Serena & Lily

Product Designer

During a period of over 60% YoY net sales growth and major retail expansion, Serena & Lily's e-commerce platform—their primary revenue channel—was hindered by an outdated architecture and inefficient third-party development processes. The company needed a scalable solution to support their accelerating business needs and enhance the customer shopping experience.

I was an essential contributor to the development, design, testing, and launch of a custom-built content management platform and associated design system.

• Collaborated on development and design of custom-built platform and design system, working directly with developers and other design team members to produce a scalable, efficient, and on-brand system

• Tested and iterated on designs at a component and module level, ensuring the platform development enabled teams to achieve flexible use cases for all company website needs

• Served as primary UX designer working deeply within the product at a technical level; learned the ins and outs of the product as development progressed, and onboarded other company members to the platform after launch

• Validated product through a pilot program of landing page implementations, setting the foundation for the brand's digital future while supporting their expanding retail presence and growing e-commerce demands

8 Core Members

1 year

Serena & Lily (S&L) began in 2003 as a small baby brand, expanding over time into a full home furnishing and interior design company. It functioned primarily as an e-commerce business, supplemented with sales from S&L Design Shops, or showrooms, that offered design advice and order management for large projects.

From 2017 - 2020, revenue consistently increased, the brand gained thousands of new customers and followers, Design Shop locations doubled from 6 to 12, and the product selection expanded. With the business steadily growing, many systems were updated and implemented to support changing needs, such as a growing customer service team, additional marketing resources, and added supply chain logistics.

With so much growth, the modernization of the brand's shopping experience was key; the majority of S&L's business was centered around the e-commerce website. The site was currently built by third-party developers - it was vital to create a new, high-functioning, and easily managed platform to enhance the customer shopping experience.

This initiative focused on creating a scalable, efficient solution that would streamline the design-to-market process, enhance site performance metrics, improve the end-to-end shopping experience, and enable internal teams to rapidly deploy and customize landing pages

The existing site architecture was managed by third-party developers who were far removed from our design team's daily work, processes, and information loops. This created significant operational inefficiencies.

Design iterations required external developer involvement, leading to extended production timelines, redundant QA cycles, missed campaign or product launch deadlines, and resource-intensive revision processes.

Our proposed solution was to implement a scalable content management platform to reduce dependency on external development and accelerate time-to-market for product and campaign launches. This platform solution would also allow design to flex with the needs of the business and specific projects on-site in a more timely manner.

We partnered with a new engineering team to define project scope through comprehensive user journey mapping and existing site analysis. Documented critical user flows and design patterns to inform component architecture, enabling the engineering team to begin technical exploration and prototype development.

Collaborated with engineering to define and iterate on core components, modules, and templates through regular feedback sessions. Leveraging my expertise in responsive design and asset management, I provided strategic guidance to ensure system functionality aligned with design team requirements.

Example: We identified that engineers had built component positioning with granular percentage controls for X/Y axes. Based on actual usage patterns, we simplified this to preset alignment options (left, right, center), improving usability and maintaining consistent layouts across breakpoints.

Our design team held many collaborative review cycles with engineering and e-commerce teams to validate design decisions, technical capabilities, and merchandising requirements. Through extensive prototype testing, we optimized the platform to balance custom design capabilities with intuitive shopping experiences, ultimately achieving launch readiness.

I led the initial platform rollout as the primary designer to implement the new system, leveraging my dual perspective from both design and development phases. The goal of this implementation phase was to both suggest any updates to be incorporated prior to launch and also gain a holistic view of the design process for future usage.

I successfully built and launched 13 complex product category landing pages for a new collection launch, validating the system's capability to create visually sophisticated, production-ready pages. This hands-on implementation phase provided crucial insights for future system optimization and team onboarding.

I had the background knowledge of how this had all been built, but tried to also view this through the lens of someone who was tasked with solely building a page to match a Figma design file they’d been given. This gave me insight into simplifications to reduce confusion and visual overwhelm when using the platform.

• Successfully created a scalable, efficient content management platform and design system; streamlined content creation workflow by reducing dependency on external development teams

• Created foundation for sustainable content management as business scales; enabled in-house teams to quickly respond to merchandising needs

• Accelerated time-to-market for new collection launches and promotional campaigns

• Established scalable design patterns that supported rapid landing page development
  

• Significant user experience improvements, including enhanced shopping experience through consistent, optimized page layouts and improved site performance with standardized component architecture