Designing referral commerce people actually trust
2022–2023
Discovery and UX strategy for Bewit — rebuilding a referral-driven e-commerce platform around real motivation, replacing pressure and overload with clarity.
Intro
Bewit had grown for eight years around one founder's mission: helping people live healthier, more conscious lives. It grew the way the best brands do — people loved the products and told others about them. But its founder, Jiří, was wary of what referral commerce usually becomes. So were its customers. In interviews we heard it again and again: a quiet discomfort with anything that smelled of multilevel selling, and a real fear of being seen — by friends, by themselves — as a "dealer."
We joined to run discovery — workshops, interviews, wireframes, and a prototype — and the real question surfaced fast: how do you keep the engine of recommendation while losing the coercion?
Team
Design
Matej Hlavacek & Ondrej Sedlacek — Two UX designers working as a pair across the whole project. We split ownership (I led the partner office, Ondřej led the storefront) and kept a tight loop of mutual critique, each pressure-testing the other's decisions.
Client (Bewit)
Jiří (founder/CEO), Marek Liška (CMO) and the internal team.
“I had the pleasure of working with Matej on a UX of this e-commerce project, and I was impressed by the approach and know-how he brought to it. The opening workshops he and Ondrej ran opened our eyes in many ways and helped us bring together requirements from several departments into one coherent project. Matej has extensive experience in product design, company branding, and web projects, which showed clearly throughout our collaboration through his innovative ideas and solutions. Thanks to his friendly approach, our regular meetings were always a pleasure — something I genuinely looked forward to.”
Marek Liška
CMO @ Bewit
Context
Bewit is a Czech natural-products company — essential oils of certified therapeutic quality and other 100% natural products. Eight years in, it was preparing to expand abroad.
There was a structural catch. The storefront and the partner office ran on two separate systems. The platform had originally been built as a network tool for ambassadors; when the business opened to ordinary customers, they were simply let into that same back-office — and its technology had become the ceiling on the founder's ambitions.
Challenge
On paper, the brief was "modernize the platform" — technically, fuse the two systems into one. But in practice, order management from the shop lived inside the partner office, so everyone — a first-time customer buying a single bottle and a seasoned ambassador running a network — landed in the same back-office just to handle an order. The real job was a double inversion: unify the technology into one platform, and split the experience into two. Merge the plumbing; separate the rooms.
Discovery surfaced the imbalance underneath: only a small minority of the community wanted to sell for commission. The vast majority just loved the products and recommended them freely. Yet the platform treated everyone like an aspiring salesperson, burying them in dashboards, wallets, and reward rules they never asked for — even partners who didn't see themselves as salespeople at all, but simply as people passing on something they trusted.
Jiří had drawn a hard line the research confirmed was right: pressure tactics don't work — they only create resistance.
Some parts of these case studies are intentionally private. If you're a recruiter or potential client, feel free to request access at hi@matejhlavacek.com.
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