I have a firm, unyielding belief in the power of collaboration. Maybe it's because it's always been the case that my best work comes out of a collaborative process, but I also believe that all of us are looking to connect and build things together. I also believe that unicorn hunting is a futile sport. People have things that they excel at, things they're great at, things they're good at, and blind spots. And the best way forward on any project is to have a team that understands their strengths and weaknesses, and works with one another accordingly. Ask me about my Voltron Theory of Collaboration some time, and how I applied it to overseeing five teams for Obermeyer that were aimed at accomplishing the same goals; development, marketing, PR, and photo studio partners, and of course, internal players and stakeholders.

The customer of your brand and the end user of an app... they are the most pivotal and important stakeholders that exist. You may design for a brand, but as Marty Neumeier says, "A brand is not what you say it is, it's what they say it is." So at the end of the day, whether it's a brand's marketing or e-commerce website, or an SaaS app that's providing a service to an end user, there's no greater stakeholder that exists than that collection of people. This drives my design thinking from start to finish, and I will always support research, competitive analysis, user interviews, and anything else under the sun if there are gaps in understanding their needs on a project.

A lot of the work I've done in my career can be deemed a success or failure with metrics. But one thing I've always loved and had a natural inclination towards is conceptualization. And it's a hard one to track, but be it a modern and inviting web or app experience, or a brand-driven photo and video advertising campaign, I've always loved and excelled at the conceptualization portion of the design process. Some recent successes with Obermeyer have been the brand's "We Know the Feeling" campaign, along with their "Disconnect to Reconnect" campaign for their new Off Grid collection. The brand hadn't really ever run a traditional brand campaign like that, and both have done excellent in their first season of deployment.

While at Obermeyer, I was a part of the go to market planning, as well as the product buy during my most recent season. I worked with our strategic marketing and PR partners to plan campaigns, designed and executed the content for those campaigns, and oversaw the execution of our plans over a six-month season. When plans broke based on inventory or weather conditions, which as a ski brand, are your god, I lead the changes needed to adjust the strategy to the current market forces. This was the pinnacle of a skillset I adopted on other teams and while working with clients as Alchmst, and I thrive at the planning and conceptual stage of work because I enjoy the creative process and the collaboration required to develop and execute large, moving, evolving strategies.

This is getting long in the tooth to be talking about conceptualization, planning, and story telling ... as in my mind, they're all quite intertwined. But at the end of all of this, is the ability to tell a story. Whether it's through nailing the one line slogan for a brand's campaign that can connect with people in three or four words, or managing a weekly digital magazine for a brand. Or when it comes to UX, being able to take a unique and specialized user flow, and turn it into a narrative that stakeholders can understand, so that you can go confidently into the build stage, and provide designs to meet that user's unique needs. Storytelling is a powerful skillset based in the foundations of human communication, and it's something I love taking part in, immensely.

We can never keep up with the evolving world, especially when it comes to digital design. I've seen a lot in my career and I've been through a ton of different systems, from tracking projects in Jira or Asana, using Sketch or Figma or Adobe, changing screen sizes every year in a design system, design systems themselves, and moving between companies at a fast clip over more than a decade. It's all honed an already inate ability to adapt with change. And that's been no more apparent than during my time as Director of User Experience at Obermeyer. What started as a digital design and user experience role, nearly immediately evolved into performing the role of a de facto Creative Director. My former manager speaks highly of my ability to pivot on projects, and fill gaps in leadership when they occured... and unfortunately, as a very small team inside of a fast-moving brand, that was the case more often than not.

Over my 20 years as a professional designer, I have always believed in a few core principals that have helped develop my skills as a director; consistency, brand-first or user-first depending on the need, and being collaborative is better than being a commando. These skills really accelerated when they were called upon during my time as Director of User Experience at Obermeyer. From directing multiple e-commerce photo shoots, to managing the entire creative operation of Obermeyer.com, to helping create the company's first print magazine for the holiday season, these skills were all required, and I brought joy, confidence, and a trusted formula for design.

My career in User Experience was something I aspired to as soon as my design career took me digital. My time at a small digital-out-of-home advertising company called the Wall Street Journal Office Network really kicked things off, and led to my first full UX job at Sears, which was quickly elevated to a Senior User Experience role. I always loved the idea of responding to human psychology and understanding a user's needs as far as it concerned the devices and apps and web experiences we were using. It felt so connected to a greater thing that was taking place. I thrive in the User Experience Design world, and I think it's because at every level, there's someone on the receiving end of your work. And as a User Experience designer, you have an opportunity to take something that could be mundane, and bring joy to it. And you have a chance to choose between the black hat and white hat mindset that developers and hackers have spoken of for decades. You have a chance to use design for good, and that brings me immense joy.

I've intentionally bounced around through different industries in my career. Knowledge is power and experience is priceless. From my time at Sears (where I began my UX career under a team of absolute UX samurai, being directed by unfortunate leadership circumstances), through to my recent experience at Obermeyer, along with a multitude of small businesses I worked on for Alchmst, I have been tasked with accomplishing sales goals through design of all scales. At Obermeyer, I combined my career in User Experience with my passion for Winter Mountain sports, and designed a new shopping experience that created a 65% revenue increase in the first complete season.

One can do some of the best web and UX design on planet earth, but brands need to reach the minds of the people to be successful. While I've assisted in many small brands to get their marketing off the ground, I really dove into the deep end with digital marketing during my time at Obermeyer. I managed our digital marketing partners and oversaw marketing strategies that ranged from brand campaigns, to reengagement on social platforms, as well as email campaigns. I applied the evolving design system of Obermeyer.com to these campaigns, because as I mentioned above, consistency in design system is one of the pieces of rebar that supports a brand or app's momentum.

This was where I cut my teeth in design, going back to when I was a child. What began with an obsession for different sports teams and their logos and jerseys, developed into a desire to be able to make logos and design systems myself. While this isn't my main source of design energy in 2025, I still love this part of developing design systems. And I also know when it's a good time to step aside and let the major leaguers in. While working at Obermeyer, I called upon a friend you may know named Aaron Draplin, and got him to help develop a logo for Obermeyer's Off Grid Collection. I directed the project and managed the stakeholders that were requesting the work, and that project was launched for the 2024 season. For more details, see the recommendation letter that Aaron Draplin penned for me after we completed that work.

Your website is where your brand can shine. And if you want to take your brand's digital home to the next level, you need full control from root to the fruit over your design system and how you present it. Webflow has been my go to to solve these issues over the last five years. It allows the designer to do his/her/their work without the restrictions of other site builder systems, and allows for complete freedom for a brand to express itself. I've also used webflow for prototyping where applicable, as it allows for more dynamic interactions and animations.

Working with developers is one of the great joys of being a collaborative design leader. The designer can always come up with excellent interaction design, but outside of a tool like Webflow, that design can't get implemented without a development team. I used to do development work myself, but as time passes, I am less proficient in the actual front end development, but am always sure to remain knowledgeable about what things are happeing in front end development. It's hard to claim the ability to lead and manage teams with a collaborative mindset if you're just hanging back not knowing what's going on. See my recommendation letter from Wick Creative's Founder, about how I collaborate with development teams.