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Closed, done, or dormant work records.
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Directory of C:\ARCHIVES [READ-ONLY]
[DIR] Basileia 2023 - 2025 (EXITED)
└── A personal care brand I bootstrapped from a kitchen. Fifteen products formulated by hand, trademark registered, supply quotes with resorts, orders shipped to five countries. The trademark itself is a crowned B wrapped in florals, which is a fancier sentence than anything else about how this business actually ran. I also ran soap-making workshops for women starting their own thing, and once sold out a table at a university exhibition before I'd even finished the branding. I exited by transferring the stock and the business to another local founder instead of letting it go quiet.
└─► [ READ CASE STUDY ]

It started with frustration, not ambition.

In 2021, nothing on the market seemed to work for my skin. Most things made it worse before they made it better, if they made it better at all. So I started reading ingredient lists and learning formulation because I didn’t have much choice.

A small store called Conscious Life introduced me to handmade skincare. I found the woman making the products and started asking questions. Those conversations changed how I thought about formulation.

I started making my own. First for myself. Then for friends. Then family, who became an increasingly unwilling product testing department.

A friend eventually told me to sell the stuff. I didn’t take it seriously until I had fifteen products sitting around and realised I had accidentally built a brand.

It became Basileia.

The trademark is a crowned B wrapped in florals, registered in India. Still one of the better pieces of design I’ve made.

I met a manufacturer early on who supplied skincare to five-star hotels across India. He walked me through formulations, certifications and the parts of the industry that aren’t visible when you’re standing at home making soap.

The business grew without advertising.

Gift hampers reached customers in five countries through word of mouth and Instagram posts I made myself. A golf resort asked for a formal quote for 75,000 units, worth more than $11,000. An investor offered to fund a full factory setup.

I turned that down.

Not because it wasn’t interesting. I already knew I was moving to Dubai, and I didn’t want to build a factory in India that I couldn’t stay around to run.

There were smaller things that made the whole experiment feel real. I was invited to present at a university exhibition before I’d even finished the branding. Everything sold out. A workshop held in a church brought in customers who kept coming back.

I also started teaching other women soap making and formulation. Some went on to start small businesses of their own.

When the move to Dubai became real, I didn’t want Basileia to simply stop existing. I found a woman already running a small clothing brand who wanted to expand into skincare and handed everything over: stock, raw materials, equipment and formulas.

We did the knowledge transfer over video calls before I left the country.

Basileia didn’t end. It just stopped being mine.

[DIR] Happy Zoned 2024 (ARCHIVED)
└── Mobile sleeping pods for budget stays in Dubai, priced simply: shared bunks by the night, the whole caravan by the week. It ran straight into GCC zoning rules before it ran into much else. I archived it rather than fight the regulation, and kept a very specific education in how regional compliance kills good ideas early. Markets like New Zealand and Australia are friendlier to this kind of thing, so it's shelved, not dead.
└─► [ READ CASE STUDY ]

Dubai’s rental market is pretty straightforward. You either rent an apartment, or you don’t.

I wanted to see if there was something in between.

The idea was mobile sleeping pods made from caravans. Bunk beds, simple pricing, and a lot less money than a hotel.

  • AED 50 a night for a bunk.
  • AED 5,000 a week for the whole caravan.

Each unit would cost around AED 24,000 to build, so the numbers looked good enough to explore.

I ended up designing the caravans myself. Not just what they looked like, but where the water tanks would go, how the generator would be stored, and how the tow hitch would work with different vehicles.

The plan was to start in Dubai and eventually take them to Ras Al Khaimah, Abu Dhabi and Fujairah, then possibly Saudi and Oman. Anywhere people needed somewhere to stay without paying hotel prices.

The problem was that mobile housing wasn’t exactly something the GCC had a neat category for. Zoning, permits, approvals. Everything took longer than expected.

I also had conversations with quite a few investors along the way. The more we looked into it, the more complicated it became. There were too many moving parts before we could even get to the part where the caravans actually moved.

The timing wasn’t right either. So I decided to chuck the idea into the archive rather than spend the next few years arguing with paperwork.

I still think the idea works. Just probably not everywhere. New Zealand and Australia were interesting markets to me because movable accommodation is already much more familiar there. Rising housing costs also make flexible, movable spaces worth looking at.

Happy Zoned is still sitting in the archive. Maybe I’ll build it one day. Just probably somewhere with fewer forms.

[FILE] The Nature Hub
└── A fifteen-zone agri-leisure and education destination for a golf resort. Spatial layouts, revenue models, vendor database, and event packages priced for real budgets. My favourite kind of problem: physical space, real constraints, no software.
[FILE] Genista Biosciences
└── UX for a food-safety monitoring platform. Owned the design system and the analytics work, tested and cut down over repeated rounds with actual lab users, the kind of people who will tell you exactly what's wrong with your interface and not soften it.
[FILE] No-Code and Low-Code Era
└── Worked across Editor X, Locofy, and a handful of other companies building in this space. Active in the communities themselves too, not just the products. Answered roughly a hundred technical questions a week from a two thousand member developer community, and built free indie tools and templates for people in the space to use. Also consulted for a few early-stage startups building through 2021 to 2023.
[FILE] UX Design Studio (2020 - 2021)
└── Five web and mobile products designed end to end through lockdown, from user interviews to prototype, across a community SaaS platform, a real estate company, and a web3 research company. The community platform was about giving people a place to express themselves without feeling judged, something other platforms never quite let you do without feeling exposed. It also helped people find mentors and coaches they'd never otherwise meet, and book 1:1 and group calls that actually went somewhere. One of the other projects was an app for apartment owners, so they could track construction progress and book their kitchen without ever calling anyone. Learned how to run user research on people you never meet in person, which was most of them.
[FILE] Open Destinations (2019 - 2020)
└── Engineering on Tineri, a mobile itinerary platform for tour operators. Ionic 3 and Ruby on Rails, working on core modules of a real enterprise system.
[FILE] IFB Industries
└── An auto on/off circuit for a washing machine. Microcontroller code that shut the display down when nobody was standing there, because idle power adds up across a million units.
[FILE] BOLT IoT Evangelist
└── Taught IoT and machine learning to people who had never soldered anything, mostly by building the thing with them.
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