Client & Project
Hive
Product & Category
Connected home energy and climate control platform
Services Delivered
deployed_code
Product design
hardware
Prototype design
factory
Design for manufacture
Brief
Hive partnered with Alloy to create a premium, consistent design system across its connected home products, moving beyond generic smart-home hardware to a more refined, home-friendly identity.
Outcome: A unified, award-winning hardware design language used across Hive’s smart home ecosystem.
Key Outcomes
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Products sold
More than 2 million Hive smart home products sold using the Alloy-designed hardware platform.0
Revenue increase
Hive achieved a 74 percent increase in revenue following the launch of the redesigned connected home product range.0
Improved sales margin
The new product design and manufacturing strategy increased Hive’s sales margin by 20 percent.
The award-winning heart of Hive’s smart-home
Hive, part of Centrica plc, whose brands include British Gas (UK) and Direct Energy (USA), selected Alloy as its long term industrial design partner to help differentiate within the Smart Home (IOT) sector. The initial challenge was to create a rich visual design language and premium CMF that elevates the Hive products away from the flat white plastic boxes currently on the market, while ensuring they remain suitably refined to blend seamlessly and discreetly into the home environment.
The resulting coherent identity provides a flexible design framework from which to create touch points and elements that are consistent across products, allowing for future expansion of the Hive ecosystem within this identity, building on the company’s core values and enabling the brand to expand and enter new markets/territories.
Smart Sensors
Working closely with the Hive team to optimise to the layout of internal components and power sources, resulted in innovative configurations that prioritized low power, high performance radio, informing the overall product silhouette. The reduced physical product volumes presented opportunities for a more refined installation within the home, for example, the narrow-elongated form of the Motion PIR Sensor allows the device to discreetly recede further into the corners of rooms than most other PIR devices, which are typically square, bulky and noticeably protrude into the living space.
