Design Management · Team Leadership · Conversion
Across BuildASign, Easy Canvas Prints, Printcopia, Allied Shirts, and multiple other spin-offs, I built and led the in-house team behind the brands, the flagship e-commerce sites, marketing touchpoints, and the customization tools — with conversion as the KPI on everything we shipped.
I ran a design practice and oversaw quality control of almost every single design related asset and decision. Multiple online consumer brands shared one in-house team, and my job was to keep brand, UX, and a relentless conversion-testing habit moving in parallel — while frequently hiring and directing the people doing the work; project managing and coaching to keep things sustainable and morale high.
With more than ten years of history, BuildASign had a rich brand story that barely showed up in its e-commerce identity. Aside from optimization our biggest challenge was to modernize the visual identity while preserving existing brand equity. We followed this by building a new responsive experience.
We treated users and ownership as key stakeholders, interviewing both early to define brand-DNA, user personas, and the competitive landscape. The new mark was modular — deployable in multiple configurations across BAS sub-brands, differentiated within the vertical, and still connoting shipping and manufacturing.
The existing funnel consistently performed well, but we still found opportunities to improve things. We required every addition to the information architecture to be validated through testing. We shifted the team to an atomic-design methodology so pages could be iterated as efficiently as possible, and started multivariate testing right at launch. Responsive from the ground up, the UX redesign quickly arrived at a 1-to-1 content match across mobile and desktop due to our prototyping with a live site instead of static mockups.
Easy Canvas Prints and Printcopia were discount brands offering customizable photo canvases and sundry home decor items. Two business needs were clear from the start: show the diversity and quality of the physical product, and bring the UX in line with home-decor sites. I oversaw the buildout of a product-photo library and ran multivariate testing of different layouts with users.
The latest design tool is the product of three years of multivariate user testing — and the lesson was that simple usually wins in this context. Multiple single-function screens proved more usable than one complex interface. The brand and site that came out of that work are still going strong today.
Allied Shirts was built in a very short period of time. Ownership wanted to test viability, so we gathered requirements and designed quickly — standing up a logo and brand system fast; then art-directing a series of impromptu photo shoots to get product imagery flowing. The brand turned out to be profitable and, because we never stopped optimizing, revenue grew every single year. We also worked closely with the art department on this brand, leading to us directing the design of much of the physical inventory we sold. This was a fantastic opportunity to use user data to help curate our template selection.
Rapid A/B testing taught us that product icons beat photography for this audience, and drove a rebrand from the original "Dress United" name. We launched a meme-focused sub-brand, Sweet Tees, whose templates quickly became the best sellers on the site. As the design tool evolved, the ongoing challenge was adding UI without it conflicting with what came before — with a strong callout to pricing, the thing this customer cares about most.
Different brands, different audiences — but the same operating model: hire well, set a clear direction, and let real users settle the arguments.