MY ROLE
Design Lead
Retention Creative Strategy · Campaign Systems · Art Direction · Team Leadership · Customer Storytelling · Multi-market Rollout
A fast-growing product with a maturing audience — the visual language and marketing communications needed to keep pace, moving beyond functional messaging towards something with more emotional depth and brand consistency. All of this at high volume: six or more emails per week, built from a limited asset library until a dedicated product shoot could be commissioned.
I owned the retention creative strategy end-to-end, leading a cross-functional creative team while partnering with marketing, product and leadership to shape direction. Every campaign was built to scale — across channels, markets and millions of sends.
CRM campaigns regularly reached audiences of 1–2 million per send, with Black Friday campaigns consistently delivering RPMs of £80–142 at peak performance.
The visual language was repositioned to better reflect the evolving audience — more refined, more emotionally resonant, and leading with memory, occasion and feeling rather than product features. The photobook was repositioned as a lasting keepsake rather than simply a product.
BAU campaigns spanned a wide range of audience segments and occasions, with some of the strongest CTR performance coming from personalised creative variants.
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Seasonal and promotional campaigns were developed to drive conversion while maintaining the elevated visual standard established across the brand.
Building on an existing photographic vision, I evolved the direction towards something more cinematic and premium — then led its implementation across CRM through my team.
Within a fixed annual campaign architecture, I progressively elevated the craft year on year — refining composition, lighting and depth to move the aesthetic from overtly retail towards something more premium.
Briefed to improve asset effectiveness, I led a cross-functional research initiative — interviewing product, CS and leadership teams, running blue sky sessions with the creative team, and synthesising insights into a strategic creative roadmap. The output shaped briefs across the entire creative function, not just CRM, expanding how the brand communicated its product, features and value across all channels.
The key insight — that the physical photobook's long-term emotional value was rarely reflected in marketing — led to a creative roadmap expanding Popsa's visual narratives across the organisation.
The OKR insights translated into a series of briefs I wrote and distributed across the creative team — including acquisition creative. I took on two directly: the product photography shoot and the creative features visualisation, while the wider team worked in parallel on 3D macro render experiments and UI-focused illustrations.
I art directed a product photography shoot with a specific strategic brief: to showcase the full range of photobook formats and finishes in a way that had never been done before. Books were shot vertically from above and placed side by side for direct size comparison — a first for the brand. I worked with a freelance art director on the day, then handled all post-production myself: retouching, editable mock-up templates, and clean extractions to enable the team to use AI background generation across channels.
A suite of icons developed in alignment with the product team's existing icon library — extended to support CRM communications across multiple languages and markets.
