Zilo

Zilo's founders, ex-Flipkart and Myntra, had a clear thesis: quick-commerce applied to fashion. Curated styles from top brands, delivered in under 60 minutes. The opportunity wasn't logistics. Faster delivery had arrived; the shopping experience hadn't.

Myntra, Ajio, and their peers share the same assumptions: surface everything, let filters do the work, accept high returns as the cost of doing business. Four structural failures, and no major player had solved any.

Before designing anything, the team audited Myntra, Ajio, Nykaa Fashion, and Tata CLiQ. The assumption baked into every one of them was the same: more SKUs, better filters, returns are an unavoidable cost. The way Indian shoppers actually browse, by occasion, by mood, by trend, wasn't reflected anywhere in the tab bar.

We also pulled references from outside the category: editorial magazines (Vogue, GQ India), Nordstrom's curated lookbooks, the way Pinterest treats outfits. The pattern across all of them was the same: people browse fashion like inspiration, not inventory.

At Pineapple, I worked across the full 0→1 build: branding exploration, UX, UI, and dev-ready files. Agency work moves in phases: brand first, UX in parallel, then UI. I contributed across all three alongside a brand lead and a senior UX designer, and owned UI end-to-end. No prior system. Everything from scratch in 4–8 weeks, Android and iOS.

The four category problems don't map 1:1 to four features. Home Trials answers returns and try-before-buy in a single move. The anxiety that drives scheduled delivery is resolved by a reliable, guaranteed 60-minute window. That left two bets the brief didn't ask for but the product needed: Ask Zilo, and a post-purchase surface that shipped with the MVP.

High return rates in fashion aren't a logistics problem. They're a confidence problem. The standard response is better size guides or peer reviews. Home Trials goes further: shoppers order multiple sizes, try them at home, return the rest, all in the same 60-minute window. A style runner waits up to 30 minutes; the delivery only completes once the user confirms.

This required a new decision layer on the product page. The size selector surfaces a Home Trial affordance with its own framing (“Introducing home trials”) that attacks the anxiety at exactly the moment it exists, before the user abandons. The cart distinguishes trial and standard shipments. The post-purchase surface handles the return without friction.

Every major fashion app treats discovery as a filtering problem, but the way people shop (“I need something for a rooftop dinner”) doesn't map to any filter combination. We rebuilt discovery around editorial structures.

The home has a Daily Planner that organises by occasion (Wellness & Yoga, Party Ready), not by category. A Lookbook does the mix-and-match work. Trend Radar gives seasonal context to what's in stock. Discover became its own destination, not an alternative to search.

The bet: if the editorial layer is good enough, users will browse Zilo the way they browse a magazine, not the way they mine a catalogue.

Even with curated surfaces, there are moments when a shopper knows what they want but can't describe it in filter terms. Ask Zilo lives in the tab bar, with equal weight to Home and Shop, not buried in a help menu.

The design decision was placement and framing. A tab-bar slot with its own 60-min badge signals that AI-assisted discovery is a product pillar, not a chatbot. It doubles as an escape hatch from the PLP: “Don't want to scroll 475 items? Ask Zilo.” An honest acknowledgement of catalogue size, turned into a feature moment.

Building a 0→1 product means constant pressure to cut scope. Post-purchase flows don't drive acquisition; they're the first thing to defer. But in quick-commerce, the first order is rarely profitable. The business only works on the second purchase and the third.

We treated the post-buy surface as a retention product. The bag distinguishes Home Trial and standard shipments. Live tracking surfaces ETA in minutes, not date ranges. Order history is searchable by status. It shipped at launch because the quick-commerce argument depended on it.

Homepage, brands, looks, trends, product detail. Scroll each page in full to see how the editorial voice carries from entry surface to checkout.

Four design responses will only carry a product so far. The challenge was making a fashion-commerce app feel different from everything else in the category, and that answer wasn't one breakthrough. It came from one consistent mark.

The slash starts in the wordmark (Z/LO) and carries through as a typographic voice (/Ask Zilo, /store, /door), and as a separator in feature strips. A two-accent palette (deep plum, acid lime, with hot pink reserved for urgency) reads as editorial rather than transactional. Photography is campaign-quality, not catalogue grids. Illustration is warmer, flat-with-shadow, used only on soft moments (empty states, confirmations) to keep the editorial register undiluted.

The MVP shipped in under 8 weeks on Android and iOS: branding, all core flows, dev-ready files, from a blank canvas. Zilo launched and found product-market fit. A $4.5M seed co-led by Info Edge Ventures and Chiratae Ventures closed shortly after; a $15.3M Series A led by Peak XV Partners followed in 2026.

The design wasn't the reason investors backed Zilo, but it was the product they saw. We built the case that Zilo could fix what Chiratae themselves had named as broken.

Eight weeks teaches you to commit. Define a new category by what to leave out, anchor it with four design responses that frame the experience, then bind it under one identity. That isn't just a Zilo recipe. It's a way of working under pressure, and it's the part I take to every ambiguous brief now: the next fog feels less like fog and more like a sequence.