Wrangler was a store-first brand with no real infrastructure for direct-to-consumer. When COVID-19 hit, that gap became urgent overnight: consumers who'd always bought Wrangler in stores had nowhere else to go but the website, and there was no lifecycle design system, no consistent process for building landing pages, and no dedicated art direction ready to handle that volume without losing brand consistency.
If lifecycle and ecommerce design ran on a repeatable system, rather than one-off builds every campaign, the team could scale DTC output, keep every email and landing page on-brand, and create a real feedback loop between design and conversion instead of treating them as separate disciplines.
Established the lifecycle and ecommerce design process from the ground up: templated, modular email and landing page systems in AEM that let the team move fast without rebuilding from scratch each time, and a design review process built around conversion, not just aesthetics. That system became the foundation for the channel's highest-visibility work, launch landing pages and email campaigns for major licensed collaborations, each requiring the design system to flex for a completely different visual identity while still driving toward a clean, converting purchase path. Art directed the team through the channel's growth, including photoshoots for the DTC visual library, setting the visual standard as DTC scaled from a small supporting channel into a real part of the business.
When COVID-19 forced the shift from in-store to online almost overnight, the DTC channel grossed over $9M in sales across multiple months during that shift, with the lifecycle and winback flow already built and running playing a key role in capturing that demand rather than losing it. The process built before the crisis is what made it possible to absorb the moment: a system already in place, not one built in a scramble after the fact.
