Turning the Sky TV from a content destination into a platform. Where every subscription, partner, tier and piece of hardware sits one click away from the screen the household is already watching.
Sky's relationship with its customers had been mostly one-directional. The customer paid for Sky. Sky delivered Sky. Anything outside that line, adding a sports pack, switching a tier, picking up a partner subscription, buying hardware, happened somewhere else. The phone. The call centre. Sky.com, opened on a laptop in the kitchen.
The brief was to change the shape of the relationship.
Make Sky the ultimate content aggregator. Position Sky as the platform, not just the space where Sky content lives. Bring every subscription, every partner, every tier, and every piece of hardware into a marketplace that lived directly on the TV.
The Sky Store as it existed was a small place for paying for movies on demand. We were asked to turn it into something else. The entry point. The doorway. The first place a household went when they wanted more.
The marketplace had to hold things Sky had never sold before. Fitness with Peloton. Music. News. Hardware. International streaming partners. Each one needed to feel like itself, not like a row in a database.
The same design language carried fitness alongside cinema alongside hardware. The viewer felt the breadth without ever feeling the system underneath it.
The marketplace had to meet viewers where they were already sitting. Not their laptop. Not the call centre. Not a browser tab open in another room. The same screen they were already watching.
Let the content showcase itself.
The original Sky Store had felt like a checkout. The new Marketplace had to feel like the rest of Sky. Cinematic. Considered. Immersive. Pricing structures had to be crystal clear without becoming the focal point. Subscriptions had to read as things the household wanted, not as things they were being sold.
The household was already there. The screen was already on. Buying was no longer a separate step out of the experience. It became part of the experience itself, sized for a sofa and a remote rather than a desk and a mouse.
The work that did not show was the largest part of the project. A robust design system capable of holding a single paid product alongside multiple-tier subscriptions, hardware bundles, and partner products with their own commercial logic. Pricing flexibility that ran from a one-off rental all the way through to a recurring three-tier subscription with hardware folded in. Subscription tiering, marketing copy, billing rules, all sitting inside the same product surface.
We built the system to handle the breadth without losing the calm. Sky Cinema sat alongside Peloton, sat alongside Sports, sat alongside Entertainment. The same language held every one of them in place. Every customer journey, from discovery through to billing, had to make the household feel they were in safe hands.
The same design system carried wildly different product types. Pay-per-view rentals alongside fitness subscriptions alongside premium hardware alongside speakers alongside the homepage that pulled them all together. Each one was authored with its own commercial logic, and each one read as itself within the same shared language.
The TV became Sky's second channel for revenue, after the call centres.
It was not a small move. Customers had a deeply held mental model that the best deals lived behind a phone call, and the call centres were not going anywhere. But by opening a pathway directly where the customer was already sitting, the funnel widened in a way the company had not had before. Sales generated through the new Marketplace started to compound. The platform paid for the design of itself many times over.
The work taught me what good design at the commercial edge of a business actually does. It makes the moment of purchase feel like part of the experience, not a step out of it. The customer ends up in a place they wanted to be. The company ends up with a channel that earns its keep. The two are not in opposition when the design is doing its job.
The lesson from the marketplace was that commerce in the right context does not feel like commerce. The customer ends up in a place they wanted to be. The company ends up with a channel that earns its keep.
Wellness, especially direct-to-consumer wellness, has a long history of getting this wrong. Products that feel like a sales funnel pretending to care.
I am interested in the version where the design is honest enough that the household feels held, the company finds its margin, and neither needs the other to fail.
That is the work I am bringing forward.