THE FULL STORY
About Me
As a passionate and curious designer, I am both intrigued and driven by the creative process. I find the most joy when I'm diving into the human experience, whether that is in commercial or residential context.
I started my career designing people's homes. I loved the challenge of making a personal space highly functional yet deeply connected to the individual. My days were spent sketching, exploring new materials and how we could use them. But mostly, I spent time connecting with my clients to fully understand why and how they use their space.
When I jumped to retail design, I continued to design spaces that connected people. At Starbucks Coffee Company, I spent nine years creating the Third Place both internationally and in the U.S. I worked on everything from concept development to high volume production and execution. Along the way I built mechanisms and tools to support design teams globally.
After Starbucks, I created an independent design consultancy, 2h Designworks. I led homeowners, plus small and large businesses through concept development, ultimately creating and implementing a personal experience for each. My clients were referral based startups (iCap Equity, Arivale) and also established, well known brands/services (Swedish Medical, Tully's Coffee). I currently fill my weekdays leading design at Amazon, but I take on 1-2 small residential projects per year as a different creative expression.
At Amazon, I've worked with three teams in startup mode - Amazon Campus, Amazon Go, and Amazon Style. When I joined Amazon Campus in 2015, I built a Store Design team from scratch, with responsibility for design strategy/environmental design, production store design, procurement, design program management, expanding my scope to include construction management and launch/program management. My team and I drove continuous improvement for in-store customer experience and capex reduction efforts, leading a multitude of projects including fixture level enhancements, returns station, instant pickup, and package-less delivery tests. We grew from 2 to 33 sites in 2 years. I then joined Amazon Go in March of 2018 to lead CX Design - a team of industrial, interior and concept designers (CXD) to develop new tech-enabled fixtures and in-store shopping solutions for Amazon Go and Just Walk Out (JWO) technology. I guided my team to unlock new selection features and shopping solutions including fountain beverages and coffee, hot food and bakery cases, and produce small SKU bins by delivering net-new technology integrated fixtures. During this time I also led CXD for the first Amazon Go Grocery location, as well as standing up a lean UK team to parallel path an international launch. We partnered across functional areas to deliver the new JWO-enabled grocery format with expanded selection, while delivering category placement and trade-down logics, overall customer experience flow, fixtures, millwork, signage packages, and new shopping interactions based on full grocery selection, while delivering mechanisms for expanding Amazon Go and Go Grocery formats. From there, I joined Amazon Style in September 2019 as one of the founding leaders. I've built a high performing team from scratch, developing the concept design through the complex, ambiguous, interconnected, and fast-paced nature of a zero to one product launch. We successfully opened the first two Amazon Style stores at Americana at Brand (CA), and at Easton Town Center (OH) in 2022.
Throughout my 20+ year career in design, the constant thread that runs through my work is a deep curiosity of human behaviors. I continue to be passionate about designing solutions that create the best, and often most innovative, possible brand-enhancing experience.