PERSONALIZATION MALL SITE & BRAND INNOVATION

Product & Brand Innovation for Emerging Markets

highlights

Consumer Research & Insights
Product Innovation
Digital Creative Direction
Lo-fidelity and Hi-fidelity Prototyping
User Surveys & Usability Testing
Information Architecture Simplification
UI 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 kicked off this process by conducting a series of consumer surveys to better understand ‘the why’.

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

 

Digital Experience Foundations

 

There were foundational aspects of the digital experience that was kept at the core of all site feature and design decisions for this product innovation process:

 
 

Old Site Experience:

 

New Site Experience:

The Launch

The new Personalization Mall website and brand launched on July 28, 2025. The launched experience included:

  • UI Overhaul: Updated typography, color, layout, tone of voice, photography/video, mobile-first design

  • Information Architecture: Simplified site structure and navigation

  • New Product Innovations:

    • “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

  • Gifting Inspiration Videos

Customer Feedback