In my time at Zulily, I led a wide range of projects that drove revenue, engagement and brand awareness.
I started at Zulily as the Creative Director of Brand Design. My main areas of focus were integrated seasonal campaigns, customer lifecycle programs, performance marketing, onsite retail shopping experience and managing a team of designers.
Within 12 months of my hire, I took an expanded role, overseeing creative across all disciplines and setting the creative vision for a team of 50+ associate creative directors, art directors, designers, writers and photographers. In addition to bringing Zulily’s brand experience to life and driving the marketing creative, my core focus includes setting the vision and standard for all creative, evolving our brand story, restructuring divisional groups, and scaling creative production to champion engaging retail content for current and new customers.
Some of the more important projects I’ve led include a complete refresh of our brand identity, national TV campaigns, website redesign, a visual refresh of our email marketing, and several seasonal integrated marketing campaigns.
Led creative development for national TV and digital brand campaigns.
Holidays: Right On Schedule
Created a playful, colorful TV spot for our holiday campaign to showcase the excitement of finding perfect gifts at unbeatable prices. directed tone, pacing, and dialogue to keep the story authentic and joyful, translating customer insight (“moms plan ahead”) into a relatable narrative. The result was a spot that made holiday shopping feel fun, not stressful. As a result, we drove engagement during peak season and strengthened brand positioning as a destination for discovery.
As part of our marketing strategy to increase brand awareness and drive sales, we developed several campaigns for TV and digital. Our agency partner, Baldwin& led the charge and I oversaw the development from conception through production and final delivery.
Sun’s Out
Extended the holiday campaign into Spring/Summer with a fresh visual language and broader category focus. I led creative continuity and production efficiency by concepting and capturing multi-season content during the holiday shoot. Oversaw post-production to maintain tone and pacing that felt vibrant and on-brand. As a result, we delivered a seamless seasonal transition that reinforced Zulily’s value proposition year-round and optimized production resources.
Fun is Part of the Deal
Created a playful, surreal TV spot, Fun Is Part of the Deal to reframe shopping for moms under pressure as escape, not chore. Directed tone, pacing, and dialogue to keep it authentic and joyful: with a scroll on the app, moms ride a “magic elevator” through a digital, golden-age department store—finding great prices without the stress. Translated the insight (“moms plan ahead and juggle everything”) into a colorful, swipe-through world that makes discovery feel easy. The result was Creative Index scores +40% vs. benchmark (pre/post), and the campaign was featured as The Drum’s Ad of the Day, driving engagement at peak season and strengthening Zulily’s position as a destination for joyful discovery.
Improved our visual identity, created new efficiencies and established a cohesive look.
As the Head of Creative at Zulily, I was responsible for setting the creative vision for the brand. My highest priority was re-establishing a cohesive visual aesthetic that evolved our brand’s identity. I also wanted to build a system that would enable my teams to work more efficiently and provide consistency across the board. I led our brand refresh to update and improve our brand identity, image, and communication. The new guide is 80+ pages long, encompassing brand codes like logos, colors, typography, photography, iconography, manifesto, tone of voice, writing style guides, brand terminology, and more. It’s a crucial tool for internal creative teams and keeping a largely decentralized organization on brand. By building a better creative system for our team we were able to reduce the time spent by our creative team by 35% for our Holiday 2023 campaign.
Led performance-driving creative for paid media at all stages of the funnel.
Despite once topping a billion dollars in revenue and having millions of faithful customers, Zulily's brand awareness found itself surprisingly low at the beginning of the year. Sales were also down year over year, due to inflation and fears of an impending recession. Paid media is an essential component to solving this problem.
I oversaw the development of creative for our paid media on platforms such as Meta, Instagram, Tik Tok, Google Ads, and Pinterest. As part of my vision, we focused on a data-driven strategy, innovative executions, and strategically optimizing our campaigns though A/B testing with the goal of increasing awareness at the top of the funnel and encouraging conversion toward the bottom.
Guided the development of seasonal campaigns, to drive engagement and sales.
Seasonal campaigns breathe life into our products and add life and dimension to our identity and brand narrative. I oversaw the development of seasonal campaigns from concept to completion, inspiring and guiding my team to execute creative stories that resonate with the Zulily Customer and promote the product focus for the season. My intention for every campaign is to create a connection between our brand and relevant seasonal moments of our consumers’ lives.
Set the vision for new email creative templates that align with our brand ethos.
Our brand refresh gave us a framework for ensuring brand consistency across all platforms and touch-points. Email is our most valuable marketing channel, as it generates a significant amount of sales. My team created flexible, lightweight templates that could be reused for different emails as well as different programs across Zulily. Our goals were: to make our messages more visually appealing and grab the attention of potential customers, keep each template flexible and ensure a consistent look, feel and tone so our subscribers easily recognize our brand and build trust with us.
A big goal for Zulily is to increase consumer sign-ups and website return rates for new visitors on our website. As part of a new testing initiative, I led the exploration of a new site experience to appeal to a new audience. Our goals were: to improve the experience and display of content on our home page, create a new navigation system with categories and pages that could be easily accessed anywhere within Zulily.com and simplify the way we present flash sales to classify our content. Our new home page test was scheduled to launch in 2024.
