Turning agency-side knowledge into a sector-leading SaaS, from the ground up.

“I knew… we'd be on to a commercial winner.”

The challenge

Stella Riley and Rob Pratt had both spent years running and working with swim schools. They knew the pain of the existing software market firsthand: systems that were clunky, fragmented, and built without the real user in mind.

So they decided to build something better themselves.

The brief was total: a name, a brand identity, a product design system and a multi-platform SaaS application, covering swim school management, a teacher-facing app and a customer portal for parents. Everything needed to work together, look right and feel effortless to use at the poolside, in the office and at home.

The thinking

We started where we always start: with the people on the other side of the product. In this case, three distinct audiences: swim school owners managing their business, teachers taking registers at the poolside with wet hands and no margin for error, and parents wanting clarity and control over their child's swimming journey.

The name Soakly came from that same thinking. Warm, approachable and clearly connected to swimming, without being generic. It gave the product a personality that could carry through every touchpoint, from the app icon to the onboarding experience.

The design system was built for the real-world conditions of each user. The teacher app, available on iOS and Android, needed to work fast, with one hand, under pressure. The customer portal needed to reassure parents and reduce the back-and-forth with swim schools. The admin platform needed to make the complexity of running a swim school feel manageable.

Every screen, every workflow, every piece of copy was designed with those users in mind, not the feature list.

The result

Soakly is now one of the fastest-growing leisure software platforms in the UK. New swim schools join every week. The combined weekly user base, school owners, teachers and parents, runs into six figures and grows constantly.

The brand, the product and the platform all came from the same place: understanding the people who would actually use it, before a single screen was designed or a single line of code was written.