Roots Canada · 2014–2017
Design manager
I led ecommerce design during a period of digital transformation at Roots, connecting customer behaviour, brand, merchandising, and technology to improve the shopping journey across desktop and mobile. The work reduced friction from product discovery through checkout while establishing stronger design standards and a multidisciplinary team to support growth.
26%
increase in conversion
18%
reduction in checkout abandonment
+30% mobile traffic
+15% U.S. customer acquisition
Turning a strong retail brand into a stronger digital business
Roots already had a recognisable retail brand and strong seasonal storytelling. The digital opportunity was to make that strength work harder in ecommerce.
Shopping experiences had to support customers moving between inspiration, product discovery, merchandising, mobile browsing, cart, and checkout while giving internal teams a faster and more consistent way to deliver campaigns and product updates.
- Team: 3 designers + 2 developers
- Partners: Ecommerce, merchandising, marketing, photography, technology and external agencies
- Channels: Desktop, mobile, email, campaigns and app experiences
My mandate
My responsibility was broader than redesigning pages. I had to improve ecommerce performance while creating a team, standards, and delivery model capable of supporting an active retail calendar.
Customer journey
Reduce friction between browsing, product selection, cart and checkout.
Commercial performance
Connect experience decisions to conversion, abandonment, mobile behaviour and acquisition.
Team leadership
Hire, coach and manage the designers and developers responsible for day-to-day digital delivery.
Scalable foundations
Create responsive patterns and reusable standards that allowed ecommerce and campaign experiences to remain consistent as the volume of work increased.
I made buying easier
I focused the ecommerce experience on reducing the effort required to move from finding a product to purchasing it. We simplified key shopping flows, improved product discovery, introduced faster paths such as Quick Add, and reduced unnecessary friction in cart and checkout.
26%
increase in conversion
18%
reduction in checkout abandonment
The value was not a cleaner interface. Customers could move through the shopping journey with fewer interruptions, and the business saw stronger completion at the point where intent became revenue.
I designed for where customer behaviour was moving
Mobile behaviour was becoming increasingly important, so I helped establish responsive design as a standard rather than treating smaller screens as a secondary adaptation. We created reusable behaviours for product browsing, landing pages and shopping interactions across viewport sizes.
+30%
mobile traffic growth
The larger change was organisational. Responsive behaviour became part of how the team designed and maintained the site, reducing the need to solve the same experience independently across devices.
I reduced the cost of consistency
Roots operated on a demanding retail calendar. Seasonal campaigns, collaborations, editorial content and merchandising experiences repeatedly introduced new layouts and production needs.
I moved the team toward reusable digital patterns, responsive standards and shared templates so we could preserve the brand while reducing one-off production.
35%
reduction in visual inconsistency
Different campaigns.
Shared digital foundations.
I was not producing isolated campaign pages. I was creating a system that allowed a retail organisation to produce them repeatedly.
I built the team behind the experience
Roots was also an important shift in my own leadership scope. I built and managed a multidisciplinary ecommerce team of three designers and two developers, with responsibility for hiring, coaching, performance development and the quality of the team’s work.
I connected the team more closely with ecommerce, merchandising, marketing, photography and technology so design decisions could respond to both customer behaviour and the realities of retail execution.
Clearer ownership
Design and development capability sat closer to ecommerce decision-making.
Reusable standards
The team could support campaigns and product experiences without rebuilding the digital language each time.
Commercial accountability
Experience decisions were increasingly discussed in terms of conversion, abandonment, acquisition and customer behaviour rather than visual preference.
Impact beyond checkout
| Outcome | Result |
|---|---|
| Conversion | +26% |
| Checkout abandonment | −18% |
| U.S. customer acquisition | +15% |
| Mobile traffic | +30% |
Together, these outcomes reflected a broader shift from treating digital primarily as a campaign channel toward treating ecommerce as a measurable customer and business capability.
What this work taught me
Customer experience and commercial performance are connected.
Reducing friction in a shopping journey matters because it changes customer behaviour, not because the interface becomes more elegant.
Brand systems have to survive production.
A design language has limited value if a team cannot apply it quickly across products, campaigns and channels.
Leadership starts when outcomes depend on other people.
Building the team, standards and cross-functional relationships became as important as the experiences I personally designed.