SONEVA, LUXURY RESORT & LIFESTYLE BRAND
Designing Trust Through Human-Centred Luxury
From resort hospitality to lifestyle brand: building Soneva's digital growth system
Client: Soneva (Global)
Sectors: Luxury Travel, Hospitality, Wellness, Retail
Role: Director of Experience Design (Interbrand Global/London)
10
reusable interaction patterns, desktop and mobile
1
living design system scaled across resorts, lifestyle, and shop
Situation
A luxury brand growing faster than its digital experience could carry.
Soneva was growing beyond its resort roots into wellness, retail, and responsible luxury lifestyle. The physical and digital experience had not kept pace. The existing site was organised around properties, which buried the brand's broader offer and made discovery difficult.
Customer journeys were fragmented, visual language was inconsistent, and nothing felt like it belonged to a brand with Soneva's ambition and its promise of responsible luxury.
Inconsistent and outdated visual language
Approach
Research-to-system, from brief to delivery.
I led end-to-end experience design, working from brief to delivery alongside a multidisciplinary team.
We opened with stakeholder and customer research. Three personas defined the specific needs and behaviours we were designing for. From those, we developed four digital experience principles grounding every subsequent decision in real audience expectations rather than aesthetic preference.
We benchmarked against reference brands including Goop, Aesop, and Gucci to establish what Soneva's digital language needed to do differently, then restructured the information architecture around customer use cases: discovery, booking, and lifestyle navigation.
System
Brand repositioning, navigation redesign, and a living design system are all connected.
The brand experience work reframed Soneva as a sustainable luxury lifestyle brand, elevating the philosophy of place over property catalogue.
The customer experience restructuring reorganised navigation around actual intent, giving wellness, shop, and sustainability equal standing alongside the resorts.
The service design layer produced a modular, living design system: reusable interaction patterns, booking flows, filter logic, and e-commerce integration, all codified so internal teams and partner agencies could extend the platform consistently without starting from scratch.
Visual approach exploring three profiles along with their traits, palettes, typography, and journeys
Digital design imperatives: looking at best practice
An evolved modular digital design frameworks and system: before and after homepage
Insight-led navigation
User-led resort landing pages
User-led villa landing pages
User-led experience landing pages
User-led shop landing pages
Booking system and filter bar
Outcomes
A platform Soneva could grow from without rebuilding for every new offer.
Experience Systems connected the brand repositioning, the restructured customer journeys, and the scalable delivery foundations into a platform Soneva could grow from rather than rebuild for each new offer.
The design system covered 10 reusable interaction patterns across desktop and mobile. Navigation simplification reduced drop-off. Surfacing sustainability and editorial expertise strengthened trust and supported conversion.
Duplicated design effort fell, and rollout speed across new lifestyle offers improved. The Digital Marketing Director noted that the result was a digital system reflecting the brand, serving customers, and scaling with every new experience created.
“We needed more than a redesign. This gave us a digital system that reflects our brand, serves our customers, and scales with every new experience we create.”
Digital Marketing Director, Soneva
Curious how this approach might apply in your context?
Ale
Chief Experience & Design Officer
Design is an act of attention.
For the people. For the business. For the system that connects them.
Based in London
Open to relocation across UK and EU
Fractional, Interim, Permanent