too zen, and dating tips into skin deep. Hoala needed to feel desirable and a little exclusive while staying warm, inclusive and genuinely good for you.

We started with the brand platform: who Hoala is, what it believes, what it does and where it stands. The belief was simple and a little defiant. Dating decisions shouldn’t be transactional. The promise followed from it, to help health-conscious people become the best version of themselves through ideas, activities and connections, and it became the line that greets members on the app’s launch screen.

The platform drew hard lines around the brand. Hoala is authentic, radiant and stylish, never shallow, cheap or over-sexualised. It also gave the product its sharpest positioning: the dating app for people who hate dating apps, designed not to be deleted. Underneath sits the idea that holds everything together, wellbeing as seven pillars: physical, emotional, social, intellectual, spiritual, occupational and environmental.

Rather than illustrate wellness with stock smiles, we built Hoala a world. Each pillar became a sculptural 3D piece in stone, copper and timber, peopled with tiny figures: a heart full of rooms and staircases for physical wellbeing, an orbiting atom for social, a stepped garden under a glowing disc for spiritual. A second set of renders gave form to sixteen personality types, each a cut-open sphere hiding its own mechanism.

The same thinking shaped the brand film. The brief opens on the drudge of the past year and the shallowness of most dating, with worn stone structures, broken rat-race wheels and Penrose steps, before light breaks in and the structures crack to reveal a glowing rose-gold form. The script lands on a single thought: rebirth is just the beginning.

The app carries the same calm. We designed every screen in a light and a dark mode, with soft clay-like surfaces, warm gradients and a single bronze button that always tells you where to tap. A date wheel spins up something to do together, an open-air yoga class rather than another round at the pub. The events and benefits feed brings the community off the screen, and each wellness pillar has its own page of events, content and partner offers.

For V1 we took the design to a full working prototype in both modes. We trimmed onboarding so it asks only what matters, reworked matching so people can say yes or no quickly but are nudged to read a whole profile before a super like, and added a teetotal badge for members who don’t drink. Dezzi then planned to test the prototype with 500 people from Hoala’s target audience before the next phase.

The partnership went beyond the product. We structured Hoala’s investor deck, and ran a workshop with Dezzi to shape its membership levels. By 2023 Hoala was presenting itself to investors as a wellbeing, relationship and lifestyle app with exclusive events, curated partner benefits and tiered memberships, all built on the brand and product foundations we designed together.