Fen
A local marketplace for artists and people who collect art. You can buy original work from people around the corner, or sell your art directly to people who will actually appreciate it. Zero fees. You keep everything.
Whether you're an artist listing your work or someone with a painting that needs a new owner, Fen is where local art finds local homes.
Team
1 Designer
1 UI/UX Developer
Our login and home screen.
Product Reel
The problem fen is solving
The online art market is $11.1B and growing at 6.3% annually. Yet 67.9% of buyers are seeking local and domestic purchases, and no scaled digital marketplace owns this space.
Today's options all miss the mark. Artsy skews toward high-end collectors and gallery-represented artists. Etsy has 6 million sellers, but original art gets buried by AI-generated content and dropshipped items. Saatchi Art and Artfinder charge 35-42% commissions, taking most of what artists should earn.
So collectors looking for affordable, local, original art end up browsing Facebook Marketplace chaos or hopping between physical galleries. Fen fills this gap. It's a neighborhood marketplace where artists keep 100% of sales, buyers know who created their art, and both sides can actually meet in person.
The Fen Promise
Walkthrough
Fen's three-step journey is simple. Five core screens, each with one job.
Home — Browse all art in your neighborhood, filtered by location (or the whole city with the 🌍 Earth filter).
Search — Find art by keyword, medium, color, price. Cut through the noise.
Create Listing — Post your art in minutes. Toggle between original or resale. Describe the piece and its condition. Done.
Messaging — Manage offers and conversations with buyers or sellers in one place.
Profile — Your listings, your offers, your account settings.
No extra features. No social feeds. No complexity. Just enough to connect artists with buyers.
Listing process
Our listing process is simple and to the point, you post a picture of the art work, write the title, description and catagory of the art, afterwords you list the dimensions, confirm the location of where said painting is, review it is all correcting and list your item.
Problem - Listing process
The listing flow works, but when reviewing our listing process we noticed that there is a high user drop off.
Walking through the flow, I ran into a big friction: pricing. I began to realize two major issues when completing the process, Most people don’t know what to charge for their art. They’d have to leave the app and dig through other marketplaces just to get a sense of value, which takes time and slows the whole listing process down.
The second issue: measurements. The flow asks for dimensions but most people don’t know those offhand. The user needs to go find a tape measure, jot numbers down, then come back. Same problem as pricing: it pulls you out of the flow and slows the listing down.
My goal for our users was to eliminate the time consumption, and cause our listing conversion rate to a positive.
Approach - Listing process - Price is right
I started with a competitive analysis, looking at how listing flows worked in apps like Facebook Marketplace, Etsy, Depop, and more to see what our process was missing. From there, I ran a UI audit of our own flow to identify where to build on it.
Working solo on the listing redesign, I used Claude and Grok Bot to spin up early prototypes so I had something visual to react to and build from.
Depop
Claude Designs
Solution - Listing process - Price is right
To speed up listing, we added a market comparison for non-original pieces like prints and reproductions. When someone uploads a photo, we run image matching similar to Google reverse image search, to find the same or very similar work online, then pull available prices to help users understand the market value on the art. It works best for widely reproduced pieces and is less reliable for rare or one-of-a-kind art.
We also added a sold and active toggle. Active listings show asking pricing not selling prices, while sold listings show what buyers actually paid. Letting users switch between the two gives a clearer read on real market value, so they’re less likely to overprice.
Solution - Listing process - Measuring
To make dimensions easier, we added a Measure button that opens Apple’s Measure app right from the listing flow. Users can grab height and width there, then hop back and enter the numbers. Doing this now saves the users 5-8 mins from finding a tape measurer and going through the measuring problem.
While this step isn’t fully automated, Apple doesn’t let third-party apps to pull data directly from Measure, it still removes the need to hunt down a tape measure, which makes the process faster and more convenient.
Impact & Key learnings
Working through the listing redesign made one thing clear: conversion isn’t just about fewer screens, it’s about keeping people from leaving the app mid-flow. Pricing and dimensions were the quiet drop-off points, and solving them meant meeting users where the friction actually lives — comps for resale pieces, and a Measure handoff when Apple won’t let you pull the numbers automatically. Prototyping solo with Claude and Grok Bot helped me move faster, but the bigger lesson was simpler: the best listing features don’t feel like extra steps, they remove the reasons people quit before they hit “List for sale.”