Shutterfly
Overview
Shutterfly recruited me to guide their Shutterfly 3.0 transformation. Shutterfly acquired 7 competitors, including TinyPrints, Wedding Paper Divas, ThisLife, and Kodak’s online photo library and needed to create unified, enriched experience to drive customer engagement and revenue. The integration effort focused on aligning all acquired brands under a single, customer-centric vision, delivering consistency and convenience across touchpoints.
By consolidating the assets from these brands, Shutterfly created the world’s largest digital photo library and was now faced with how to effectively monetize their collect of over one trillion photos. I led the initiative to unify these acquisitions—including six customer-facing brands and key backend platforms—into a seamless, customer-first commerce experience and single e-commerce platform. This effort unlocked significant business value: it improved cross-device experiences, increased conversion and average order value, and delivered major operational efficiencies. By aligning brand assets under a shared infrastructure—while preserving their unique identities—I was able to reduce costs, accelerate innovation, and build a scalable foundation for future growth and category expansion.
A key driver behind the success of Shutterfly 3.0 was the Universal Creation Tool. By replacing 23 fragmented, product-specific creation tools with a single, flexible platform, I streamlined operations and eliminated pain points—such as requiring customers to restart projects when switching card types. This change alone led to a 4.5% increase in card completion rates delivering measurable business value and enhancing the customer experience.
This tool dynamically adapted to each product category, offering tailored features like storyboards for PhotoBooks to framing options for wall art. Its flexibility empowered merchandising teams to quickly launch and test new products, including a home décor line that generated $6M in its first quarter. It also supported expansion into customized textiles through the Spoonflower acquisition.
In parallel the design team led the definition and creation of a single account management, merchandizing and e-commerce engine tailored for custom gifts. The result was a more scalable, efficient, and flexible ecosystem that improved user experience, streamlined operations, and positioned Shutterfly for sustained growth through differentiated and deeply integrated offerings. For customers, the result was a seamless, consistent user experience across all devices and product types. For the business, it unlocked new revenue streams, improved conversion, and established a scalable foundation for future product innovation.
Responsibilities
Overall product design and UX strategy for the company
Integrate the 7 acquisitions into a cogent user experience
Built out both the design team and their processes, design systems, and user research program
Deliver updated common creation tools for use by all brands
Created new merchandizing, account management, and e-commerce engine
Separate brand refresh for Wedding Paper Divas
Replace legacy photo management backends with a common database that included facial and image recognition, recommendations, and automated image correction
Deliverables
Platform Efficiency: $50M+ in annual savings; faster go-to-market for new SKUs
New Unified Creation Path:
+4.5% Q4’13 revenue
18% YOY revenue increase
Combined 25% increase in order size
7% increase in average order value
Wedding Paper: +24% conversion
TinyPrints: +14% in conversion
Revenue Acceleration: +18% YoY growth; +4.5% Q4 uplift post-tool launch
Customer Retention: Improved usability across devices and reduced project abandonment
Shutterfly 3.0 Strategy: Single creation and ecommerce platform, Shutterfly Family of Brands
Products: Experiential (VR) & Inspirational Shopping, Memories & Expressions, Seamless x-device experience “from photo taking to memory making”
Brand Differentiation: Maintained brand equity while leveraging a unified back-end
Category Expansion: Launched new product verticals with rapid market uptake
Refreshed Design System: to reflect new branding
User Research program and lab
Mobile e-commerce apps
Universal Creation Tool
Holiday Cards are the core revenue driver for Shutterfly. After reviewing the funnel metrics, the design team noticed there was a high abandonment rate for cards in progress that corresponded with our marketing email campaigns. Resulting in a loss of about $4m in potential revenue.
Most customers begin their holiday cards months in advance, painstaking selecting photos, drafting their year-in-review updates, and of course looking for the perfect card design to make their’s stand out. The process of creating the perfect holiday is a point of pride for many of Shutterfly’s customers. So when given a discount to upgrade their card with rounded corners, or embossing came many customer jumped at the chance.
Unfortunately, once they had started to make their card, Shutterfly’s card creation tool would not allow users to change the surface their design was to printed on (in this case square to rounded or scalloped corners, etc). So taking advantage of these promotions meant starting their card over again from scratch. Leading to the high abandonment rates the team was seeing. In follow-up interviews with customers it was clear that many felt this a failure of Shutterfly’s brand promise.
Working with lead designer and engineering manager, we prototyped a new creation tool that would allow customers to change surface in the middle of the creation workflow. By enabling customer to select different card type we unlocked the ability for them to change what they were printing on, which meant ALL of Shutterfly’s products were on the table. So not only could a customer opt for rounded corners, she could also opt for mugs, ornaments, wall art, etc.
From an operational perspective, at the time Shutterfly had 23 different creation tools, with specific tools created for each new product type. The new universal creation tool could be used with any product in the Shutterfly catalog. Product type dynamically determined which toolbars and palettes were displayed. For example, Photobooks have a storyboard feature, while Wall Art has framing options, and greeting cards had options for various die-cut edges, metallic inks, embossing, etc.
In its first quarter, the new universal creation tool delivered +4.5% Q4 uplift resulting in an additional $7m in revenue. With a year over growth of +18% in the first twelve months. It also led to the creation of new products including framed wall art, textiles and home decor items.