JOLI Collective —
an editorial travel concierge.
A travel concierge that reads like a well-travelled friend's note, not a recommendation feed. Built in-house as the studio's own venture, JOLI is a stress-test of what design-led AI looks like when craft sits next to capability.
JOLI Collective (studio venture)
2026
Brand, product, AI architecture, design system
Context
Algorithmic travel recommendations have a flatness problem. Everything is good, nothing is interesting, and the things that get surfaced look the same across every platform. JOLI started from the opposite premise: a small set of opinionated recommendations from someone whose taste you trust, in places where taste matters more than ranking. The studio built it to find out what an editorial AI product feels like when it's designed end to end - voice, surfaces, system, and model layer - by the same hand.
Approach
The brand came first. Monument Grotesk, an editorial reference register that sits closer to Cereal and Monocle than to a typical AI product. Present-tense, opinionated, written in the voice of someone who has actually been there. The product was designed to extend that voice - not to bolt a chat interface onto a recommendation engine, but to feel like a continuous editorial surface that happens to be alive.
The architecture is a multi-stage AI pipeline with three section-scoped copilots — Stay, Eat, Do — each with its own thread, context, and tools that mutate state. The copilots don't share a brain; they share a brief. That separation is what lets each one stay opinionated rather than collapsing into a generic assistant.
What we built
In collaboration with designer Natalia Witwicka. Wordmark, editorial typography system on Monument Grotesk, voice guidelines, photographic register. Reads as taste, not as a tech product.
Multi-stage AI pipeline. Three section-scoped copilots (Stay, Eat, Do), each with isolated thread, context, and tools that mutate state. Designed surfaces, not chat-as-default.
Next.js 14 App Router on Vercel. Supabase with pgvector and PostGIS for geo-aware retrieval. RLS across 22 tables, rate limiting, Stripe webhooks. Claude Sonnet at the model layer with OpenAI embeddings.
Separate codebases for the marketing site and a Remotion-based video pipeline, sharing a TypeScript-native design system. The studio ships the brand, the product, and the surfaces around it from one stack.
Outcome
JOLI is the studio's own answer to a question worth asking out loud: what does an AI product feel like when it's designed end to end by people who care about both halves?
The work continues — new sections, new surfaces, new model layers — and what's shipped already is the proof of approach the studio brings to design-led founders.
Credits
Natalia Witwicka — wordmark, identity system, and editorial typography in collaboration with Flykite.
Flykite Studio.
Hannah TW — identity and site for an artist and label manager.
See all work