Leafly Market
Leafly Market was a premium CBD marketplace built to ship nationwide. We had three months. I owned the homepage, sponsored pages, and dynamic content. The team was small, with design, product, and engineering, firmly aligned to one shared vision. We launched on schedule and saw success with a substantial conversion rate. The pandemic closed Leafly Market the following year.
After Market closed, I led design for Leafly's core consumer products: editorial content, the native apps, ads, and checkout.
Outcomes
- ✱Designed, developed, and launched on schedule in three months
- ✱8% conversion rate, against an industry average of 2.9%
Shopping Funnel
Most of Leafly's traffic landed on our strain pages, but these generated little revenue and did not encourage high intent users to shop. We turned those strain pages into shopping touchpoints, meeting our users where they were and building a funnel from there.
Outcomes
- ✱$200,000 in additional annualized revenue in two months
Native App Revitalization
The app had no dedicated resources and high design debt: inconsistent patterns, unique visuals, and atypical conventions for native app design. I pushed for an overhaul, and my team rebuilt it on iOS and Android platform conventions rather than ported web screens, bringing it onto the design system.
Outcomes
- ✱18% increase in app downloads
- ✱16% increase in checkout interactions
- ✱Retention rates 10% higher than web users
Endemic Ad Framework
Leafly ran generic third-party ads, easily caught by ad blockers and often irrelevant. I designed a new framework built on contextual placements — cannabis products, on cannabis content, in front of readers already shopping. The flagship format, Marquee, sold out in multiple markets as fast as we could list it.
Outcomes
- ✱Over $3 million in new revenue over Q1 of 2023
User Retention Strategy
Millions of people used the strain database and almost none of them had a reason to come back. We put a strain-matching quiz directly on the strain pages — answer a few questions, get a match, and save it to an account. Then shop it.
Outcomes
- ✱70,000+ new user accounts generated within three months
Design System Evolution
Botanic, Leafly's design system, was fragmented and difficult to use. We moved it from Sketch to Figma, restructured the libraries, and backed it with Storybook and Chromatic. Production churn dropped and we shipped faster.
Outcomes
- ✱Achieved full company adoption
- ✱Fostered cross-functional speed, consistency, and reliability
Growing the Design Team
We needed headcount in two places that mattered: native app design and front-end. I built an equitable hiring process for the design team, and filled both roles. To foster growth in my team members, I pushed hard on consistency, understanding the business, storytelling and executive communication, and working across teams.
The team was fully remote and had never been in the same place. We funded an offsite in Denver ourselves where we learned more about our industry and finally spent some quality time hanging out, building rapport and team empathy.
Outcomes
- ✱Retained all six designers through a high-attrition year
- ✱Over 100 usability tests validating early design hypotheses
- ✱Improved visibility and collaboration through regular cross-functional participation