Digital Retail · Design System · Product
REI Co-op
Rebuilding the co-op’s digital experience to feel as trustworthy and well-made as the gear it sells.
Client
REI Co-Op
Role
Art Director, Digital Retail
Year
2013
Discipline
Responsive · Design Systems · Mobile
Outdoor gear is a promise you make with your life. The digital experience selling it should feel just as dependable.
The Challenge
REI needed its digital retail experience to feel as trustworthy and well-made as the gear it sold, across a rapidly growing set of devices and a member base that expected the co-op to get the details right.
The Approach
As Art Director for Digital Retail, I helped rebuild REI.com around a responsive foundation and co-founded a Council for Digital Standards to hold quality and consistency steady as the team and the storefront scaled.
The Outcome
The rebuilt experience contributed to sales growth of roughly five percent per quarter and gave the organization a shared language for digital craft.
One storefront, every device
REI.com needed to grow up fast — more devices, more traffic, more products, and members who expected the same integrity online that they found on a trailhead. We rebuilt the experience on a responsive foundation so it held together across phones, tablets, and desktops.
Finding the co-op’s place
Before pixels, we mapped the landscape — plotting REI against the field to sharpen a position that was both content-rich and distinctly its own, not just another commerce catalog.
A shared language for craft
“Standards are not bureaucracy. They are how a growing team keeps its promises to the people who trust it.”
To keep quality from slipping as the team scaled, I co-founded a Council for Digital Standards — a system of principles, patterns, and craft expectations that gave everyone a common definition of what “good” looked like.
Mobile shopping flow
Bringing the co-op into the aisle
REI Ascent explored how the expertise of a store associate could travel with the shopper — a companion app connecting online research, in-store discovery, and the trusted advice REI is known for.
A brand identity of its own
Ascent earned a distinct visual system — confident typography, a clear palette, and mountain texture — that felt native to REI while standing apart as a product.
Final app screens
The Outcome
~5%
quarterly sales growth
The rebuilt, responsive experience contributed to sales growth of roughly five percent per quarter. Just as lasting was the culture of craft the standards work left behind — a way of working that outlived any single page or campaign.