We are a team of multi-disciplined designers. Specialists in crafting compelling user experiences for our clients, through product & digital design.
Since 1999 we have been working with clients big and small, all over the world, from our design studio-workshop outside London in Surrey UK.
We are passionate, and dutiful, about our design impact
We help our clients use innovation to deliver better customer experiences. We do this by converting human insight into designs for physical products, digital interfaces and services.
We believe this role gives us an important leadership responsibility: our designs will have a powerful direct impact on customer opinion, but only after they are delivered by multiple teams of specialists, all over the world. Our job is to guide, motivate and unify them in the common purpose of delivering the excellent, differentiated, experiences needed to deliver business success.
We have a strong employee-owner culture
Our name, Alloy, expresses our founding belief that to be effective innovation leaders, individual designers need to be inspired by a much smarter mix of human empathy, technical knowledge and commercial understanding.
This founding idea lives on in our deep-rooted culture. It drives in-house training and challenges each of us, every day, to apply broader balanced thinking to every design decision we take. It also challenges us to constantly innovate our own services to stay ahead of the rapid changes in our world.
A business where everyone is expected to think like a leader can’t really be owned by others. We are owned by an Employee Benefit Trust that represents every one of us. We work for clients, no one else. For each of us, it’s personal.
We win awards for creativity and design effectiveness
We have won every major global design award, most many times, but there is one that we enter and win more than any other: the UK DBA Design Effectiveness award. This can’t be won with pictures, the entries are case studies demonstrating clear commercial gain from design interventions.
Successive generations of employee-owner designers have nurtured our strong team culture for one simple reason: it works. Over 20 years Alloy designers have delivered more than a thousand successful projects, all over the world. Every day, tens of millions of people interact with our designs.
We are experts at Experience-Led Design
Our team focus on user experience and empathy has inspired deep expertise in research methods that directly inspire our creative decisions. Over time this ability has made us recognised experts in design for precise user groups designers need to understand, in depth, not guess about. Older consumers, mothers, firemen and broadcasters are just a few segments we know well.
This empathy inspires design ideas we test and evolve constantly using a broad range of rapid behavioural prototypes, from photo-realistic visuals and tactile models to software interactions of all kinds. We constantly update our simulation skills as interaction experiences evolve. Today it’s about Voice, AR and AI. Tomorrow? Who knows, but designers will have a role to play.
We are trusted to deliver, again and again…
Clients select us to understand and improve interactions with their customers, but they come back because of our ability to understand their business context, anticipate realisation constraints of all kinds, create precise specifications and work effectively with downstream teams to ensure prompt and faithful delivery to market. They come back a lot for our services, some for decades.
The consequence of rapid technological progress is that today’s successful innovation delivery also needs to address the wider social experience of sustainability. This makes our ability to create smarter connections between customer experience planning and implementation more important than ever.
Sectors in which our expertise has delivered results many times:
Connected devices (Smart Homes, IoT, fixed, mobile, wearables, consumer and B2B)
Mother and Baby (Baby monitoring, Smart monitoring and sleep aids)
Mass-market Inclusive & Sustainable design
Pro-specialist (Emergency services, film & TV production)
Our clients include:
A few testimonials:
“I had the pleasure of working with Alloy, alongside my team from Unilever’s Digital Venture division. Alloy brought a fresh perspective to our project, challenging our initial brief and encouraging us to think differently in order to address the consumer problem we had identified. Their confidence, purposeful approach, and diligence were truly impressive. What stood out was their commitment to understanding the user perspective. They reviewed hours of user interviews we had conducted, ensuring that every decision was rooted in user insights. This level of dedication and attention to detail was remarkable. The collaboration with Alloy resulted in a product that has the potential to upend an otherwise commoditized market. Their innovative ideas and strategic guidance were instrumental in achieving this outcome. Working with Alloy was a rewarding experience, and I would not hesitate to collaborate with them again in the future. Their expertise and commitment to excellence make Alloy an invaluable partner”
“Conventional approaches to product design either gave us products that looked good but couldn’t be made, or bulky products that could be made but were hard to sell. Alloy’s ability to bring together the essential mix of creativity, technology and yet deliver in a tight timescale delivered the solution to this difficult assignment. ”
“Alloy’s excellent design made the benefits of our innovative technology really clear to customers. They really found the best way to present our unique mix of communications, IT and consumer electronic. We are delighted with the result. ”
“BT-Device’s long-term partnership with Alloy has played an important role in the growth of our business. To us it’s a core knowledge asset that adds value to our propositions and keeps our brand strong. The collaboration has endured because it has remained consistently effective yet also adapted continuously to our fast changing business context.”
“We have been sharing the Alloy design concepts with all our key customers and the response has been extremely positive. While commercial confidentiality prevents me from saying too much about specific points of appeal, I can say that Alloy’s approach of designing a complete service system, as well as a standalone device, has been extremely well received. Our customers in the Aid and Development sector have, as ever, raised concerns about cost, but we are confident these will be fully addressed in the next stage of development.
Alloy’s work has given us a roadmap to modernise the ways we help our partners in developing countries. This will be vital to our mission in future years. We are currently working on securing the funding needed to get through the pre-production phases and we are confident the project will move forward in 2020”
“Since working with the team at Alloy, they have taken every idea we had and transformed it into the best, real-life version of itself. A great agency with even better vision, they are the dream team to work with to bring your ideas to life. Tackling any issues with innovative thinking and next-level designs embedded into every bit of their work.”
“The bottom line is that our investment in Alloy has generated a huge return and helped us grow to become the second largest DECT-digital cordless phone manufacturer in the world”
“Restful worked with the Alloy team to develop the concepts for our upcoming bedside lamp. They took an objective, unbiased approach, helping us build user personas and test prototypes for usability and aesthetic fit. They checked in with us for feedback consistently. Once the concepts were solidified, they created absolutely stunning renderings. Our team was super impressed with the concept, and we will be putting this lamp into the design for manufacturing phase in early 2024.”
“Since being introduced to Alloy I’ve become a believer in creative control. Before Alloy we would let creatives miss deadline after deadline due to being told that’s how creative people work – you can’t control the creative process. Working with Alloy has clearly shown this to be wrong. Our designs have not only improved significantly, our products are also now engineered to a level never seen before. Alloy deliver this high standard of work ALWAYS on time and in budget.
I would not hesitate to highly recommended Alloy to anyone needing help although it pains me to write this as ideally I would like to keep them a well-kept secret to our success to date.”
“The NETGEAR ID team are proud to have won the Red Dot Award for our AirCard 340U, our latest 4G / LTE modem. It was the successful result of a collaboration between Alloy and our own internal design resources to deliver an extremely compact highly usable and consumer friendly product which has been successfully launched in some of our largest service provider markets.”