Selected Projects
Photo by Brett Gundlock
While I prefer to create clean and repeatable processes, some of my most proud career moments have been collaborating with teams solving major problems at the 11th hour. Here are some examples of massive solutions created in high-pressure situations.
StockX #flexfromhome - an engagement with community
An Inspired Call:
On March 9, 2020, Americans all over the country went into COVID lockdown for the first time. It was scary. In New York City, a cacophony of sirens went all day and night bringing suffering patients to hospitals. Our CMO wanted a way to engage our community without focusing on commerce and transactions.
A Way to Connect:
Since the words on everyone’s minds were “Work From Home”, I immediately pitched the creation and promotion of the hashtag “#flexfromhome”. Combining the impulse to flex with the edict to remain safely at home, it was the right move for us. We partnered with Feeding America to back the initiative with meal donations.
(Fun fact, when I got the email from the CMO soliciting ideas, I was still in bed [it was the early days of lockdown]. I sent the concept via my iPad before even getting out of bed.)
The #flexfromhome initiative resulted in a $22,500 donation to Feeding America. Before we were even finished with our campaign, other brands attempted to co-opt the hashtag for their own marketing and promotional purposes. Luckily, they were unsuccessful, and #flexfromhome has become a go-to hashtag on Instagram for sneakerheads sharing sneaker pictures. You can search the hashtag on Instagram today and you’ll find new posts every single day.
Learn more about #flexfromhome: Click Here
Participants took to social media, namely Instagram and Twitter, to post photos of themselves in their favorite sneakers and streetwear, with the hashtag #flexfromhome. Each post added to our Feeding America donation, helping those most negatively affected by the lockdowns.
StockX Landing Pages - a necessary innovation
An Institutional Issue:
In early 2020, responsibility for creating custom brand landing pages transitioned from an Engineering team to my Editorial Content team. Used about once quarterly, the CMS for custom landing pages was optimized for Engineers, not creative content people. In other words: the CMS was incredibly complicated, unintuitive, difficult to learn, and even more difficult to master. This limited how often custom landing pages could be made, how easily they could be edited, and required ongoing support from outside teams whenever there were issues. And there were many issues. I needed to find a sustainable solution for my team and the business.
A Proactive Solution:
My Editorial Content team was already familiar with a different CMS optimized for creative content users, so I engaged our development vendor to create a whole new landing pages root and ecosystem through the familiar CMS. Working closely with the Product, Growth, and Platform teams, we built a new root and process to create unlimited Landing Pages on a platform that global teams were already trained on and familiar with. But that was just the beginning.
After a few months of design and development, we created a Landing Pages process that was simpler, more customizable, and much easier to use - plus no one really had to be trained on it. It was a system that users already understood. By developing this new tool with teams like Product, Growth, and Platform, it was already optimized for SEO and fit into the larger UX flow. This integration and simplicity opened new possibilities for growth, and made Landing Pages one of the most in-demand internal products in a matter of months. The increased value and volume demanded that a Senior Producer was hired to service the requests by teams across the business.
Landing Pages had previously only been used for the Brand’s highest profile projects, but the ease and customizability of the new process made LPs a great choice for other priorities. They could be used for Paid Campaigns, Merchandizing, Promotions, Brand Announcements, and one was even featured in a 2021 Super Bowl ad. This flexibility and versatility ultimately took pressure off of StockX’s Product Design teams, allowing them to focus on other priorities, and what was once a tool used quarterly became a foundation of weekly business use.
Global StockX Teams continue to use this Landing Page ecosystem in every language, every day - and if you have the StockX app on your devices, you probably got a push notification today that sent you to one of these Landing Pages.
Like all of these projects, a whole lot more went into making this work, and I’m always thrilled to discuss it in more depth.
StockX Holiday 2020 - an exercise in volume
How It Started:
In the lead-up to the first Pandemic Holiday, we sketched out an Editorial strategy that would engage our community in a way that felt inclusive and sensitive to a challenging Holiday season. We opted for consistency and curation - a small number of shopping guides that would be shared consistently and act as tentpoles around our normal content creation.
What We Did:
The team shifted gears and jumped at the challenge. In a matter of weeks, a new, exhaustive process was implemented using the same resources to execute exactly what was requested. Knowing the increased demand would be a heavy burden on my team, we worked together to create alluring and catchy headlines on topics that they’d enjoy writing. This made the tasks exciting for the team and entertaining for the audience. We made it fun. And we succeeded.
A Surprise Twist:
Upon approval of our strategy, we were asked to adjust it to create daily sharable content. This would effectively increase output and demand by almost 8x with no extra time or resources. This request came directly from the CEO: it had to be honored. And we would honor it. We just had to figure out how.
I recently found this meme I made after this request.
We hit the brief and the numbers proved it was exactly the right thing to do, and the right way to do it.
To see all the StockX Holiday 2020 Editorial content: Click Here.
Like all of these projects, a whole lot more went into making this work, and I’m always thrilled to discuss it in more depth.
Final Numbers:
53 Unique Editorials
1.2M Unique Views
71%+ YOY
Photography by Sam Sklar, Art Direction by Lizzie Kassab & Monica Dubray
StockX Holiday 2021 - a puzzle of agility
How It Started:
Building off the previous year’s success with daily sharable content, we planned a blockbuster volume of content for the following year with content set to publish daily starting in October. Every day in front of our audience was crucial to hitting the season’s needed results. The team was writing, assets were shot, and all we awaited was final approval. But the approval didn’t come.
A Surprise Twist:
The day before content was set to go live, it was decided to redo the campaign assets from scratch with a brand new concept that hadn’t been created yet. While this meant some teams could pause while a new concept was created, it would seriously reduce our campaign length and hurt the entire season’s performance - unless my team made a different choice.
What We Did (The Puzzle) :
While other teams reconvened to find a creative path forward for the biggest season of the year, my team needed to fill the gap. We could not lose a month’s time engaging with our audience, especially during the highly competitive Holiday season.
First, we individually evaluated all assets from the former campaign and got approval or rejection for each individual asset. Then we stepped back and allowed groupings to form organically within this smaller group of approved assets. Those groupings implied new potential themes which we developed into fresh narratives. One narrative was approved, and we used that new context as a jumping-off point to produce new imagery inspired by the original assets.
We did all of this in 36 hours. This allowed a brand new “Pre-Holiday” Campaign to go live just five days later. This process was done in a specifically balanced way so that 90% of the work the Editorial Content team had already done could still be used, keeping morale up and output consistent.
The quickly conceived and executed Pre-Holiday campaign ran concurrent to production of a new Holiday campaign. By bridging the gap, we were not only able to salvage this previously forfeited and crucial time, we hit our goal numbers for the season and then far exceeded them.
To see all of the StockX Pre-Holiday Editorial content: Click Here.
And to see all of the StockX Holiday 2021 Editorial content: Click Here.
Like all of these projects, a whole lot more went into making this work, and I’m always thrilled to discuss it in more depth.
Final Numbers:
55 Unique Editorials
3.1M Unique Views
158%+ YOY
Photography by Madison Koster, Art Direction by Lizzie Kassab
