Holiday World
Designed a two-sided marketplace for festive shoppers from scratch
Role
Product Strategist, Qualitative Research, Conceptualization, Design System, Prototyping, Developer Handoff
Design Goal
Owned end-to-end product design and strategy for Holiday World’s first-ever e-commerce platform. From shaping the user experience and visual identity to delivering a scalable design system, I ensured every design decision aligned with user needs, market gaps, and business growth. My approach balanced emotional storytelling with business goals, turning a blank slate into a festive, high-performing digital product.
TouchPoint
Website Responsive
Collaborators
UX Designers, Developers, PMs, Founder
Overview
Holiday World is a new two-sided marketplace connecting independent vendors who sell seasonal and celebration products with buyers across the United States. It provides vendors a storefront to list their products and buyers a curated destination to discover and purchase them.
Despite the scale of the opportunity, Holiday World had no digital presence at launch. And the platform had no brand equity, no user data, and no existing design foundation to build from.
I was brought in as Lead Product Designer to own the user experience end-to-end, from research through final developer handoff.
Opportunity
How might we design a shopping experience for buyers who arrive with a feeling rather than a product in mind, earn their trust quickly, and convert them.
Problem
Holiday World's buyers are not habitual online shoppers making frequent, deliberate purchases.
They are occasion-driven. They arrive in concentrated bursts tied to cultural moments, gifting deadlines, and seasonal celebrations. Many of them are buying for someone else, without a precise product in mind, and with a mild but real fear of choosing wrong.
Buyers need to be inspired and guided, not just presented with inventory.
That buyer profile made standard e-commerce patterns an unreliable starting point. A search-first experience assumes buyers know what they want. A large category grid assumes buyers are willing to browse without direction. Neither assumption held for the buyer Holiday World needed to serve.
Understanding the Buyer
With no existing user data, I ran a mixed-method research program with 16 participants who regularly purchased physical gifts for seasonal or cultural celebrations in the US.
Three pain points emerged consistently and became the foundation for every significant design decision that followed.
Entry Paralysis
When buyers landed on an undifferentiated product grid, they stalled. Without a clear invitation or sense of curation, buyers disengaged before finding anything.
Budget Discomfort
Participants had a budget in mind, but none applied a price filter voluntarily. Setting a price limit felt transactional. Budget had to be surfaced as a neutral browsing parameter built into the experience.
Trust through context
Buyers didn't evaluate unfamiliar products through ratings. Rather, by understanding what the product was for. Occasion relevance and framing consistently influenced purchase confidence over ratings.
Design Strategy
I worked with the PM to build information architecture around two buyer modes that research surfaced:
Inspired Discovery
Knows the occasion, not the product
Directed Shopping
Has a category or budget and wants to move fast
Both paths had to feel like one coherent experience, converging at the product listing pages.
Homepage
Designed to inspire, not confuse
Gifting Guide
A dedicated page designed to educate buyers on holiday traditions and the cultural significance of products. Research indicated that informed buyers make more confident purchase decisions, leading to higher conversion rates compared to uninformed users.
Product Listing
Deep dive into product and shipping information. Buyers can learn more about the vendor, request customizations, or make a counteroffer.
Reflections
Starting from zero is harder than inheriting a problem. There is no existing data to lean on, no prior design decisions to react to, and no user base to learn from.
Documentation is collaboration. A Notion page that captures why a decision was made holds a lot of importance than one can think. It keeps everyone moving without requiring meetings to revisit the same thing over and over again.
Research done early pays off throughout. The three buyer pain points we identified before designing wireframes kept showing up as the right answer whenever a decision got complicated. Good early research does not just inform the design. It runs interference on bad scope creep and subjective debates.
How did I end up in the core team as lead Product Designer?
Don't just stay curious. Read here!
