SMOKE RISE NY
04Sole product designer at Smoke Rise, a New York fashion brand operating across DTC, wholesale, and retail. Over two and a half years, working alongside a product manager and a developer, I owned product design, conversion optimization, brand system, and paid creative end to end.
Smoke Rise is a New York-based fashion brand selling menswear and womenswear direct-to-consumer and through wholesale and retail partners across North America and Europe (via Snipes). When I joined in 2023, the design function was effectively unstaffed. Product decisions, brand consistency, and performance creative were spread across whoever had time.
I came in to consolidate all of it. My scope covered the e-commerce site (UX, IA, conversion), two external B2B platforms plus a retailer section on the main site, the full brand system, and paid creative on Meta and Google, including the custom landing pages each campaign pointed at, the funnel from first contact through to email retention, and the lifecycle work that pushed customer lifetime value beyond the first purchase.
I worked alongside a product manager who owned stakeholder relationships and campaign priorities, a developer who handled Shopify implementation, and a rotating roster of graphic designers, photographers, and influencers who produced content under the brand system I built.
The work in this case study covers the highest-impact threads: a conversion redesign that lifted CVR ~20%, a B2B flow rebuild across three surfaces, and a brand system that drove sustained performance across paid social, search, and email.
DTC conversion redesign: browse, product, and cart
B2B contracts were Smoke Rise's largest revenue channel; the DTC site was its weakest conversion surface. Traffic was strong; the funnel wasn't. Looking at the flow end to end, the moments doing the most damage clustered around three points: browsing the catalog, deciding on a product, and converting in cart.
I redesigned each surface across two quarters, mobile-first. The majority of Smoke Rise's traffic was on mobile, and every structural decision was made against the mobile experience first. Desktop followed. Conversion lifted ~20% directionally across the period.
Catalog navigation was flat, and the information architecture didn't follow any clear user mental model. Categories, collections, and promotions sat side by side without hierarchy, and customers told us so directly. Customer service calls came in regularly from users who couldn't find a favorite pair of denim or didn't understand why a specific collection wasn't surfacing. Google Analytics confirmed the same thing from the other direction: the highest drop-off rates were on the home page and the catalog page. Users were arriving; they couldn't get to what they wanted.
I approach design from the user first, and the fix started there. I restructured the menu around a small set of scannable parent categories, clear enough for users to find what they were looking for and aligned with how the business actually merchandised. Then I designed a filter system, starting with denim, that let customers narrow large catalogs by the dimensions that actually mattered (fit, wash, style) rather than by surface metadata.
After shipping, Google Analytics told us the same story in reverse: drop-off on the catalog page came down, confirming the hypothesis we'd started with. Browse stopped being a place customers escaped from, and the PDP started receiving traffic from people who knew what they were clicking on, which set up everything downstream.
The Mega Menu designed to support the user mental and facilitate searching experience.
The problem. The PDP was carrying nothing but product imagery. There were no product descriptions, no return information, no upsell, no metadata for SEO to rank against. Just an image and an add-to-cart button. Search wasn't picking the pages up, and customers were being asked to commit without anything to commit on.
A specific friction point surfaced through customer behavior: shoppers were constantly reaching out via Instagram DMs and customer service calls, asking which size to buy based on their measurements. Returns were one symptom; the inbound size questions were the louder one.
The change. The PDP work was as much data enrichment as it was design. I built out the page's structured data on Shopify (shipping, return policy, fit, descriptions, metadata tags) so the page had something to say and something for search to index. On top of that I restructured the page hierarchy (image, decision-critical detail, supporting context, related product), added a fit guide pop-up built around actual product measurements rather than a generic chart, and added a cross-sell module that surfaced complementary pieces tied to the product being viewed, framed as styling rather than as upsell.
Why it mattered. The page started doing the work the imagery alone had been carrying. Add-to-cart and AOV both moved. The fit guide cut down on the size-related support volume directly. Customers had the answer on the page rather than in their DMs. The cross-sell module did something specific to Smoke Rise's catalog: a lot of looks are sold as separates, with top and bottom listed as distinct products, so surfacing the matching piece on the PDP let customers complete a set without navigating back to a collection page to hunt for it. The same data work let me organize products into dynamic collections more cleanly downstream, which streamlined the rest of the seasonal workflow.
Added cross-sell and fit guide functionalities. Two questions, answered before they're asked: what size, and what to pair it with.
The cart was a confirmation screen with a button: no last-mile reinforcement of the purchase, no recovery of abandoned add-ons, no friction reduction on the path to checkout. I rebuilt it as a continuation of the shopping experience rather than the end of it. Promotional clarity (free shipping thresholds, applied discounts) became explicit and visible. The cross-sell module from the PDP carried into the cart, with one more contextual recommendation positioned close enough to add quickly, far enough from the checkout button not to delay it. The cart became a soft upsell surface without becoming a friction point, closing the loop the PDP cross-sell opened.
The changes weren't independent. Browse fed cleaner intent into the PDP, the PDP fed better-considered carts, and the cart converted at higher AOV. The ~20% lift is the compound result, not the sum of separate optimizations.
Every change shipped through one developer on weekly Shopify release windows. Deciding what was worth building was as much of the work as designing it.
Designing for buyers, not consumers.
Wholesale buyers don't shop the way consumers shop. They arrive with a purchase order in mind, work through large catalogs efficiently, need pricing and availability surfaced fast, and care more about line-sheet legibility than lifestyle imagery. The DTC playbook actively gets in their way. Smoke Rise's wholesale business ran on three surfaces: two external B2B platforms used by retail buyers, plus a retailer-only section on the main DTC site. None had been designed as a system.
On the external platforms, the work was less visual design and more information architecture: deciding what to show, in what order, with what level of detail, given each platform's structural constraints, leaning the brand's presence into what each did well rather than forcing parity. The retailer section on smokerisenewyork.com, the surface I owned outright, was structured for speed: dense layouts, quick filtering, downloadable assets, no marketing copy. Alongside the platforms, I built a B2B email program on MailChimp (separate from the D2C Klaviyo account) that sent drop announcements customized by purchase history, geo-localization, and category trends, linking to landing pages that rendered dynamically based on which email the buyer came from.
The hard part was holding brand coherence across surfaces where I had varying degrees of control, while designing for a user whose needs ran opposite to the consumer site I was simultaneously optimizing: full expression where I owned the surface, recognizable shorthand where I didn't. Designing for it taught me how to work with constraints I didn't set, for users who don't want to be marketed to, on surfaces I don't fully own. That set of muscles is the one I most want to keep building.
Built from scratch, applied across every customer touchpoint
When I joined, Smoke Rise had a logo and a set of recurring visual habits, but no system. Every email looked slightly different. Every campaign re-litigated the same decisions. Paid creative was inconsistent enough that performance was hard to attribute to anything other than spend.
I built the brand from the inside out: tone and voice first, then color and typography, then visual language, then packaging. The deliverable was a full set of guidelines. The point was that the guidelines had to hold up under pressure, across high-volume email, fast-turn paid creative, organic social, and physical product, and in the hands of other people. Graphic designers, photographers, and influencers all produced work under the system. The real test wasn't whether I could keep it consistent. It was whether they could.
The full brand guidelines are confidential. What's shown below is the system in application, across the surfaces where it had to work hardest.
Meta ads, and graphics for email, social and commercial usage created under the brand guidelines.
The clearest test was paid social and search. Meta and Google creative ran continuously, with new variants designed and shipped weekly against the previous week's performance data, and over the period I owned this work the channel sustained a 4.6× ROAS. Media buying, audience, and product all contributed to that number, but the creative was the variable I controlled, and the system was what let me iterate at the cadence the channel demanded without breaking recognition.
The same system was the backbone of the email program. In March 2025, Smoke Rise's email open rate hit 51.6%, above the peer group median (49.9%) and well above the broader e-commerce apparel and accessories median (45.2%). Open rate isn't the cleanest metric, but the comparison is the signal: brand work that's recognizable in the inbox earns opens that brand work without a system doesn't.
Solo design, seasonal cadence
Fashion runs on seasons, and Smoke Rise shipped new collections multiple times a year. Each cycle started with the B2B line sheet (what we'd take to wholesale partners to anchor the season) and the rest cascaded from there: campaign concept, photography direction, site updates, email program, paid creative, packaging where relevant. All of it on a deadline set by the merchandising calendar, not the design one.
Working as the sole designer against that cadence shaped how I designed. Campaign priorities came from a product manager who owned stakeholder relationships and seasonal planning; my job was to translate those priorities into the design system, the site, and the creative output the brand shipped against them.
I built reusable components instead of bespoke layouts. I treated the brand system as infrastructure.
Two things, mostly.
Designing against business outcomes, not brief outcomes. At Smoke Rise, design was held to the same numbers the business was: conversion, ROAS, AOV, open rate, sell-through. I treat those numbers as the brief. Tell me a business goal and I can name the surface, the decision, and the lever that moves it. Designing for the user and designing for the outcome the business needs the user to drive aren't separate jobs. They're the same job, done well.
Building systems before deliverables. From a design perspective, a system is what makes velocity possible (components, tokens, decisions made once that everything downstream gets to compound on). Consistency across surfaces instead of approximation each time. From a marketing perspective (a lens I bring alongside design), a customer meets a brand across social, email, packaging, and the site, and those touchpoints have to feel like one brand for any of it to land. Recognition is what earns trust, repeat purchase, and the kind of open rates Smoke Rise was hitting. The system was how I held that line across the surfaces I owned and the ones other people produced under it.
I'm looking for the next environment where those instincts compound. Specifically: a product team where design has to drive measurable outcomes, where the surface area is broader than a single feature, and where systems thinking is rewarded over polish.