How Clay Global designed a real estate brand that starts with feeling

One of the buyers Clay Global interviewed during the research phase for Eden had been spending two hours a day on the Zillow map. He had 150 saved homes, no filters and a constant fear of missing something. His girlfriend kept separate Pinterest boards full of aesthetic references with no way to connect any of them to an actual listing. Another couple had been tracking their individual preferences in the Notes app for months before visiting a single property or speaking to an agent. A lawyer admitted his agent added zero value at every stage of the process, yet he still used one because he assumed he had to. These conversations became the foundation for everything that followed. Eden is an AI-powered real estate platform built around a simple observation: most homebuyers already know what they love. They just have no way to express it. The product lets users focus on curation and instinct, while the AI handles the searching, translating vague feelings and visual preferences into personalised property recommendations. San Francisco-based UX design and branding agency Clay Global developed both the identity and app experience, working from early product strategy through to implementation. “We were trying to describe something that had never existed,” explains Luke Mizell, Co-Founder at Eden. “No reference point, no comparable product. We were inventing a new category of home search, and the only honest brief we could give was how we wished it would feel.” Rather than delivering specifications, Mizell and his team brought emotions. Brian Chesky’s concept of the 10-star experience gave them permission to lead with feeling over functionality. When Clay asked the founders to describe their favourite home styles and they struggled to answer, the team recognised that moment as the entire problem distilled into a single exchange. If the people building the product couldn’t articulate what they wanted, no conventional search tool was ever going to find it for anyone else.