Design Manager & Brand Strategist
As Design Manager & Creative Content Lead, I directed digital‑first creative strategy across two major organizations — Cole‑Parmer/Antylia Scientific and Sears Holdings. My work spanned brand strategy, UX content architecture, campaign leadership, and multi‑channel creative operations.
- $847K initial sales from a single content‑led campaign
- +50% SEO impressions through structured content architecture
- 7 sites aligned under a unified brand system across 4 languages
- National‑scale campaign execution across digital, email, print, and interactive media
- Design Manager & Creative Content Lead
- Led designers, agencies, FEDs, email teams, and marketing partners
- Directed creative strategy, content systems, and cross‑functional workflows
- Built scalable processes that enabled consistent quality without bottlenecks
Genuine understanding, desire, and attentiveness builds relationships and collaborations that drive real results. When a leader listens to understand and not respond, together everyone can flourish, often in a happy medium.
Both organizations faced similar core issues:
- Fragmented brand voice across channels
- Inconsistent creative quality
- Inefficient content workflows
- Lack of scalable templates and systems
- Heavy reliance on manual oversight
- Limited cross‑team alignment
The opportunity was clear: build a repeatable, scalable creative ecosystem that could support campaigns, launches, and evergreen content across global digital properties.
Listening to understand, not just respond
My leadership philosophy centers on genuine understanding of people, problems, and business needs. This approach builds trust, accelerates collaboration, and creates teams capable of producing consistently strong work.
- Set clear creative vision and standards
- Built collaborative rituals that encouraged curiosity and shared ownership
- Coached designers with honesty, context, and actionable guidance
- Advocated for design across Marketing, Product, IT, CX, and leadership
- Fostered psychological safety so designers could explore, iterate, and grow
- Ensured feedback was timely, private, constructive, and reciprocal
- Content frameworks
- Design standards
- Review processes
- Multilingual publishing workflows
I created systems that allowed a small team to deliver high‑quality work across seven sites and four languages without every decision routing through me. These systems reduced bottlenecks and empowered designers to make informed decisions.
Collaboration & QA
Taking on a lead strategy role of shared creative service across Antylia’s suite of sites, I built a culture where designers understood the “why” behind decisions. This enabled:
- Stronger design rationale
- Better cross‑functional alignment
- Faster iteration
- Higher quality output
- Shared accountability
Humanity’s superpower is collaboration and my teams practiced it intentionally and casually, producing work we were proud of.
Coaching & Mentorship
My coaching approach is grounded in honesty, curiosity, and context. When designers understand the whole picture, they make better decisions now and later. I encouraged:
- Open dialogue
- Reciprocal feedback
- Growth through understanding
- Slow judgment, fast curiosity
Design Advocacy
I represented design thoughtfully across departments, ensuring:
- Customer needs remained central
- Business goals were balanced with UX integrity
- Conversations were constructive, timely, and grounded in shared purpose
National scale campaign management
At Sears in mygofer.com, I managed creation of site ads, email, print, landing pages, and led homepage and email calendars. I managed relationships with internal and external design agencies, directed dotted line designers with partial workloads, and directed agencies on print, email, and interactive landing page designs at national scale.
- Led creative content production for national holiday campaigns, delivering email, print, interactive landing pages, and digital asset packages on tight deadlines
- Managed weekly content calendars, promotional campaigns, and email editorial schedules across homepage and digital channels
- Coordinated creative assets across marketing, merchandising, and design teams at national scale
What this work required
- Owning direction of content and placement to tell consistent brand and product stories
- Balancing creative judgment with operational rigor across multiple concurrent projects
- Creating scalable content systems across digital channels and multilingual sites
- Leading creative workflows from concept to completion with agency and internal partners
- Mapping customer journeys and creating assets and processes to address pain points
- Writing requirements and leading kickoff meetings to move projects from concept to delivery