CASE 02 — 2014–2016
COMMERCE / UI / BRAND / PRODUCT
Two years rebuilding a €100m sports commerce business as Head of Design — identity through checkout.
New investors had just joined Keller Sports, opening the door to a full strategic and visual reset. The brief on day one of the Head of Design role: position the business as the best advisor and curator for premium sports products, then make every surface of the shop reflect that positioning — top of funnel to checkout to unboxing.
UI and UX of the shop had never been addressed in a focused, iterative manner. The mobile experience was an afterthought of the desktop site and converted poorly. The brand and the product experience had drifted apart.
Two years of in-house tenure made every iteration testable in production. Three complete shop relaunches shipped — responsive desktop and mobile layouts, a backend and CMS rebuilt from scratch, content architecture that put curated stories alongside product catalogues. Each launch’s data trained the next.
Differentiation against larger sports retailers was visual, not pricing. We built an in-house photography studio and creative department to own the brand’s visual language end-to-end — product shots, athlete content, video. Adidas later changed their global product photography based on the processes developed here.
The mobile experience converted poorly because it had been adapted, not designed. The responsive rebuild treated mobile as the primary surface — checkout flows, product detail pages, and search were reworked from the phone up. Conversion followed.
In-house Head of Design covered identity, photography, packaging, UI, and content strategy under one mast. Working directly with the CEO, Head of Product, and engineering shortened the loop between brand decisions and shipped product — the visual identity and the checkout flow were never more than one design review apart.
Thirteen international awards across brand, shop usability, and user experience. Adobe selected the UI and Xd work for its showcase. Most notably, Adidas adopted the global product photography process developed at Keller Sports. The business was later acquired.