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Purple Shirt is excited to announce that we are now an Elemental Concept company.

We are thrilled to share that Purple Shirt has officially joined the Elemental Concept family! This new chapter opens up exciting opportunities for innovation and collaboration.

Our work

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Air New Zealand

Partnering with a world-leading airline

Customer Experience Strategy, Digital Product Strategy, UX Research & Design, Service Design, Employee Experience

For over a decade, we delivered world-first innovations, accelerated transformation programmes, and helped shape globally recognised customer experiences with Air New Zealand.

Air New Zealand

Reimagining Inflight Entertainment as a strategic customer channel

Product Strategy, UX Research & Design

Arvida

Supporting change through a clear view of the employee experience

Employee Experience

HR managers taking notes with agentic ai on computer

UK Client

Empowering HR leaders with an agentic AI for people analytics

Tech Consulting, Software Development

Air New Zealand

Partnering with a world-leading airline

Customer Experience Strategy, Digital Product Strategy, UX Research & Design, Service Design, Employee Experience

Air New Zealand

Reimagining Inflight Entertainment as a strategic customer channel

Product Strategy, UX Research & Design

Arvida

Supporting change through a clear view of the employee experience

Employee Experience

UK Client

Empowering HR leaders with an agentic AI for people analytics

Tech Consulting, Software Development

Purple Shirt Studio | From idea to scalable product.

Purple Shirt Studio combines great design, modern engineering and AI assisted delivery to move you forward faster. Perfect for start ups and SME's who are serious about technology solutions and digital products that last.

Learn more about Purple Shirt Studio

Latest articles

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The canvas is no longer the starting point

From Canvas to Claude Code

Some of us here at Purple Shirt have been designing digital experiences long enough to have worked through Fireworks, Photoshop (what were we thinking?), Sketch, and eventually Figma. Different tools, but the same basic idea: you have a canvas, you shape things until they feel right, and hand them off. What's changed with Claude Code is what the canvas looks like and what you hand off. Instead of arranging components on a frame, you're describing intent in a prompt. The output is still something you can see, click, and react to, it just gets there differently.

April 28, 2026

How hard is your business to disrupt?

AI is compressing the disruption cycle. Five years to respond has become eighteen months. A strategic moat sits where two things overlap: what drives customer choice, and what a disruptor cannot easily replicate. A capability that drives choice but is easy to copy is a feature. A capability that is hard to copy but does not drive choice is a cost. Most organisations defend both while telling themselves they are defending moats.

April 23, 2026

Building confidence for change

In a recent article, Designing for Change, we explored why Human-Centred Design (HCD) matters in transformation and why it cannot sit on the sidelines of change delivery. HCD and change management share a common goal, which is to support people through change in a way that is purposeful and collaborative. Traditional change management provides the structure and governance needed to deliver change at scale. HCD brings empathy, co-design, and a focus on how change will be experienced by the people affected. Importantly, HCD is not about simply asking people what they want. It is about deeply understanding their needs and thoughtfully balancing them against the practical realities of delivering change. The best outcomes happen when the two are integrated.

March 25, 2026

What to expect from a software engineering engagement - and how to know if we're the right fit

There's a version of this piece that opens with a line about our "people-first approach" and ends with a call to action to "start your transformation journey." But you won't find that here. What you will find is an honest account from Chief Technology Officer Gaven of what working with our global team on a development or engineering project actually looks like - the shape of the engagement, how decisions get made, what we need from you, and what you can expect from us in return. Because the best way to know if we're the right fit is to understand how we work before we start.

March 13, 2026

“Working with the Purple Shirt team was an incredibly rewarding experience. We gained deep insights into not just what our clients want to achieve, but also what works for them, what doesn’t and the role they want Milford to play in helping them achieve their goals. Our thinking was challenged throughout the process, and as a result, we now have a robust client experience framework, cemented in client research, to not just guide all future client experience enhancements, but also to help us prioritise which enhancements to go after first.”

Nina Hassall

Senior Manager Client Experience

Milford Asset Management

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Working with Steve and the team at Purple Shirt has been revolutionary for SchoolDocs. They have helped us recognise the potential of our product, providing insightful, client-focused evidence and data that has supported us to scale and transform. The quality of engagement with Steve and the Purple Shirt team has been exceptional. Their passion for customer experience has inspired us to be bold and ambitious about our business, fostering a renewed sense of purpose across our whole company.

Jane Gregg

CEO

SchoolDocs

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Purple Shirt has been instrumental to the success of our next generation of airport operational and financial software. It feels like Purple Shirt have become part of the Veovo family.

Holger Pleiss

Solutions Manager

Gentrack

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"Purple Shirt partnered with us on two generations of our inflight entertainment experience, which contributed to Air New Zealand winning two international awards. More than just a UX partner, they gave us the confidence to deliver a series of world firsts for the aviation industry."

Paul Harper, Product Manager, Air NZ

The Purple Shirt team not only helped us navigate through a critical period in our Zeno product development process, but they also worked with us to build out a thoughtful and consistent approach to design and user experience. This has given us the internal capability to carry forward across our organisation and has been tremendously valuable for Serko.

Charlie Nowaczek

Chief Operating Officer

Serko

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"I just wanted to acknowledged Purple Shirt's amazing contribution to help Rail Freight team’s vision come to reality. Their expertise to deliver the UX and working collaboratively with the Team is outstanding."

Ley Ilo, Senior Project Manager, KiwiRail

This was Loadrite's first experience working with external user experience designers and it was a big call for the organisation to make. However, our engagement with Jonathan and Steve from Purple Shirt has been fantastic. Right from the start of the project, they collaborated with us to gain a deep understanding of our users' needs and together we have crafted a truly world-class product that our customers are thrilled to use.

Jason Anderson

Director of Product Management

Loadrite

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