Bringing the feeling of handmade gifts online
- Team
- Solo
- Timeline
- 2026
- Scope
- Product DesignInteraction DesignDesign SystemDevelopment
- Status
- Shipped and ongoingOpen live product
- Opportunity
- Help long-distance friends make something personal for each other, while preserving the thoughtfulness of a handmade gift.
- Contribution
- I owned the concept, product decisions, visual design, and development.
- Result
- 100K+ overall usage, 400K+ unique visitors, 1.8M+ page views, 30% bounce rate. (Last update: October 7, 2026)
Context
Digital gifts often feel less thoughtful than handmade ones.
A card and flowers are what people expect to be sent.
As more of us live far from friends and family, giving something handmade isn't always practical. Shipping costs money, packing takes time and gifts don't always arrive when we want them to. So we send a link instead. A link that takes a click to share and only a few seconds to experience, which can make the gesture feel less personal, even when the thought behind it is just as genuine.
Handmade gifts also carry a different kind of meaning. A 2015 study on the handmade effect, Read the study found that people associate handmade objects with love and value them more when they're given as an expression of care.
The question
How could a link carry the love of something handmade?
Solution
A digital gift maker studio that remembers how it was made.
A Little Love For You is a website where you make the gift yourself. I filled the shelf with things people don't expect to be sent. Sew a cross-stitch, write a tune note by note, add a keychain you can poke, a sticker, or a letter in a font made from my own handwriting. Wrap them into one parcel and seal it.
Sealing gives you a link to send. Your friend opens it and each keepsake rebuilds itself. The stitches appear in the order you sewed them and the doodle draws itself back in.
Research
What makes a handmade gift feel handmade?
I asked 8 people to describe a gift someone had made them that they still had, and to say why they still had it. These conversations show a pattern.
- 1
A handmade gift takes time.
- 2
You can tell a person made it.
- 3
The gift is specifically for you.
Design decision 1
People get stuck when they're given a blank page.
In a survey of 13 people about the first prototype, a common theme was feeling overwhelmed, so I gave them a starting point for the harder crafts then left room to make each one theirs!
Cross-stitch — Adding preset templates to help users get started.
Tune — Adding preset tunes and making sure the tunes are the ones that sound good together, helping users without music background.
Embossing stamps — Adding preset stamps and shapes to aid design.
Design decision 2
Let people change their minds while making.
I initially left out undo to mimic real cross-stitch, where every stitch is permanent. But 4 of 5 users found it frustrating.
I had recreated the limitations of making by hand but not the joy of it. So I tested out a couple ways to undo/clear the cross stitches.
Clear the whole swatch in one tap.
8 stitches placed.
Dragging across stitches worked best. It fixes the area you meant to change without clearing the whole swatch or undoing one stitch at a time.
Design decision 3
Print how long the gift took to make.
A handmade gift takes time and a link usually hides it. After sealing, senders get a printed receipt showing how long they spent making theirs. A short time could make the gift look low-effort. Digital crafts are faster than physical ones which made the receipt a risk worth watching.
So far the recorded times suggest people are still putting care in so I kept it!
Outcome
More people used it than I expected.
An Instagram post about the product reached 600,000 views.
A 30% bounce rate is relatively low so most visitors stick around instead of leaving right away.
- 100K+
- overall usage
- 400K+
- unique visitors
- 1.8M+
- page views
The best part has been learning that the care that went into making something came back as real joy on the other end.
A few of the messages I've received - there are many more!
What’s next
At 85K+ users, I asked what could be better.
- More colours and less motion when the keychain is tapped for accessibility.
- Longer letters, photo keychains and voice notes are in consideration since larger gifts raise storage and running costs.
- Known tunes like happy birthday are a fair ask but I need to check licensing first!
What I learned
Building this taught me how much work happens after design.
Keeping it running meant rate limits and cost guardrails so a traffic spike couldn't take the site down or leave me with a huge bill.
It also meant making shared parcel links long and unique so they were hard to guess.