About

I finished graduate school and started at Robert A.M. Stern Architects. I thought I knew how to design before I got there. I didn’t.

I learned by drawing, redrawing the building, and then drawing it again, and through precedent studies, looking hard at the architecture of the past to understand form, shape, material, light, and space. I learned how to present and more importantly listen, painful as that was when Bob Stern was frustrated with the work we were doing. Grant Marani, the partner I worked under was fabulous. He was patient and I learned a lot from him.

The model shop was incredible, the teams were collaborative and the design work took us around the world, from Almaty to Xiamen, with competitions filling in between. I don’t think I’d be the design practitioner I am today without this experience.

I joined Moment as an intern in the fall of 2011, yes intern :) Allison had worked there before me, so I knew the people and the work. I’d leave work on 34th Street and head down to the Moment office on Crosby Street, into a different design world, people designing software, testing it, redesigning it when it wasn’t clear.

It felt like architecture. How people use something, the paths through it, the systems that hold it together. I had an itch and took the risk as an intern, and I’m glad I did.

I worked mostly with John Devanney and his team on the ESPN and NFL accounts. We designed in Illustrator and created PDF spec decks, not far off from CAD and drawing sets.

Our son was born in 2012, and in the spring of 2013 Allison and I moved back to Atlanta. Remote work wasn’t common yet and our professional connections were in New York, so we started our own product studio. We’d always talked about it and this was the chance. Our first office was at 750 Ponce Place.

It was the definition of learning by fire, sales, marketing, and P&Ls on top of doing the work. I learned how to run a business, how to refine the way you talk about what you do, and how to leave behind the things you don’t do well. We worked with Zola, The Associated Press, Harry’s, Pendo, and PatientPay, and designed the first iOS apps for Blue Apron and 1stDibs. We did a lot of deep research and learned a lot about DTC, complex marketplaces, B2B SaaS and native application design. This is also where I learned to have real conversations about software design and the UX tradeoffs and limitations that occur on engineering and product teams.

By 2016 we were working with a lot of DTC businesses, several sharing the same venture backing, Rockets of Awesome, M.Gemi. That’s how LAUNCH found us, and how we started on our next chapter, running UX and product design for the companies they were building.

I spent two years at LAUNCH, a VC builder focused on multi-channel consumer experiences. I was there for UX and product design, but the real education was everything adjacent to it: GTM strategies, post-launch marketing, operations, how a business actually grows.

Alongside Rockets of Awesome I worked on Follain, an early clean beauty business, then spent my second year on M.Gemi, the Italian shoe brand that was LAUNCH’s first company. Selling shoes online is a hard business. I designed some interesting return and repurchase flows that reduced refunds and shipping costs. Plus, my shoe closet had never looked better.

By the end my interest in DTC ecommerce was fading. Shopify and others were commodifying every page of the shopping funnel, and the problems were becoming brand problems more than UX ones.

After leaving LAUNCH I kicked off a second round of independent studio work. We grew Everyday to a team of six and bought a small studio space at Studioplex in 2020, three weeks before the pandemic shut the world down. And, the space sat empty for over two years :-(

Like a lot of businesses we came out of the pandemic remote, and so were many of our clients. Most of the work for me in this phase was deep embeds with in-house teams: Primer, Grapevine, Nara, ButcherBox (the case studies on this site). It was great being there as those businesses grew, learning from their customers as they used the product, seeing where design decisions needed to pivot and understanding where the UX was working.

I also learned how to run a more complex studio than the first time around. We had a studio space and amazing people working at Everyday. While the client design work was challenging, especially at growth stage business speeds, running a small business is harder still.

After eight years of both, what I want next is to put all of it into one product and one team.