There is a particular silence in a room when a founder realises the thing they have built is not the thing people want. Most studios have watched that silence from across the table. We wanted to have sat in it.
Taking our own advice
The Lab is the part of Hue & Heal where we build ventures of our own. Not concepts for a portfolio: real products with real people using them, real constraints and real consequences when we get it wrong.
The reason is simple. It is easy to tell a founder to narrow their promise, test earlier, or design the ending before the middle. It is much harder to do those things when the product is yours, the money is yours and the deadline will not move. Every principle we offer in the Studio has to survive that test first.
What Remedae taught us
Remedae began as a big idea: every one of the world’s healing traditions, from modern medicine to Ayurveda to traditional Chinese medicine, held side by side in one honest library. It is now live at remedae.app, and building it taught us more than any client project could have.
It taught us that what you are allowed to say is a design material. Early on, a conversation about regulation made it clear that a product which diagnoses or treats is a very different thing, legally, from a product which helps people understand. We chose understanding. That constraint did not weaken the idea. It sharpened it into a library, free to read, where every passage is traced to a named source and where “we do not know” is an acceptable answer.
It taught us to tell the truth in our own documents before asking anyone else to. When the plan said one thing and the product said another, we changed the plan.
And it taught us pacing. People arrive at a health question late at night, worried, often caring for someone else. What they need first is not a wall of research. It is something familiar, then something useful, then the evidence, in that order.
Play as a practice
Our second venture, Moss Island, comes from a different question: what does wellbeing look like for children when it is not delivered through a screen? Moss Island explores children’s wellness through real world quests: an app built to get children off it, sending them to play with their hands and their bodies. It is early, and we are designing it the way we ask founders to: in small, honest steps, with the people it is for.
What founders get from this
When we sit down with a founder, we are not guessing at what it feels like to launch something in wellness. We know the anxiety of a claim you are not sure you can make, the temptation to promise more than the product does, and the relief of a smaller, truer version that people actually use.
That is what the Lab is for. It keeps our advice honest.
Curious about what the Lab is making?
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