What do you feel when you first discover an app?
Think about the first three seconds. Before reading, before tapping. A visual scan that captures your attention. The moment when you decide, without realizing it, whether this is something worth your time.
Not every app has that magnetic pull, that desire to return to a place you genuinely want to stay in. That feeling that lingers before anything is revealed. That sense of a spell.
December 2025. An empty Figma file and a fresh new brand.
The promise: to build a place where characters come alive, are remembered, and generate their own economy.
The challenge was turning that promise into a product people would use every day without losing its appeal.
If you've been following the project, you're probably already familiar with two chapters of the story:
The Charms team shared the “why” behind Charms: how it was born and evolved from Humans vs AI, and what they discovered about the real connection between humans and AI characters.
The FLOC* team shared the “what": how a living brand is built through direction. Identity, narrative, and system, in Design Sprint mode.
This article explores what no one else documents: the gap between what the brand promises and what the product needs to deliver, and the daily work of designing it seamless.
At FLOC*, we have a concept that defines our relationship with the brands we create: Brand Guardian.
When we complete a brand project, our work doesn't end with the deliverables. We understand that brands evolve alongside their context, the product lifecycle, and the team’s decisions. Supporting that evolution from within is part of how we work, ensuring the brand remains consistent as the product grows.
Ongoing sessions keep us involved in the conversation as decisions are made. Open design. Learning by doing. Sharing the process with the team, not just designing for the team. That’s how a product crafted with care comes to life.
Charms isn't an AI chat app. It isn't a wallet. It isn't a game.
Designing something that doesn’t exist yet comes with a beautiful trap: it only works when it feels like it has always existed.
Some flows have no established UX patterns. Every decision remains a hypothesis until it’s validated by the system, the team, and the users. Research and exploration stop being just an initial phase and become a continuous process.
The unfamiliar can only be understood through the familiar. Users arrive with established habits, and asking them to learn both the product and its gestures at the same time is one of the fastest ways to lose them before they even begin. Standard conventions become the starting point.
They help define which patterns should remain familiar and where challenging established conventions can create space for the magic of Charms.
The system is what connects the brand and the product: design tokens, components, micro-interactions, animations, states, and copywriting. It ensures the brand evolves alongside the product without losing its identity.
From that empty file, the design process evolved through three distinct phases: Characters → Market → Using Charms. These are interconnected layers that feed into the same system and continuously reshape one another as the product evolves. Each feeds the others. None of them is ever finished.
How do you design something that looks like an agent but feels like a companion?
An AI character in Charms isn't an agent, because people don’t truly interact with agents. Once you give something a name, a voice, an appearance, and a memory, you stop simply assigning tasks to it and start building a more personal and social relationship.
That emotional bond is where the experience begins. And the process needs to feel both fast and meaningful. If you ask for too much, the user won’t finish. If you ask for too little, the character feels soulless.
How do you bring charm to the coldest part of the product?
We faced another challenge: making sure that participating in Trade still felt like participating in Charms.
The goal was to elevate familiar fintech conventions through a series of small design decisions. Always keeping the character at the center while the market moved around it.
Every interaction was designed to keep the character's energy alive. Every operation isn’t just a silent transaction; it’s a moment where the character connects with you.
The result is a workflow that experienced traders understand instantly while remaining approachable for new users. Trade isn’t the boring part of the product. It’s another place where the character feels alive.
How do you capture attention in a way that brings users back?
Once the character has been created, once the market is open, the most important question remains: what brings users back the next day?
The work became designing that reunion. Creating daily touchpoints that capture the user’s attention:
When the character remembers who they are, what their relationship is, and what it takes to keep it alive.
When the market gives the character a public life and continues to operate even when you’re away. Others discover it, its community grows, and its economy flows.
The character extends beyond the app itself: it appears in memes and resurfaces in the feeds and chats where users spend their time every day.
Returning to Charms doesn’t feel like returning to an app. It feels like returning to a place you want to be.
Some decisions will only reveal themselves once real users begin interacting with the product. That’s why the system is designed to adapt to new developments without requiring a complete overhaul, and why we’ll continue to be there, as Brand Guardians, as part of the conversation.
Charms is now available on the App Store.
Discover the platform where AI characters come to life.
Remember those first few seconds and let yourself fall under its spell.
Thank you 💙
None of this would feel alive without the people behind it every single day — Gon, Juan, Ignacio, Sergio, Víctor and Jesús. You keep this project's charm and energy alive.