Julie brings 15 years of experience turning complexity into thoughtful and intuitive design
Make it simple, but significant
Coming soon
On the Digital Commerce Platform (new bets) team, I launched multiple 0→1 products to build new lines of business.
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On the Faire Direct team, I owned design vision and strategy, and launched various experiments to help brands deepen retailer partnerships.
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On the Merchandising team, I drove design strategy and launched Page Builder, a 0→1 product that empowers brands to design eCommerce stores without code.
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I founded Trail575, an artisanal DTC candle brand built from the ground up. Handled everything from brand identity and packaging design to sales and fulfillment.
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Exploring glaciers in Fairbanks, Alaska
Biking the Shimanami Kaido, Japan
Sunshine in Barcelona ☀️
I'm a Product Designer based in the SF Bay Area with 15+ years of experience designing in fast-paced startup environments.
I'm happiest when I'm building something new, and especially love being part of collaborative teams where there's always something to learn (and share).
When I'm not designing, you'll find me chasing some form of activity, whether that's watercolor painting, outdoor cycling, postcrossing, or pickleball. Art, in particular, is my way of slowing down and finding a little quiet in the everyday chaos.
DoorDash connects millions of customers with local merchants across delivery, pickup, and in-store channels.
As part of the Omnichannel Loyalty & CRM team, I built and designed programs that help merchants recognize, reward, and re-engage their customers—driving retention across every touchpoint.
Faire is an online wholesale marketplace connecting independent brands with retailers worldwide 🌎
Through Faire Direct, brands get the tools to find, convert, and manage their own retailer relationships directly on the platform—all at 0% commission.
Scaling into retail is critical for brands, but finding the right boutique partners remains a massive bottleneck. Brands spend hours manually vetting and reaching out to shops with zero guarantee of success.
To address this gap, I co-led a global research initiative to identify where the conversion funnel was breaking. Partnering closely with PM, UXR, and CD during a vision sprint, we translated these insights into a comprehensive strategy deck and a data-driven roadmap that ultimately shaped the long-term direction of Faire Direct.
"I'll spend 1-2 hours just copying and pasting the same message to a bunch of shops on Instagram...it's exhausting"
— This Little Piggie Co.
1 Foundational research
Alongside my UXR, PM, and CD partners, I co-led a global research initiative spanning 30 deep-dive interviews across four countries and a 500-respondent survey.
The resulting insights shifted the organization's perspective on how brands build and cultivate retailer relationships.
2 Visioning sprint
To unify Faire Direct's disparate tools under a shared narrative, I led a 3-day vision sprint with my PM, CD, and cross-functional stakeholders.
Together, we reimagined how the platform could help brands scale, generating the foundational concepts that drove our 2025 vision deck.
3 Faire Direct 2025 vision deck
Synthesizing the sprint's concepts, I created the 2025 Faire Direct vision deck in close collaboration with my PM and CD partners.
This narrative leveraged brand archetypes to establish a cohesive identity and vision for Faire Direct. Shared org-wide, it successfully aligned leadership on our subsequent roadmap of strategic bets.
Pulling together our research and vision for Faire Direct, we set out to map out every surface area that could drive brand adoption. Our insights pinpointed three critical questions brands ask before adopting: What is it? Why should I use it? and How do I get started?
Answering these on the landing page was just one piece of a broader push—alongside it, we redesigned the Widget to drive retailer awareness and rebuilt Rewards to sharpen incentives.
4 Faire Direct onboarding
Our first experiment targeted the Faire Direct landing page. I redesigned it to drive adoption by enhancing clarity, comprehension, and action.
The new page highlights value props that resonated more strongly with brands. The experiment resulted in a +15% increase in new retailer signups and +11% increase in brand adoption.
5 Faire Direct widget
To drive Faire Direct adoption and retailer first orders, I redesigned the widget and its landing page—a cleaner look paired with content that speaks to what retailers actually care about.
The result blew past expectations: +214% retailer signups per brand and +29% widget adoption.
6 Faire Direct Rewards
Faire Direct Rewards gamifies growth on Faire—brands earn tiered perks for inviting new retailers onto the platform.
To validate the program's ROI, I redesigned the onboarding experience for a new European pilot cohort, simplifying content to improve comprehension and drive adoption.
Our experiments turned Faire Direct into a steady driver of new retailer signups.
This directly boosted the bottom line and accelerated our flywheel—more retailers bring more demand, making the platform more valuable for every brand ❤️
BigCommerce is an eCommerce platform powering over 40,000+ storefronts worldwide 🌎
Our team set out to build a modern, intuitive visual page composer—transforming store customization into a seamless drag-and-drop experience.
(Before) The legacy store designer was slow, complex, and unintuitive
(After) A modern, drag-and-drop Page Builder designed for seamless content creation
Replacing our legacy designer with a modern visual composer seemed straightforward until early research revealed a major blind spot: we didn't fully understand how users interacted with the existing product.
To bridge this gap, I led foundational research featuring in-depth user interviews and competitive market analysis. Those insights were then translated into a 4-day vision sprint, steering the team to explore distinct interaction models and align on key release goals.
I led a 4-day vision sprint with PM/Eng partners to map product milestones
With our vision and release timeline set, we structured Page Builder's development across four major milestones. Our goal was to build a flexible tool that felt intuitive for both first-time merchants and advanced power users.
Rather than treating these milestones as rigid deadlines, we used each as an iterative checkpoint. Real merchant usage directly guided our design decisions—allowing us to refine save and publish flows, sharpen widget behavior, and prioritize highly requested features like inline editing.
Shipped the first internal release of Page Builder, empowering merchants to build, save, and publish custom pages using foundational widgets.
Validated core workflows through a closed merchant alpha on sandbox stores, while shipping more complex components like the 'Product list' widget.
Validated live store workflows through a closed merchant beta, using early feedback to polish the UI and simplify widget configurations.
Scaled early access to select merchants and shipped high-value feature updates, including inline rich-text editing, a carousel widget, and improved navigation.
Page Builder was launched to early access users in March 2020, followed by a full public rollout in June.
Early data showed that ~70% of merchants who published a widget went on to convert to paid plans—a strong signal for trial-to-paid conversion.
Trail575 creates outdoor-inspired candles that bring the sensory experience of nature into the home
Like many people stuck indoors during the 2020 lockdowns, I missed being out on the trail and under open skies. That frustration sparked a question: Could a hand-poured candle recreate the sensory experience of the outdoors at home? That idea became Trail575.
Over the next six months, I ran extensive fragrance and packaging iterations while setting up the business operations from scratch. In July 2020, I soft-launched on LinkedIn, quickly building momentum across both direct-to-consumer and wholesale channels.
My three key takeaways
You can build a stellar product, but without a plan to reach new audiences, you're stuck selling to your own network—a strategy that quickly hits a ceiling. While our LinkedIn soft launch gave us great early momentum, sustainable growth demands a real marketing strategy and budget...skills that were admittedly way outside my wheelhouse.
I was used to making candles in large batches for individual online sales, but corporate wholesale took demand to an entirely different level. Securing bulk gift box partnerships with clients like Zendesk and Affirm allowed me to lock in massive, guaranteed volume in a single order. It expanded my distribution globally and proved that a handcrafted brand can handle scale.
Corporate gift boxes unlocked a new level of scale
Running a brand is deeply rewarding, but it completely blurs the line between work and life. For me, it meant thinking about candles from the moment I woke up until late into the night.
The silver lining? When you're passionate, it rarely feels like traditional work. The most rewarding moments came from craft fairs—connecting with customers in person, seeing them love the product, and getting raw, firsthand feedback.
Over five years, I grew a handcrafted candle brand from single DTC sales to global B2B partnerships with companies like Zendesk and Affirm.
Though it initially started as a passion project, it became my masterclass in sales, marketing, and the real grind of entrepreneurship.
