CMF & CIRCULAR DESIGN STUDIO
Bringing brands into clarity.
SOLEY helps design teams turn material, colour, and sensory thinking into strategy.
What people see, touch, and feel about your product is your brand. Most design teams make those decisions under pressure, without a system, and without a clear map for where materials are heading. We help you build both.
SOLEY works with design-driven companies ready to move from decorative material thinking to strategic. Where circularity, sensory identity, and brand clarity become the same ambition.
HOW WE WORK
Clarity
We move teams from scattered references and gut instinct to a clear, shared material language, one everyone can name and defend.
Relevance
Every direction we develop is grounded in your brand, your market, and the cultural moment, not borrowed from a trend report.
Confidence
You leave with a system you can use, not just a document. Your team can make better decisions independently, long after we've finished.
Alignment
Design, brand, and product move in the same direction. The work we do together becomes the foundation for decisions across teams.
ABOUT
SOLEY is the studio of Lyse Martel, a CMF and circular design strategist with 15 years of practice where material culture, sensory intelligence, and brand identity meet.
Previously at Volkswagen Group and across work for Bang & Olufsen, NIO, and Hopium, Lyse built CMF systems where materials are not decorative but intentional.
She founded SOLEY on a single conviction: that circularity and beauty are the same ambition. A product designed to last, made from materials that respect their origin, will always feel more honest and more desirable than one that doesn't.
"Feeling is intelligence."
SOLEY works with design-driven companies who are ready to build what doesn't exist yet and who want a partner, not just a consultant.
SOLEY is named for the Icelandic buttercup, sóley, a flower that turns toward light. Lyse, in Norwegian, means light. Soleil, in French, means sun.
SELECTED WORK
Bang & Olufsen Beosound Explore
CMF direction for B&O's first outdoor speaker, materials chosen to age with use.
Bang & Olufsen Core Palette
Built the foundational CMF system unifying B&O's product family. A shared material and colour language across generations.
NIO CMF Design Identity
Senior CMF designer on NIO's brand identity system. The material and colour logic that runs from badge to cabin, across the entire lineup.
Scent of The Unreal
AI-generated visions of surfaces that don't yet exist, each paired with a bespoke fragrance. A multi-sensory prototype asking what materials could become.
Volkswagen Adaptive Design for Circularity
Led a cross-disciplinary team across strategy, exterior, interior, UX, and CMF designing a full circular car concept built on longevity, modularity, and recyclability.
NIO EVE Concept
Led full CMF for NIO's origin concept, the car that established the material and sensory language the brand still builds from.