Client
Google
Year
2024
Problem
Small business owners have a deep understanding of their brand’s soul, but they lack the resources to translate the idea into professional marketing.
Solution
AI-driven product that decode a brand’s unique identity and automate the production of tailored creative content.
Keywords
Research, concept development, prototyping
Packages
Frame - Discover - Imagine - Materialise
Launched as
Pomelli (Google Labs, October 2025)
Google Labs
Google Labs
Related Project
Pomelli
We’ve been working with Google on AI user experiences since 2018 - exploring how AI can feel more human and how to design experiences for capabilities that don’t fully exist yet. It’s a long collaboration we value enormously, and one we rarely get to talk about.
In 2023, we worked with the design team responsible for originating Pomelli on early-stage concepts.
The question at the heart of it: what happens when a small business owner - someone who pours everything into what they make - tries to communicate that care to the world? And what if AI could actually help with that, not by generating generic content, but by first learning to understand what makes them distinctive?
We started where we always start - with people. We spent time with real small business owners: a pastry chef in London who knew exactly what her shop should feel like but couldn’t make that show up in her marketing. A hardware startup founder who could describe his brand in a sentence but struggled to express it consistently across channels. A jewellery maker whose brand was inseparable from her own personality. We spoke to people like this, alongside branding experts and strategists, to understand the gap between knowing who you are and being able to show it.
What we found was consistent: most small businesses understand their values intuitively but lack the tools, language, or time to turn that intuition into coherent creative output. The gap isn’t creative ambition. It’s the distance between what they feel and what they can produce.
We ran foundational research with real business owners and branding experts, then collaborated closely with Google’s team to develop and prototype a series of interactive concepts exploring how AI could bridge that gap - between intuition and expression.
In 2023, we worked with the design team responsible for originating Pomelli on early-stage concepts.
The question at the heart of it: what happens when a small business owner - someone who pours everything into what they make - tries to communicate that care to the world? And what if AI could actually help with that, not by generating generic content, but by first learning to understand what makes them distinctive?
We started where we always start - with people. We spent time with real small business owners: a pastry chef in London who knew exactly what her shop should feel like but couldn’t make that show up in her marketing. A hardware startup founder who could describe his brand in a sentence but struggled to express it consistently across channels. A jewellery maker whose brand was inseparable from her own personality. We spoke to people like this, alongside branding experts and strategists, to understand the gap between knowing who you are and being able to show it.
What we found was consistent: most small businesses understand their values intuitively but lack the tools, language, or time to turn that intuition into coherent creative output. The gap isn’t creative ambition. It’s the distance between what they feel and what they can produce.
We ran foundational research with real business owners and branding experts, then collaborated closely with Google’s team to develop and prototype a series of interactive concepts exploring how AI could bridge that gap - between intuition and expression.
“Working with the Special Projects team is always a pleasure. They bring real rigour about people combined with a creative instinct that's pretty unique. The research was thorough, the concepts were magical (naturally), and their prototypes and storytelling made the ideas feel tangible. They really helped us find the human story inside the brief.”
Rob Marchant, Google DeepMind
Google’s team continued to develop and refine the product over the following two years. Pomelli launched through Google Labs in October 2025. It reads a business’s website to understand its brand identity and generates tailored marketing campaigns across social, ads, and email. It recently added AI product photography and animated video. It’s free and has been one of Labs’ most successful launches. It’s a testament to the designers, strategists, and engineers at Google who took early thinking and - over two years of dedicated work - built it into something genuinely useful for the people we originally set out to understand.
For us, this project represents something we care deeply about - designing with AI in a way that amplifies human judgement rather than replacing it.
For us, this project represents something we care deeply about - designing with AI in a way that amplifies human judgement rather than replacing it.
