My background is in the direct-to-consumer space, creating digital content for retail and lifestyle brands.
Strategy Manager,
Global Shopping Enablement
// Apple
18-month contract role.
Video Content Series for Digital Channels
During the pandemic, Apple began creating short-form video content featuring real Retail Specialists answering specific questions to assist customers in their product purchasing journey. I used customer data from online and instores to asses topic relevance. I owned the content editorial roadmap, working with a highly-cross-functional group of teammates to bring to life. The content was used across .com, Social (YouTube, Weibo, WeChat).
Expansion: New countries, placements, platforms
As the program grew in popularity, we assessed new opportunities to grow audience reach through new social and commerce channels in China and Japan WeChat, Weibo, Tmall. Another big growth opportunity included getting the videos to launch in the Apple Store App, which required additional tech resources to enable. We did our first entrance into the Apple Store App timed with the US launch of Vision Pro.
Reporting and Strategic Recommendations
As the video content series developed into an established program, our needs around campaign measurement evolved. I helped to identify business-user needs for how new ways of viewing data in dashboards would be executed against. Reports were done ad-hoc as needed, and in more formal presentations for quarterly business reviews.
Digital Brand Experience,
The Americas
// Vans, VF Corp.
Vans Customs Strategy and Digital Content Creation
My primary focus at Vans was to own and drive the content strategy to support one of the key business growth drivers: the Customization business. My role was to develop the digital content needed for .com, social and email to help raise awareness for the program and to support the monthly merchandising efforts including limited edition collaborations and seasonal product stories.
Connecting Upper-Funnel Brand Initiatives to Digital
My secondary focus at Vans was helping to drive internal alignment between campaigns happening in our brand space (OOH and social) to our commerce-driven digital channels (.com, email). I assisted in building and distributing content requests that supported a more integrated campaign execution.
Internal Process and Collaboration
Establishing more formal communication and connection between brand, product, and digital teams with the goal of building a consumer-first mindset through in-person conversations and Wrike as a PM and asset-tracking tracking tool.
Digital Experience Team Lead,
Western Europe
// Converse, Nike Inc.
Moving to a new country, being a first-time team manager, in a 25-person e-commerce team representing 14 nationalities, amidst a global pandemic, and delivering consistent double-digit growth in traffic and revenue (most recent year, $115m net revenue, +83% YoY, AND maintaining a 2.34% average site conversion rate) - wow! Truly no other way to describe the professional learning and personal growth this role enabled. When you are building from the ground up, it is tough to summarize everything that we accomplished together in 2+ years, but here are a few favorites I am most proud of:
New Go-to-Market Plan focused on Localized Strategy
As the European business continued to trend-up double (and sometimes triple) digit growth, there was no denying that we needed to start paying attending to local styling and trends. For our digital content on social and .com, we wanted to reflect those customer attitudes in our content and merchandising strategy (vs. the one-size-fits-all-approach that we had been adopting from our North America content strategy). Starting with our Fall 2019 strategy we created a country-specific brief for imagery and copy and used in the subsequent seasons expanding later into localized influencer content and affiliate partnerships. By treating country-strategy separately, we saw massive improvements such as France jumping to represent 33% of the business and + 161% YoY.
Locally-Produced & Styled Content
A specialized project between my team and the geo-Brand and Buying teams was built and resulted in 4x locally styled and produced photoshoots including local talent. The campaign was centered on our Designed in Italy collection that focused on premium materials and elevated design details aimed at a loyal, fashion-forward consumer. The editorial content we produced resulted in higher click-through and engagement across site and email content, and helped to grow that portion of the business grow +20% YoY, delivering $6.9M for the year.
Customer Data & A/B Testing to Drive Experience
In summer of 2020 we onboarded a third-party tool, Content Square, to help us analyze our consumers on site behavior to inform UX and design decisions based on things like engagement heat maps, scroll rate, and journey mapping tools. Enabling this tool has become central to how our team looks at data beyond what Omniture is able to provide. Through Content Square we are also able to review screen recordings of actual customer data to identify points of friction and to better optimize the shopping and checkout experience.
New Homepage Design and User Experience
Using consumer journey data, I led the strategy to redesign our homepage with no budget and no development resources. (Don’t you love it when that happens?!) So, that meant a detailed understanding of existing framework and where modifications on the front-end could be made to create something visually different in Fall 2019 just in time for Back to School. This would later be followed up with an even more extensive 2.0 redesign along with our new CMS in Fall 2020, and A/B homepage testing in Spring 2021.
Team Lead: Converse Sustainability Initiative
Elected by Senior Leadership as one of two team captains to lead an internal project team to increase Converse Western Europe sustainability efforts. I was chosen to lead the consumer-facing content on our site, working in direct partnership with the operations captain to bring ideas to life copy and content for our consumer to be educated on our improvements in product materials, shipping & delivery options, updates to our packaging materials and efficiencies in our supply chain across various touchpoints on our .com experience. Our reward for taking on this extra responsibility was a full scholarship to attend Harvard Business School Online: Sustainability Business Strategy course July 2021.
#BestTeam
You can create all the shared calendars, slack channels, and Asana boards you want, but if you don’t have a team that is connected and inspired, you won’t get far. Building a team that had clear expectations, and felt empowered to drive change and fail fast was an essential part of my approach to leadership during this period. As the broader company saw re-orgs post covid, maintaining a level of stability and transparency was critical to ensure the team felt supported through change. To make things more challenging, our diverse team was 90% expats and dealing with mandatory lockdowns all across Europe and were isolated from families for a year. As a team leader, I dedicated time to discuss career planning and opportunities for continuing education/sharpening skills throughout the 1.5 years we spent working remotely during the pandemic.
Experience & Content Manager
(Individual Lead)
Global Digital Commerce
// Converse, Nike Inc.
My favorite part of this job was the level of autonomy I was granted and exposure I had to senior leadership to regularly present my ideas. I did a lot of public-speaking for this role. It also gave me the opportunity to work with incredibly smart, creative teammates internally and externally with several best-in-class creative agencies. True career-changing experience.
North America .com Re-Design & Relaunch with Agency Partner
While this was an enormous cross-functional effort, I served as the UX lead during the portion of the project dedicated to conducting interviews, brainstorming blue-sky thinking, identifying the appropriate agency partners, and leading the UX/Design sprints with our agency partner based on my own industry research and learnings from the Converse North America business. The project included consumer testing, A/B testing, interviews with senior leadership, and extensive wireframe and visual design sprints broken into six phases throughout the year. Each sprint was dedicated to a specific element of the site.
Creation of the First Digital-Only Content & Limited Edition Hub
In addition to seasonal content readiness and building out detailed bi-weekly site refresh plans, I was also responsible for leading the first end-to-end digital content strategy for Converse Limited Edition (high-heat, designer collaborations) focused on driving brand engagement across channels, increasing customer acquisition through “first to know” initiative via email and SMS notification, and delivering a premium digital experience. I was also part of the team to drive the first digital-only photoshoots based on the increasing need for assets shot in a different ratio and supported different products to supplement traditional brand photography previously used for large-scale marketing activations.
Onboarding and Launch of Shoppable Social Commerce on Converse.com
Having user-generated content integrated within the Converse.com shopping experience was identified as a key area of opportunity to increase customer engagement and to extend our reach in terms of access to imagery outside of what we were shooting as the brand. We identified Curalate as our third-party vendor after interviewing several others and began the integration and onboarding experience. To bring this to life, I had to work with an extensive list of internal teams for input and approvals including our merchandising teams to synch product feeds, our legal team to discuss privacy and rights, and partner with brand and social teams to create image guidelines and standards.
Performance Marketing Manager,
North America
// Converse, Nike Inc.
When I was in this role, our team was tiny compared to where it is in 2021. I was a one-woman show managing strategy across all performance channels. Today, Converse has full performance marketing teams with specialized managers owning each one. This was an incredible opportunity to test new concepts, and to dive into the world of performance marketing and learn from the variety of agency partners along the way.
Email Template Redesign
You’d be surprised where we were starting from at the time. Our templates were static and dated; buttons were not designed for mobile, and neither were things like navigation elements. Our email templates needed to be deconstructed and rebuilt to enable modular design, to be mobile-friendly, and to allow more flexibility for use across brand campaigns, product pushes, sale moments, and trigger-based emails. The modules for the new templates would allow for things like dynamic product recommendations, user-generated content, and ratings & reviews to be pulled in, and would increase our personality and tone of voice to align with the broader Converse brand point of view.
Trigger Email Launch
As part of driving customer acquisition and retention tactics, I managed the redesign and relaunch of multi-touch marketing trigger series. The project included identifying and onboarding a new third-party vendor, Bluecore, and leading the strategy briefing with our internal design team. The project lasted for almost a year and included the creation of new templates to support: browse and cart abandon, new arrivals, a reminder to finish your custom-shoe design, and a post-purchase series. Once we were fully onboarded, the project also involved learning and using the Bluecore platform along with our CRM for enhanced understanding of the data and the performance of each email program.
Extensive Agency Audit
A new priority on driving digital meant it was time to look closely at all of our partners and uncover spend efficiencies wherever possible. I assisted in the performance agency account review, resulting in the negotiation of annual account savings of +$100K, plus a 43% reduction in media fees across multiple agencies. After the audit was completed, we spent the first 90 days to fully redo our Google PLA’s and update the Converse catalog and did a full optimization of our product and pricing feeds.
Digital Producer
// Toth & Co.
When I’m interviewing others, I love to hear people who worked in hospitality because it generally comes hand-in-hand with the ability to deal with a ton of personalities and changing demands. I’d say the same for anyone who has been a project manager or producer in a design agency: Learning how to manage budgets, work in between the clients’ ever-shifting needs and the designers and copywriters responsible for meeting impossible deadlines is a skill that carries into any job in the future. Toth & Co was a boutique agency that was small but mighty. We were around 30 people at the time, and had the privilege of working with some of the biggest names in American retail.
Taylor Swift for Keds, “Brave Girls” campaign
In 2013, Toth + Co helped Keds to idnetify and sign Taylor Swift to be their leading lady for three years with the goal of reaching a younger, more on-trend female audience including a the creation of a campaign micro-site, Bravehearts.com, encouraging girls and young women to share “stories of strength” on social channels. My role in the project included: photoshoot production planning, post-production retouching, copywriting, multi-season asset creation across print & digital, submission of final ad proofs straight to publishers.
Park Hyatt “Your Luxury List” campaign
Park Hyatt, the most upscale of the nine Hyatt brands, ran a campaign featuring the personalized, individual luxuries it offers its guests. Timed with the opening of two new hotels in Vienna and NYC, and the 20th anniversary of Tokyo location, the campaign featured magazine and digital advertising and social initiatives. My role in the project included: participation in initial pitch and winning of account, photoshoot production, retouching, copy writing, ad creation across print, out-of-home, digital.
Helena Christensen for NYDJ campaign
NYDJ signed with model Helena Christensen to take the next step in its ongoing re-branding effort, during a period where the brand been identified as the largest women’s jeans company in the department store channel. It was the first time they featured a known personality in their advertising. The content was used across their web site, digital, and print ads. My role in the project included studio production for ad specs according to their media buys, copywriting, retouching, and submission to publications.
Digital Marketing & Events Manager, Boston Growth Strategy
// FutureBoston.com
Right place, right time rings true: I was given the opportunity to attend a fundraiser, in the place of my then-manager, for a new startup/non-profit aimed at pairing creative entrepreneurs with business mentors in the Boston area. The keynote speaker was an incredibly inspiring woman and the new Managing Director, Malia Lazu. I wasted no time introducing myself afterwards. We arranged to have a coffee, and I soon found myself pitching a job and reason she should hire me for a year to help build our events programming and marketing strategy.
Event Planning for Museum of Fine Arts x FBA x Juneteenth
We partnered with the MFA in Boston to host their first Juneteenth event to raise awareness, celebrate local artists, connect to the community, and bring together a diverse crowd. I drove the event planning and programming for the evening alongside the museum’s brilliant community outreach team, and I drove the marketing and activations leading up to the event across email, social, and pitching the story to Boston media. The event has now continued as an annual tradition at the museum.
“Accelerate Boston” program for Creative Entrepreneurs
We launched a six-month program based on strategic mentorships with business leaders including Devin Hill, Managing Director, JP Morgan, Liana Peterson Krupp, comms consultant and Founder of New Brahmin, and Liz Miranda of BHCC; and designed monthly classes based on a traditional MBA-curriculum but taught through storytelling and first-hand experiences, with appearances from experts of industry such as Daymond John from Shark Tank, Bill Warner, Founder of Avid Technology, and Alec Stern of Constant Contact.
Bi-Weekly Local Artist & Startups Event Series
As part of our mission to connect with the creative community in Boston, we organized a series of bi-weekly events through social media that showcased different artists and entrepreneurs. I was responsible for securing the featured artists and developing the calendar, for partnering with the events-vendor and overseeing all of the logistics and details for the day-of event executions, and for driving the pre-event marketing and post even PR coverage.