MY ROLE
Design Lead
CRM Creative Strategy · Campaign Systems · Art Direction · Team Leadership · Customer Storytelling · Multi-market Rollout
A fast-growing product with a maturing audience — the visual language and marketing communications needed to keep pace, moving beyond functional messaging towards something with more emotional depth and brand consistency. All of this at high volume: six or more emails per week, built from a limited asset library until a dedicated product shoot could be commissioned.
I owned the CRM creative strategy end-to-end, leading a cross-functional creative team while partnering with marketing, product and leadership to shape direction. Every campaign was built to scale — across channels, markets and millions of sends.
CRM campaigns regularly reached audiences of 1–2 million per send, with Black Friday campaigns consistently delivering RPMs of £80–142 at peak performance.
The visual language was repositioned to better reflect the evolving audience — more refined, more emotionally resonant, and leading with memory, occasion and feeling rather than product features. The photobook was repositioned as a lasting keepsake rather than simply a product.
BAU campaigns spanned a wide range of audience segments and occasions, with some of the strongest CTR performance coming from personalised creative variants.
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Seasonal and promotional campaigns were developed to drive conversion while maintaining the elevated visual standard established across the brand.
In collaboration with the Creative Lead, I defined a new photographic vision for the brand — moving away from staged stock imagery towards candid, memory-led storytelling, then led its implementation across CRM over time.
Within a fixed annual campaign architecture, I progressively elevated the craft year on year — refining composition, lighting and depth to move the aesthetic from overtly retail towards something more premium.
Briefed to improve asset effectiveness, I initiated cross-team research across product, design and customer support to identify gaps in how the product was communicated.
The key insight — that the physical photobook's long-term emotional value was rarely reflected in marketing — led to a creative roadmap expanding Popsa's visual narratives across the organisation.
I art directed a product photography shoot to showcase the variety of customisation options, quality and finish of the printed photobooks — then handled retouching and asset production to build a reusable library of imagery and editable mock-ups for use across CRM, social and acquisition.
A suite of icons developed to support CRM communications — clear, on-brand and designed to work across multiple languages and markets.
