Case study
Sculpt by Lore
An online Pilates studio that turned a Facebook group with hand-collected payments into a subscription platform — and became the blueprint for Eclipse.
Brand, Product Designer & Engineer — 2022–Present
The challenge
A real business, running on a Facebook group and hand-collected payments.
Lore had already built what most instructors dream of: a loyal, paying audience. What she didn't have was a product. Her studio ran inside a private Facebook group — new workouts were posted to the feed, and older ones sank beneath it, effectively unfindable. There was no library, no structure, no way for a member to pick a workout by focus or duration.
Billing was worse. Every month, Lore charged every member manually, one by one — messages, bank transfers, a running list of who had paid and who hadn't. Her Instagram audience kept growing, but every new member added admin work instead of leverage. Her time was going to collections, not coaching.
The brief, in one line: automate everything — memberships, billing, content access — without losing the closeness that made the group work. One instructor, no staff. The platform had to run itself.
My role
Brand, product, and code — one person, the whole arc.
I owned every layer: the brand identity, the product design, and the production build. The wordmark, the palette, the photography direction, the flows, the Rails codebase and the Stripe integration all came from the same desk — so the brand never drifted between the identity and the interface, and no decision got lost in a handoff.
This was 2022, before Eclipse existed. Sculpt by Lore is where my designer-engineer practice took its current shape: designing only what I could also build and maintain, with feasibility baked into every screen from the first sketch.
Process
From a group thread to a product.
Discovery
Sat with Lore to map how the studio actually ran — where workouts lived, how members joined, and exactly where the monthly billing ritual ate her time.
Brand & identity
Built the identity around how the classes feel: low impact, high intensity. Natural green, warm khaki, and a calm, minimal visual language — soft but never weak, warm enough to feel like Lore, clean enough to feel like a product worth paying for monthly.
Flows & architecture
Designed the core of the studio — a structured workout library, membership plans with clear gating, and a self-serve account flow — every screen at phone width first.
Build & ship
Wrote the production code: Rails, Stripe subscriptions for recurring billing, Vimeo for gated video, and an admin panel so Lore uploads and organizes everything herself — no developer in the loop. Then migrated the community off Facebook and onto the platform.
Evolve
Layered structured programs on top of the library — multi-week guided journeys like Reto Glow in 21 that sequence existing content into commitments with a start and an end. About one in five members sees a program through end to end.
Key decisions & rationale
Three choices that defined the studio.
A library, not a feed
The feed model made content disposable — the group's biggest hidden cost. Workouts became a structured catalog organized by format — Cardio Pilates, Barre, Power Flow, Express Flows — filterable by duration and focus. Content stopped expiring: a session published a year ago is as findable as yesterday's, and the library has since grown past 450 workouts.
Billing that runs itself
The single highest-leverage decision was moving to Stripe subscriptions: recurring charges, automatic retries on failed payments, and self-serve card management replaced a monthly ritual of chasing every member individually. Collections went from days of work to zero — and churn became visible for the first time.
Mobile first, because Instagram first
Members arrive from Lore's social audience and train from their phones — living rooms, hotel rooms, mats on the floor. Every screen was designed at phone width first, with video front and center and controls reachable mid-workout.
Impact
A community that became a product.
The platform converted a manually-operated community into a business with recurring revenue. Growth stopped costing admin hours; every new member is now pure leverage.
What I took from it
The project that became Eclipse.
Sculpt by Lore was client zero. Everything this build proved — that an independent instructor could run memberships, payments and content without staff or a developer on call — became the thesis for Eclipse, the white-label platform I founded, which now powers eight studio and coach sites in production. The story is coming full circle: Sculpt by Lore is scheduled to migrate onto the current Eclipse core, inheriting every feature the platform has grown since.
What it taught me is that automating the boring parts is a design act. The most valuable screen I made here isn't one members ever see — it's the billing that stopped existing as a task. Every platform starts as one person's spreadsheet; this one started as one instructor's Facebook group, and learning to see the product hiding inside it changed how I look at every workflow since.