Hotel Client New Brand & Experience Design
The Challenge: Help a hotel client break out of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ hospitality model to launch an approachable lifestyle brand for modern travelers.
My Role:
• Owned relationship of the Global Head of Brand Development.
• Conducted new market analysis to identify an untapped audience of ambitious, health conscious travelers.
• Designed & co-lead qualitative workshops to collaboratively build hotel concepts & experiences with potential guests.
• Built & lead ideation workshops based on guest insights with wellbeing experts to come up with innovative experience ideas
• Supported online longitudinal quant concept testing.
• Co-delivered a brand narrative, a robust guest experience map, and over 150 potential hotel names to client & partners.
The Result: A hotel that helps guests prioritize their well-being & personal growth by inspiring new, positive habits they can take home. There are 30 hotels already under development and a total of 500 planned across the U.S.
The Team: Merideth Peck (MD), Gretchen Devero (SD), Steve Winchell (CD), Katie Sadow (CD), Cole Nielson (CD)
Waze Cultural Audit & Business Strategy
The Challenge: Help Waze understand its purpose in the world & bring it to life both internally & externally.
My Role:
• Owned relationship of the Marketing & Executive team, including the CMO & CEO of Waze.
• Personally interviewed 100 employees & presented an analysis on how to keep internal culture thriving.
• Conducted qual & quant across Brazil, France, US, & UK.
• Lead vision workshops with the Executive team.
• Presented brand narrative and mission to 400 employees globally.
• Lead brand activation workshops in New York, Silicon Valley, & Tel Aviv with HR, Sales, Partnerships, & Product teams to help them use brand as a strategic tool & guiding light.
• Developed toolkits for these departments, including exercises to help Partnerships with sales strategy, & a product principles playbook to help Product teams innovate.
The Result: The work was met with huge success & has since been incorporated into every department across Waze. It most recently served as a foundation for global brand & product redesigns.
The Team: Joey Camire (MD), Trevor Larry (SL), Jess Vander (SL), Alexandria Jarvis (CD), Marije Roodhof (SL)
Isminé Product Design & Company Launch
The Challenge: Help The American Friends Of Georgia raise funds for the only free hospice & palliative home care program in Tbilisi.
My Role:
• Connected with The American Friends Of Georgia & interviewed patients of their hospice & in-home program in Tbilisi.
• Designed & handcrafted 100 pairs of ceramic earrings, each style dedicated to one of the eight interview respondents.
• Concepted, named, & launched a non-profit brand where we featured photos & stories of the interviewees. Customers could purchase the earrings or donate directly on the website.
• Managed a team of two volunteer photographers, an art director & a coder to bring the brand to life.
The Result: Isminé, a brand on a mission to share stories of marginalized people in Georgian society, & to raise money for the organizations that care for them. At Isminé (meaning ‘listen’ in Georgian), we believe the act of listening is a simple yet powerful way anyone can help heal the world. We exceeded our goal of $3000 by raising $9000 through earring sales & donations. The project was featured several times in the Georgian press.
The Team: Cory Tyler Bowles (CD), Conor Driscoll (WD), Alex Contell (AD), Saba Shengelia (AD)
Walmart New Brand & Innovation Strategy
The Challenge: Help Walmart build a design-driven brand of affordable tech accessories in a crowded landscape.
My Role:
• Owned relationship of the Marketing & Design team at Walmart.
• Identified the macro trends a distinct, design-driven brand could tap into through culture & category deep dives.
• Conducted secondary research to determine the ideal customer & lead qualitative interviews to unearth their needs & aspirations.
• Designed & lead an ideation workshop with engineers & fashion experts to develop consumer-ready product concepts for testing.
• Spearheaded the brand strategy, naming, & product suite formulation, & guided brand identity, communications, & packaging design, together with a designer & a strategist.
The Result: Motile, a bold new collection of sleek, everyday fashion accessories that marry form & function with innovative built-in tech solutions. Almost all vegan leather products & cell phone accessories were sold out within the first 6 months of launch.
The Team: Ben Cheney (MD), Trevor Larry (SL), Katie Sadow (CD)
Calvin Klein Brand & Influencer Strategy
The Challenge: Help Calvin Klein become a leading global lifestyle brand by driving relevance & momentum in 2017.
My Role:
• Immersed into the lives of Gen Z in China, Brazil, the Netherlands, the UK, & the US through digital ethnographies.
• Lead cultural analyses & developed a report on 5 macro trends.
• Developed guidelines for selecting & partnering with influencers & identified 40 mega to nano influencers to hire.
• Designed work sessions with young, diverse women to address sensitive issues around sexuality, confidence, & sex.
• Delivered & presented a brand role deck, & a media brief Calvin Klein used for agency partners to activate campaigns in ’17 & ’18.
The Result: In 2017, Calvin Klein lead a progressive communications campaign reflecting a more modern, nuanced & multifaceted expression of ‘sexy’. The campaign garnered media attention for it’s inclusivity. Calvin Klein successfully challenged fashion industry status quo & injected itself back into relevant cultural conversations.
The Team: Alain Sylvain (CEO), Krystal Plomatos (SD), Chia Schmitz (CD)
Media Client Internal Insights Training
The Challenge: Help the client break out of an execution-first mindset & learn to leverage insights toward more robust creative ideas.
My Role:
• Interviewed stakeholders to understand the organization’s big picture goals & hurdles in their creative process.
• Co-developed & co-led a three day workshop to train 150 employees on understanding, finding, & leveraging insights.
• Found an event space & managed a huge production checklist of all materials, exercises, & props for the day.
• Delivered a bespoke insights toolkit for delegates to leverage post-workshop.
The Result: Armed with insight hunting, generating, and activating skills, teams were inspired to stretch creative and advertising ideas to new directions. The bespoke toolkit is now part of the official on-boarding process and is used as a campaign ideation and sales tool.
The Team: Chris Konya (MD), Osei Kwakye (SL)
Google Ara User Research & Hardware Innovation
The Challenge: Help Google rewrite the rules of the mobile market and create meaningful value for new customers of Ara; a more sustainable, affordable, and flexible smartphone.
My Role:
• Identified valuable early adopter segments of the Ara smartphone.
• Designed and moderated ethnographies to uncover the user needs that represent opportunities for Ara hardware modules. Ethnographies explored user passions, work flow, tensions around their mobile device, and included an ideation exercise.
• Delivered a robust research report for each of the affinity segments.
• Recruited and briefed experts including DJs, filmmakers, UX designers and industrial designers, to ideate on innovative hardware modules based on user needs.
• Refined and prioritized the hardware concepts together with an industrial engineer and illustrator to build out the 30 most compelling consumer-ready modules.
• Delivered final reports on affinity segments and a body of Ara module concepts that solved real user problems. These reports included user journeys to help tell the stories of how modules fit into segments’ lives.
The Result: Expected to launch by 2016, Project Ara was cancelled indefinitely. A classic case of a good idea, just not great timing. Customers are still accustomed to closed designs, hardware technology is not yet advanced enough, and businesses have yet to see the value of dissuading customers from upgrading with all new $800+ smartphones.
The Team: Joey Camire (MD), Joanne Bolens (SL), Chia Schmitz (CD)
