Building the first digital home for sculpture.
Ignia began with a simple observation: sculpture had no digital environment designed around the medium itself.
Most online art platforms were created around flat works. Sculpture appeared inside the same discovery and purchasing journeys, despite depending on scale, material, volume and spatial context in a fundamentally different way.
The opportunity
Sculpture was visible online, but the experience had never been designed around it.
The digital art market had made art more accessible, but its dominant product models were still shaped around paintings, photography and other flat works.
For sculpture, this created a structural mismatch. Collectors could see images, dimensions and a price, but had limited support for understanding form, scale, material or how a work might exist within a real space. Artists could publish their work, but rarely within an environment capable of expressing its physical presence or building context around their practice.
Ignia's opportunity was not simply to create another marketplace. It was to build a specialist digital environment where sculpture could be discovered, understood and collected with greater context and confidence.
An online gallery dedicated to sculpture.
A specialist platform shaped around the needs of sculpture.
Define the vision, business model, experience, brand and market direction.
Product direction
Three decisions shaped Ignia from the beginning.
Design around the medium.
Ignia could not be a conventional art marketplace with a sculpture filter.
The medium required a different way of thinking about presence, discovery, context and trust. That meant giving more space to the work, introducing artist and material context gradually and designing around the questions collectors actually have when considering sculpture remotely.
This decision also shaped the brand. Ignia needed to feel curated and premium without becoming distant or elitist. Its value would come from specialisation, not from trying to serve every form of art.
Trade offA narrower category reduced breadth, but created a clearer proposition and a stronger reason to exist.
Make technology useful before visible.
Technology was central to the opportunity, but it could not become the identity of the product.
Collectors did not need a technical demonstration. They needed help understanding a physical work, confidence in the transaction and evidence of authenticity.
I prioritised three dimensional viewing, secure payments and digital certificates because each capability addressed a specific source of uncertainty. Future augmented reality follows the same logic by helping people relate sculpture to scale and space.
The value of the technology should be felt through better understanding and confidence, not through spectacle.
Trade offThe platform would sacrifice technological showmanship in favour of keeping attention on the sculpture.
Build credibility before scale.
Every marketplace begins with a trust problem.
Artists are asked to invest time, materials and reputation before the platform can prove demand. Collectors are asked to trust a new environment before it has established quality or authority.
For the beta, I chose a more deliberate path based on direct conversations, selective invitations, free initial participation, clear permissions and gradual onboarding.
The goal was not to fill the platform quickly. It was to establish a coherent first body of work, learn directly from artists and test whether Ignia could create value on both sides of the marketplace.
Trade offSlower acquisition protected curation, relationships and the credibility of the initial platform.
Building Ignia
The product, business and brand had to be designed as one system.
Ignia did not begin with an existing company structure, established audience or inherited roadmap.
The opportunity had to become a business proposition, a product model, a visual identity and a credible market narrative at the same time.
I defined the value proposition, target audiences, marketplace logic, product architecture, editorial direction and initial go to market approach. I also shaped artist acquisition, onboarding, content strategy and the relationship between discovery, education and commerce.
Artificial intelligence supported research, content development, prototyping and production. It accelerated execution, but the judgement, prioritisation and direction remained mine.
Ignia now exists as a working beta. Payments, three dimensional viewing and authenticity certificates are also in beta, allowing the full proposition to be tested before wider market development.
- Opportunity definition
- Business model
- Product vision
- Marketplace strategy
- Experience direction
- Brand direction
- Content strategy
- Go to market direction
- Artist acquisition model
- Beta prioritisation
- Development
- Payment implementation
- Three dimensional visualisation
- Authenticity certificates
- Legal agreements
- Technical feasibility
The product
A specialised proposition translated into one coherent experience.
The beta was not designed as a collection of disconnected features. Discovery, visual understanding, trust and purchase needed to feel like parts of one continuous relationship between the collector and the work.
Creating the conditions for discovery.
The browsing experience was designed to feel closer to entering a gallery than navigating a conventional ecommerce catalogue. Large imagery, restrained hierarchy and progressive context give the work space to lead. Filters and commercial information remain available, but they do not dominate the first encounter.
Understanding a physical work remotely.
Three dimensional exploration gives collectors a better sense of form, proportion, surface and volume. It does not replace the physical encounter, but it improves the quality of the decision by revealing information that traditional product photography often hides.
Designing trust into the transaction.
Ignia treats payment and certification as one trust journey. Secure transactions reduce commercial uncertainty, while digital certificates connect the purchase to verifiable information about the work and its authenticity. These capabilities remain in beta.
The potential
A specialised platform can do more than sell sculpture.
The long term potential of Ignia comes from the depth of the category. A platform focused exclusively on sculpture can build richer information about artists, materials, processes, scale, spatial context and provenance than a general marketplace designed to serve every medium.
For artists, this creates a more intentional environment for presenting work and reaching collectors beyond existing networks. For collectors, it creates a clearer path from curiosity to understanding, confidence and purchase. For galleries and art professionals, it creates the possibility of a shared specialist infrastructure for discovery, representation, education and commerce.
Ignia is not designed to replace the physical art world. Its potential is to become the digital layer that sculpture has been missing.
- Working beta marketplace
- Curated discovery
- Three dimensional viewing in beta
- Secure payment in beta
- Authenticity certificates in beta
- Educational content
- Future spatial and augmented reality tools
- Richer provenance and ownership information
- Deeper educational content
- Specialist infrastructure for artists and galleries
- A global discovery layer dedicated to sculpture
What changed
An observation became a product, a business proposition and a distinct place for sculpture.
From initial idea to working beta across discovery, three dimensional viewing, payment, authenticity and educational content.
From a market observation to a defined marketplace proposition with audiences, value exchange, acquisition logic and go to market direction.
From a broad art platform concept to a recognisable specialist position around sculpture.
Artist participation, collector behaviour and commercial demand.
The current evidence is product and proposition validation at beta stage. Broader market, commercial and behavioural validation remain the next phase.
Building Ignia reinforced that, in an early product, business, brand, technology and experience cannot be designed independently.
I would preserve the clarity of the category focus, but introduce artist onboarding and market validation earlier so product and acquisition learning could happen in parallel.
The project has made me more disciplined about protecting a strong proposition while testing real behaviour sooner.
Next case
Designing a configurable platform to control the complete waste journey.
Bezeroo presented a different leadership challenge. Instead of creating a category from zero, the work required building one coherent product model across regulation, operations, finance and multiple professional roles.
Explore Bezeroo