PicMonkey Integrated Marketing + Brand
I built PicMonkey's creative organization from the ground up, reporting directly to the CEO.
Increased conversions up to 300%
Cash revenue up ~10%
Directed the brand narrative behind PicMonkey's $110M acquisition by Shutterstock
The Challenge
PicMonkey needed to grow up, and it needed a team that could elevate the brand across growth, product, and marketing initiatives with a strong creative point of view.
I was brought in for my design eye and tasked with building a team that could deliver at that level while moving at the speed of a growing SaaS company.
The challenge was balancing both high creative standards and high performance, without sacrificing either.
As we scaled, the opportunity was bringing it all together: work that served the customer, strengthened the brand, and drove profitable growth.
One campaign, one clear story, carried consistently across every interaction.
The Approach
Built the creative team from 1 to 11, nearly 15% of headcount as PicMonkey grew from 30 to 80 employees.
Developed our intake process, workflows, design ops, and content strategy from the ground up, refining with input from all teams on the regular to ensure we were doing our best work.
Every decision ran through three questions: What's the message? Who's the audience? How do we serve them? That's what kept our growing team aligned.
We treated every channel as part of one integrated system, with ads, landing pages, blog posts, emails, social, and in-product moments all reinforcing the same message.
Over time, we redefined PicMonkey's brand identity to match the audience and where the company was headed. We converted landing pages from manual to automated, cutting turnaround from months to minutes. We defined a comprehensive spec for a custom CMS that enabled building high converting landing pages at scale.
We also gained and maintained high brand awareness through educational social content, targeted events, and live user demos.
We looked at our efforts holistically across departments. I also developed a solid estimation system for work to help with planning and load balancing.
The Results
Grew cash revenue ~10% (2020), partnering across marketing, product, engineering, and finance
Drove +30% overall traffic through SEO optimizations and shipped 9K+ new pages
Increased conversion up to 300% through A/B testing on layout, visuals, ads, and user flows.
Beat industry benchmarks on email performance
Boosted average order value 46% through creative direction across integrated and product marketing
Directed the brand narrative and designed the creative behind PicMonkey's $110M acquisition by Shutterstock
Leadership, not just output
Numbers are one kind of proof. Here's the other kind.
I coached and mentored a team member who was struggling, enough that it showed. Within a year, he was Principal Designer. Not because I lowered the bar. Because I found the version of coaching that actually worked for how he thought, and got out of the way once it did.
When the company took a hard look at the numbers and asked every team to run leaner, I restructured mine from 7 to 4, without backfilling. Saved the cost of 3 full-time hires, streamlining how we worked to keep our same standards with fewer people.
In the work
The Social Media Revamp
In 2021, our social media manager and I took a hard look at PicMonkey's Instagram. The feed wasn't doing its job.
So we rebuilt it into a visual portfolio, something that showed the power of the tool at a glance, and went live every week to prove it in real time.
I directed the educational strategy, as well as designing and animating a good chunk of the posts myself.
It was a great success, as well as being incredibly fun.
First month: 170K+ impressions, engagement at .19% (above industry average), 72% click-through on link-in-bio. Grew the account past 43K followers.
We ran the same playbook on Pinterest. Results: impressions up 4% (5.34M), saves up 3% (16.79K), outbound clicks up 4% (8.35K).
