SmartGift Inc.

I joined SmartGift as the company's first designer, working day-to-day with the founders from the early MVP stage through enterprise scale. Design was a founding function, tightly coupled to product strategy, business decisions, and engineering realities.

• Embedded daily with founders to shape product vision, roadmap, and feature trade-offs
• Led end-to-end design across core flows, systems, and UI
• Balanced brand constraints against user flexibility in feature decisions
• Designed for speed, scalability, and technical feasibility
• Used quantitative data (Google Analytics, Tag Manager) to inform iteration and optimization

I co-invented SmartGift's patented recipient-first gifting flow (US10679268B1), which formalized the separation of gifting intent from product selection. The system enabled:

• Brand-controlled product eligibility and pricing logic
• Recipient-driven customization and substitution
• Scalable enterprise deployment without operational overhead

This system powered 500+ enterprise integrations across 14 countries. The "address-less shipping" pattern it introduced became an industry standard.

SmartGift lived on vendor product pages as a "Send as Gift" button below Add to Cart. Clicking it redirected shoppers to our platform to explain the value prop. Drop-off on that first page was severe, and vendors didn't want their customers leaving the store to learn what SmartGift was.

I designed an embedded widget that opened directly on the vendor's product page. No redirect. The value prop stayed inside the shopping experience instead of interrupting it. The widget also let shoppers add multiple products before continuing to our platform, enabling multi-gift sending in a single link.

Drop-off reduced drastically and vendors saw it as a genuine improvement to their product pages rather than a third-party disruption.

• Deep experience working directly with founders and executives
• Strong intuition for balancing user needs with business constraints
• Confidence designing zero-to-one systems under real-world pressure
• A data-informed approach to product and UX decision-making

This experience ultimately contributed to SmartGift's successful acquisition by 1-800-Flowers in May 2023.

As SmartGift expanded to enterprise partners including Nike, Under Armour, Pandora, Estée Lauder, Brilliant Earth, and VF Corporation, my role evolved from broad execution to optimization and systemization. I focused on flow efficiency, KPI measurement, and design patterns that could scale across partners and use cases.