Brand & Product Innovation

Deliverables:

  • Consumer Research & Insights

  • Product Innovation

  • Digital Creative Direction

  • Lo-fidelity and Hi-fidelity Prototyping

  • User Surveys & Usability Testing

  • Information Architecture

  • Design System Overhaul

  • Site Feature Prioritization

The Challenge

During its inception, The Personalization Mall brand grew quickly by providing innovative ways to personalize a vast assortment of products. In the last few years however, we began to see signs that what worked well for our ‘core customer’ of yesterday wasn’t the same as what was going to work for emerging generations.​ Our goal was to create an entirely new digital experience of personalization that would appeal to younger audiences.

Consumer Surveys

While we knew we had ground to make up in terms of market-share of consumers under 40 years old, we weren’t yet confident in why we weren’t resonating as successfully with that age group. I began discovery by developing key personas based on our existing and target market segments and conducting a series of consumer surveys across each segment to better understand what motivated each segment.

UX Foundations

I conducted competitor analysis and focused surveys around gifting and personalization. Overall, we found that the definition of ‘Personalization’ has rapidly changed between generations. While our oldest demographics visualized ‘Personalization’ as adding a name or a date to a journal, mug, etc., our younger consumers echoed the importance of identity, meaning and experiences tailored to them. We also discovered that the core of any ‘good gifting’ experience for the gift-giver is the joy of giving the right gift to their recipient.

The Launch

The new Personalization Mall website and brand launched on July 28, 2025. The launched experience included a brand new UI system and information architecture. It also supported experiences to support new product innovations including:

- “Photo First” Experience: User is able to upload their photo once and see it previewed on multiple items at a time vs. uploading per product

- Photo Books, Prints & Calendars

- Video & Audio Gifts: User is able to natively record or upload a video or audio file to a product via QR code

- AI Print Studio: User is able to generate any design they can dream of using AI to print on a collection of products

Customer Feedback

“Last time I was on Personalization Mall, I did get a little overwhelmed. I am loving these changes. This is great — I’m impressed!”

“It’s designed for people of all ages. When you’re making something personalized, you put a lot of thought, emotion and time into it. I feel like this would be a great tool for anybody.”