Timeline:
12 weeks
Role:
Brand Designer / UX Designer
Industry:
Branding, App Design, Physical Product
As an endurance athlete, I've struggled to understand how my menstrual cycle affects my training, performance, and recovery, and couldn't find a single platform built to address this gap.
That's why I created Stella: a cycle-aware fitness brand that enables strategic training based on your personal rhythm. This project spans brand strategy, identity design, a landing page, app design, and a physical product extension.
Most fitness platforms take a one-size-fits-all approach to training. For half the population, that ignores a major variable — the menstrual cycle, which directly affects energy, recovery, and consistency every single month.
My Approach
Instead of ignoring or working around hormonal fluctuations, Stella takes advantage of them — syncing training intensity to each cycle phase to maximize peak energy, support recovery, and keep athletes consistent toward their biggest goals.
How it Works
Stella is centered around a post-workout vibe check that allows users to record subjective data as a supplement to their objective cycle phase. This information can be transformed into insights for users to provide personal training suggestions and nutrition support, allowing users to align more with their body's unique patterns and visualize a more consistent training regime.
User Research
I interviewed three women in the target audience to test the concept of Stella and understand how their cycle actually shapes their training. I captured their immediate reactions to the product.
What I heard
Their responses surfaced three consistent threads: the pull toward community, a desire for more qualitative depth in fitness tracking, and how strongly the visual direction resonated.
Community was a priority — women are eager to train alongside others who understand their experience.
The subjective focus on performance feels missing from current fitness platforms.
Approaching the brand aesthetic to be gender-considered without being stereotypically feminine resonated.
Opportunity Space
Existing platforms tend to fall into one of two camps: generic training tools like Strava and Peloton, or cycle-tracking apps like Natural Cycles that stop short of adaptive training. Stella sits in the gap between them, holistic and personalized.
The Vibes
The initial mood board captures the energy and audience. Once the name Stella emerged, I recreated the mood board to visualize the brand's star metaphor.
Visual Identity
The color palette was drawn from the refined mood board, pulled from the tones that best captured Stella's energy. I explored different colors and typefaces as I sought to evoke movement, elegance, and boldness. I tested variations of a star to add to the logo, and landed on an 8 pronged star as I shifted away from the common AI twinkle to create an identity that was more unique to Stella. For the backgrounds, I tested solid and gradient backgrounds; the gradient backgrounds drew attention to the pattern while the solid backgrounds allowed the Stella logo to stand out and appear more polished, which is the direction most reflective of Stella's brand.
Finding the right typeface meant balancing boldness with femininity to create an identity that felt strong, dynamic, and confident. Lust Display landed for its confidence, with the italic L's adding movement and flow, grounded by DM Sans. Cobalt and coral fit best for their complementary bold and energizing effect for the primary color palette.
Landing Page
Stella's landing page shows how Stella is different than existing fitness platforms, shows users how the system works, highlights Stella Sticks, and invites users to join the constellation.
Stella App
Users can use the Stella app as the touchpoint for everything from cycle syncing, post-workout reflections, training plans and strategies, and fueling support.
Stella Sticks
Stella Sticks are a cycle-aligned hydration system to support performance and recovery throughout each cycle phase. They can be purchased directly through the app, so nutrition and training can work together in one place.
Reflection
Stella came out of a problem I've lived with as an endurance athlete: training without any real sense of how my cycle affects performance and recovery. Stella let me design brand strategy, identity, UX, and a physical product as one connected system, rather than a set of standalone pieces. It also gave me the chance to build something rooted in community, not just tracking, which turned out to be exactly what resonated most with the women I interviewed. Bringing that sense of community into a system built around real physiology is what made this project feel worth doing.
Next Steps
Pull data from existing platforms like Strava, Garmin, and Apple watch, where athletes already track.
Research different sport types, age demographics, and experience levels to learn how training needs vary across activities and stages of life like perimenopause.
Interview athletes on their supplement routines to inform the Stella Sticks phase-specific hydration system.
Design the Stella Sticks in-app purchase and subscription flow — merge nutrition and training recommendations into a single experience.