Children grow, interests change and yesterday’s favourite toy can quickly find itself forgotten at the bottom of a cupboard. Whirli offers an alternative, allowing families to rent toys through a subscription, swap them when they’re ready for something new and keep the ones they love.
But Whirli was evolving. Alongside its established subscription service, the business was introducing opportunities to purchase new and preloved toys, sell unwanted toys back and participate in a more circular approach to consumption. The existing website struggled to explain the original subscription model, let alone accommodate these additional services.
We were appointed to rethink the entire user ecommerce UX design. Our responsibility was extensive UX research, journey mapping, information architecture and creative design, establishing how several different commercial models could work together within one engaging digital experience.
Heartbeat
At the centre of the project was a deceptively complicated question- how do you make renting, buying and selling toys feel like natural parts of the same experience?
Our discovery work revealed that Whirli’s existing customers loved the service once they understood it. However, new visitors often struggled with subscription tiers, tokens, pricing and the mechanics of returning toys. Introducing a marketplace risked making an already unfamiliar proposition even harder to navigate. We explored the needs of different audiences, including first-time parents, existing subscribers, occasional shoppers, gift buyers and families looking to sell toys. Each had different motivations, but they all needed to understand their options quickly and confidently.
Rather than designing individual pages in isolation, we mapped the experience around complete customer journeys. This informed everything from the homepage and navigation to product discovery, subscription selection, product detail pages, account management and the new marketplace. Particular attention went into the relationship between renting toys through a subscription, purchasing forever toys and selling toys back to Whirli. We developed a consistent design approach that could accommodate these different decisions while keeping the wider experience connected.
We also wanted the website to feel much more like the world of play. Working with Whirli’s existing identity, we developed an extensive visual design system that introduced greater warmth, personality and energy. Playful interactions, engaging imagery, clearer product information and stronger visual storytelling helped balance the practicalities of ecommerce with the excitement of discovering something new.
Sustainability was another important consideration. We explored opportunities to communicate the environmental benefits of toy rotation throughout the experience, making the positive impact of keeping toys in circulation easier for families to understand.
Impact
Our work delivered a comprehensive UX and website design solution, establishing how Whirli’s expanding services could operate together within a single digital platform. The designs addressed the complexity of subscription management, product discovery and ecommerce while introducing dedicated experiences for buying and selling toys. A flexible design system provided consistency across the website, with the freedom to accommodate new products, services and future developments.
Crucially, the work gave Whirli a more intuitive way to communicate its circular business model, helping families understand the choices available to them and encouraging toys to stay in play for longer. The resulting website now brings subscription rental, toy purchases and sell-back services together within the Whirli experience.
