Client
Libas Collective
Year
2022
Reach
100K+ users
Industry
Resale, e-commerce
The product
Libas Collective is a marketplace for authenticated pre-owned luxury, selling worldwide with a focus on MENA. People sell bags, watches and jewellery they no longer wear, and other people buy them well below retail, with the platform standing behind whether each piece is genuine.
I designed it from the ground up, and it's the product the company took to Shark Tank Dubai.
The constraints
Every item is one of one. No restock, no second size, no other colour. That breaks most of what e-commerce assumes, from product pages to baskets to anything built around buying the same item twice.
The real product is trust. Someone is spending thousands on a second-hand bag from a stranger, so authentication and condition have to be visible everywhere rather than buried in a policy page.
And it works in two directions. Someone photographing a bag on their sofa and someone comparing one to retail price need very different things from the same app.
The work
Every listing comes from a person, not a warehouse. Someone with one bag and a phone has to produce a product page good enough to sell it, and a buyer has to find that bag among items that each exist once.
Both sides needed building. Three parts are worth showing properly.
Listing an item
A seller has one bag, a phone, and no product data. So listing is a guided sequence rather than a form: category, brand, size, photos, colour, material, condition, price, pickup address. One decision per screen.
Splitting it that way does two jobs. It keeps someone moving through twelve steps without it feeling like paperwork, and it produces structured data the marketplace can filter on later. A free text box would have been faster to build and would have made every item unfindable.
Price is the step people get wrong most often, so it arrives with a recommended range and a breakdown showing the fee and what the seller actually earns.
Offers and negotiation
Resale is not fixed-price retail. People negotiate, and if the app doesn't allow it they do it over Instagram instead, and the platform loses both the sale and the protection it was offering.
Offers sit inside the chat between buyer and seller, as a card rather than a message, so the amount and its status stay readable while the conversation moves around them. Three suggested amounts do most of the work, because a seller is more likely to accept a number the app proposed than one pulled out of the air. An accepted offer reserves the item and becomes an order without anyone retyping anything.
A feed built on size and brand
When every item exists once, browsing by category is close to useless. What a buyer wants is their size, in the brands they wear, listed right now.
Onboarding asks for both before anyone sees a product, and the feed is built from those answers. Each row says why it is there, because personalisation people can see is personalisation they will correct, and a marketplace holding one of every item depends on those corrections being right.
