Tactile Elegance
A brand-led e-commerce redesign for a premium performance retailer
VML + New Balance
The Ask
Transform New Balance's digital storefront into a brand-led retail platform that balances craftsmanship storytelling with a high-converting commerce experience.
My Role
Associate Director, Experience Design
Design System Structure, Accessibility, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Stakeholder Alignment, Communication
Results
10x web traffic vs. the prior year's collection launch
Follow-on RFP awarded to continue evolving the shopping experience
The Ask
New Balance aims to be the world's leading premium performance brand, crafting the highest-quality sports products for athletes and fans at every level. Yet, its digital storefront didn't reflect that ambition or the brand's deep performance heritage. VML was asked to lead a redesign of New Balance's e-commerce experience that balanced commercial goals with storytelling, craftsmanship, and emotional connection: transforming the online store into a brand-led retail platform that inspires, proves New Balance's craft, and builds trust, all while maintaining a high-converting shopping experience.
My Role
I joined as Associate Director of Experience Design on a team of roughly 8–10 designers spanning multiple levels of seniority, split across London and several U.S. time zones, with additional support from brand creative, strategy, client engagement, and project management. I came onto the project mid-stream, after the Reframe and Investigate phases were complete. The team had already presented and gained approval on a conceptual design direction called Tactile Elegance, an aesthetic translating the feel of premium materials, considered construction, and human touch into digital form. My focus was integrating into the established brand, strategy, and UI visual design culture to provide UX guidance and refinement across the brand-led page designs.
Approach
As design sprints kicked off to tackle different sections of the e-commerce experience, several visual designers focused on executing the new aesthetic direction, while my role as a User Experience Lead centered on the Explore and Refine work of the process: concepting, prototyping, and testing solutions against strong foundational principles of accessibility, design system structure, and overall CX best practices. The team was collaborating across disciplines, offices, and time zones to keep the brand vision and the user experience in balance.
For each section of the experience, I produced documentation, annotations, and structured feedback, working directly with visual designers to align on the best path forward. I used Figma to prototype solutions early, before formal revision and review sessions, so ideas could be pressure-tested quickly. When new landing pages and "shoppable moments" needed a clearer story structure, I partnered with creative leads and used AI tools to rapidly brainstorm and present user journeys and narrative content, helping guide the rest of the design team.
Ahead of and following each sprint's deliverables, I annotated and presented feedback from a feasibility, viability, and desirability lens to internal and external stakeholders, keeping a fast-moving process aligned across teams. As the project moved into its delivery phase, I stepped in to help complete a substantial portion of the Figma design system and its documentation, supporting a clean operational handoff to New Balance's internal engineering and development teams.
Challenges
The team continually had to find the balance between a streamlined, minimal, high-fashion brand aesthetic and the practical demands of a high-volume retail experience serving broad, global audiences. On the client side, the size and capacity of New Balance's internal engineering team created scope and timeline bottlenecks, requiring daily communication and compromise to keep priorities aligned. Internally, coordinating across London, Seattle, Chicago, and New York time zones pushed the team to build a new way of working — one that could hand off phases of work cleanly and keep momentum and communication flowing around the clock.
The Outcome
The redesigned experience debuted with a high-profile pilot launch tied to the 2026 Australian Open, showcasing the new brand expression alongside a partnership with Coco Gauff. The launch drove 10x the web traffic compared to the prior year's collection launch, along with strong positive feedback from the client. These results that built immediate momentum heading into the next major brand moment and led to a follow-on RFP for VML to continue evolving the shopping experience.
Takeaways
Running a project on Agile principles requires more than sprint ceremonies. It takes genuine buy-in and shared understanding across every level of the client and design teams. Project management partners whom are unfamiliar with the nuances of iterative design can struggle to keep pace with the output that an aggressive timeline demands. I also saw firsthand how visual designers approaching a brand-led redesign can diverge from a CX-focused, UX-led perspective; being explicit about the goals and expected outputs of each sprint and phase saves significant time and cost down the line.
