Nike: Personalizing emails for consumers
🌿In a nutshell…
The consumer problem: Nike sends millions of emails globally. Without personalization, consumers receive irrelevant content (i.e. wrong age group, wrong sport, wrong interest) leading to lower engagement and unsubscribes.
The business problem: Creating personalized emails at scale required authors to work across four separate tools just to produce a single email version — a fragmented process that slowed down the entire workflow
Impact: I shaped how email authors create and personalize consumer emails, designing features that streamlined the creation-to-publication workflow from four separate tools into one centralized platform
My Role: I designed 2 features for the email authoring workflow and prototyped the end-to-end experience, showing how authors could leverage consumer data, templates and components to build personalized emails at scale. I collaborated closely with the design team, presenting iterations and incorporating feedback throughout the project. I partnered with a product manager to align on requirements and ensure designs met both user needs and technical constraints.
🌿What I learned at Nike
Design explorations unlock the conversation
I spent much of my time sketching different versions for the particular features I was working on before diving into hi-fi I learned that these explorations do not need to be polished but can help communicate your design thinking to other designers
Terminology is context, not expertise
Joining a new project means inheriting its vocabulary. I invested time learning the terminology specific to Nike's email ecosystem, which helped me ask better questions, understand the problem more precisely, and propose solutions that actually fit the constraints I was working within
Communicating design is a skill
Early in my internship I struggled to articulate my design decisions clearly. I learned that structuring my file deliberately — leading with my main point, showing the reasoning behind each design choice, and practicing how I'd walk someone through it — made my feedback sessions significantly more productive and helped me iterate faster