Ripple — Creator Partnerships App Design

Ripple lets a brand book a creator the way it buys from a store: pick a creator, send one request, approve a priced proposal, sign, and pay in phases that are held until the work is approved.

Project: Ripple — creator partnerships for brands

My role: Product designer: research, UX strategy, flows, UI, brand and motion

Platform: Mobile app, iOS and Android

Market: India first; D2C brands and Instagram and YouTube creators

Scope: Complete Product Design

Market and competitor research, MVP UX flow with edge cases, 9 high-fidelity screens, three visual variants, a brand mascot, illustrations and a 45-second flow animation

Booking a creator in India today means weeks of DMs, WhatsApp threads and bank transfers, with no protection for either side. Brands pay upfront and hope the content arrives on brief; creators do the work and then chase payment. Terms like usage rights, revisions and GST are rarely written down.

The opportunity: make a multi-deliverable creator deal as simple and safe as a checkout.

The research showed a market growing fast but served by tools that stop short of the deal. Full findings and sources are in Ripple — Market Research & MVP UX Flow.

Market: Indian influencer marketing is estimated at ₹3,000–3,500 crore in 2025, growing about 22% a year (Kofluence via Tribune).

Small creators win: 47% of brands prefer micro and nano creators (EY and Big Bang Social).

Disclosure is the most common failure: 94% of ASCI's influencer cases through November 2025 involved missing disclosure (Grynow summary).

Indian tools fall into managed agencies (Kofluence), discovery tools (Qoruz, Elev8or) and contact directories (CollabVue). Global marketplaces like Collabstr price in USD and treat each deliverable as a separate order.

The gap Ripple fills: nobody takes a multi-phase deal from request to held payment, signed terms and payout in one place.

Who it's for Ripple serves two people at once, and every screen has to be fair to both. • Rhea, the brand: founder of Ember & Oat, a small coffee roaster launching a cold brew. She wants to book one creator this month without paying for content that never arrives. • Leo, the creator: a coffee and lifestyle YouTuber with 318K subscribers. He wants clear, well-paid deals and money that's there before he starts. Design principles Five principles guided every decision.

Book like a checkout — approval lands in a cart; signing and paying are steps 2 and 3.

One thread, one record — request, proposal, signature and payment all live in the chat.

Money moves only on approval — payment is split into phases, held until the work is approved.

B2B, not social — calm, sharp-edged and precise, not swipeable.

Warmth where it counts — Rip the mascot appears only at the big moments.

Palette: ink #0B0B0C, warm base #FAFAF8, tangerine #FF5A1F for action, success green #11845B for the booking.

Type: Castio for headlines and big prices, Geist for the interface, Geist Mono for numbers.

Shape: sharp 0–2px corners throughout, to read as a precise business tool.

Photography: fashion-style portraits with a muted grade, so creators look professional rather than social.

Rip: a tangerine drop that sends out ripples. Rip waves on the proposal, celebrates the approval, guards escrow and cheers the booking.

Discover — browse creators by platform, reach and price.

Profile — check verified stats and the rate card.

Request — send one message with the package and budget.

Chat — talk it through; the proposal arrives in the thread.

Approve — review the terms and approve in a bottom sheet.

Cart — the approved deal lands in a cart with a payment plan.

Sign — sign the agreement in the app.

Pay — pick dates and pay the first phase; the money is held.

Booked — confirmation, receipt and next steps.

Ripple turns a weeks-long, risky negotiation into a nine-screen booking that takes minutes, with both sides protected.