Macy's Private Brands Relaunch
Starting in 2023 Macy's began rebooting it's private label brand strategy with the goal of increasing it's contribution to overall revenue to 25%. From 2023-2025 as a Lead UX Strategist and Designer, I led a cross functional team to reimagine how these brands show up throughout the Macy's ominichannel journey, in particular through our web and mobile experiences. These images represent 2+ years of thinking, leading, concepting and persuading leadership buy-in. The implementation is still visible at Macys.com and in the Macy's native app.
Project details
Discovery Workshop Facilitation
The process began with existing research and data readouts, competitive analysis and collaborative workshops I planned and hosted with product managers, researchers and designers from each of the domains in our digital experiences.
Each workshop began with a short video I produced to capture "Lindsay's" journey to find an outfit for party that resulted in her discovery and trial of "Starlight", a previously unknown Macy's owned brand. Each workshop uncovered insights and generated ideas captured on this FigJam board.
Experience Blueprinting
I created my own proprietary experience design framework based on the language and structure of cinema to organize and visualize the ways private brands might show up throughout the Macy's omnichannel customer journey.
Reframing Problems and Opportunities
From synthesized insights and collaborative ideation, I created maps and wireframes to demonstrate a reimagined UX strategy. My data exploration revealed that we were falsely imagining a horizontal journey from Homepage to Checkout where as most of our customers were entering our experiences through other entry points.
My thinking captured the imaginations of our executive team when I depicted the go-forward strategy as more like a subway map and compared the discovery of new brands to the discovery of new music which made Spotify an abstract catalyst for innovation in our experience.
Product Concepts and Roadmaps
Since this initiative was part of a major corporate investment in private brands, we leveraged low fidelity sketches of feature concepts to secure buy-in and investment from the Corporate Steering Group responsible for leading our ongoing company transformation efforts.
Implementation
Our 2+ years of work produced significant enhancements to our website and mobile app. Some features were heavily visual like brand page templates, while others involved changes to global navigation and taxonomy. Perhaps the simplest and most impactful implementation for private brand discovery was simply linking the brand name on PDP back to the brand browse page.
Results
Our work, starting with the On 34th brand launch, drove a 600 bps increase in total sales penetration (from 16% to 22% of revenue) from 2023 to 2025 aided by a 12% lift in digital conversion rates from executed design concepts.
