On Swiggy Instamart, I designed Handpicked, a label for products picked for quality, taste and authenticity: where it sits on a crowded item card, and how shoppers learn it.
A label on the products Instamart’s category team picks for quality, taste and authenticity, including lesser-known brands.
Not the deal hunter: the shopper who wants something different. Two shoppers, buying bhujia for guests:
Shopper 1: “A popular brand, so it’s good.”
Shopper 2: “A unique find, so it’s good.”
InsanelyGood, Swiggy’s premium grocery service, had shoppers who loved it. Handpicked carried it into Instamart under one name, with room to grow.
Its products, and its loyal shoppers
New finds
Distinctive products, later beyond groceries
Handpicked
One name, inside Instamart
Recognise Handpicked products at a glance, among everything else.
Understand what the label means, through onboarding and prompts in context.
Handpicked products share the shelf with everything else, so the label had to live on the item card itself.
An item card is prime real estate, like a sea-facing bungalow on Marine Drive. Each spot already spoke to a different shopper.
For the deal hunter.
A badge on the photo.
Like “Previously bought”.
A reason to buy, like “Rich in protein”.
A new spot first, then two spots to share.
Like a fish market: when everything shouts, nothing gets heard.
“Handpicked, because it’s rich in protein” doesn’t hold for every product.
The most visible spot, already built to show one marker at a time.
Several markers compete for the strip, so it shows the highest one that applies.
The same item card
Before. Orange, competing with the label.
After. Grey, so the label leads.
The orange description had long been Instamart’s way to stand out. Now the label had to lead, so the description went grey.
Icons for it were tried too, but read as buttons.
We looked at premium sub-brands like Amazon Prime, Swiggy One and Zomato Gold, then explored colours and motifs.
Gold says “pricier”, and Handpicked isn’t always. Burgundy was already an Instamart sub-brand colour.
A star reads as a rating, a starburst as “verified”. With design and marketing, we chose the mark people would remember.
A label only works once people know what it means.
Instamart’s leadership asked us to go bold: a permanent tab in the bottom bar, animated, with a heart burst.
Where shoppers first meet the label, a prompt explains it in place.
An animated banner, in the spot usually kept for marketing.
Handpicked shoppers came back significantly more, across every cohort.
Shoppers who tried Handpicked spent more and ordered more often.
Over half of Instamart’s top shopper groups used Handpicked.
Handpicked brands led customer retention in key categories.
A second version was in planning.
Give Handpicked products an experience of their own, to elevate them further.
Smart prompts that suggest a Handpicked alternative to what a shopper picked.
