Building the future of e-commerce advertising, powered by brand partnership

Problem

Digital advertising has become increasingly unsustainable for most DTC brands. Rising CPMs, iOS 14.5 privacy changes, and the decline of third-party cookies have driven up costs while reducing effectiveness. At the same time, the pandemic-era boom in DTC brands has intensified competition for ad space, and post-COVID challenges like higher logistics costs have slashed marketing budgets.

As a result, 40% of DTC brands have cut paid media spend, and 77% now prioritize brand partnerships as a key acquisition strategy. But executing a partnership campaign is expensive and time-consuming—often costing over $10K and taking months to coordinate. For lean teams, this manual process of identifying partners, reaching out, and launching campaigns is a major barrier.

This growing pressure revealed a clear opportunity: to build a scalable, tech-driven solution that makes collaborative marketing fast, accessible, and effective for brands of all sizes.

Goal

Our mission is to help brands grow through collaboration, not competition. We aim to make co-marketing fast, easy, and accessible.

In its first phase, our product helps brands:

• Discover value-aligned partners open to collaboration
• Plan and launch joint campaigns with built-in tools
• Track campaign performance and learn what works

Long term, we’re building a DTC SaaS toolkit for brands to thrive in the post-cookie, partnership-driven era.

During my time as a solo designer at ShopSwap, I was responsible for:

• Ideation & Coordination: Worked with the leadership team to uncover insights and translate concepts into features. Collaborated with the development and marketing teams to align user goals with business objectives.
• Design Execution & Validation: Created sitemaps, user flows, wireframes, and prototypes. Conducted usability studies and user testing to validate designs. Led efforts to improve the service and address user pain points in the brand partnership experience.
• Building & Maintaining the Design System: Developed a modular design system with reusable components and their states. Regularly maintained the system to ensure UI patterns remained up to date, embraced evolving design and development best practices, and continued to meet user needs.
• Art Direction & Brand Design: Designed brand guidelines, transactional emails, social media posts, and campaign-related image and video content.

User testing is a critical part of the design process. By interviewing users and observing their behavior, we identify design issues and continuously iterate for a better user experience. Here are a few examples showcasing the validation and refinement process.

#1 Onboarding

Problem:

To provide a better brand-matching experience, we created ShopSwap Scores, which use our algorithm to indicate how well a brand aligns with yours. However, the algorithm requires brands to provide detailed information during onboarding, which can extend the process and discourage users from completing it.

Solution:

• Visualized the onboarding questions using Tinder-style cards.
• Added skipping options and encouraged users to complete the onboarding questions after signing up by blurring the ShopSwap Scores until onboarding is finished.

#2 Pre-Generated Task List

Problem:

There are common campaign types often used by brands during partnerships, such as discount sharing, giveaways, and gifts with purchase. We aim to reduce the workload for brands as much as possible by providing pre-generated tasks once they have chosen a campaign type. However, we discovered that the complexity and specificity of each task vary. For example, some tasks require collaboration between brands, while others can be completed by each brand individually. Some tasks can be completed by one brand but require confirmation from the other brand.

Solution:

• We defined each task as one of four types: individual, collaborative, hybrid, or general. Additionally, we designed progress pills with tooltips to educate users on how the different task types work and guide them on what to do next.
• After user testing, we discovered that one brand typically does most of the work, while the other mainly just confirms. As a result, we removed the restrictions and dependencies between tasks, allowing brands to move on to the next task without having to wait for the other brand to take action. This enhances the continuity of the workflow and reduces the bounce rate.

#3 Landing Page Customization Tool

Problem:

Discount code or gift redemption landing pages are essential in co-marketing campaigns, but they can be a hassle for brands to create. Brands need to build a functional website that collects emails and displays discount codes. Additionally, they need the ability to customize these landing pages to align with their branding.

Solution:

• Created an easy-to-use and customizable landing page builder.
• Designed pre-made templates that brands can easily customize to align with their branding.

#4 Campaign Broadcasts

Problem:

We discovered that some brands prefer to publicly announce a partnership opportunity with a specific campaign type and topic in mind, rather than cold-calling other brands without knowing if they are interested in collaborating.

Solution:

• Designed and developed a new ‘Campaign Broadcasts’ feature that enables brands to post and apply for partnership opportunities, as well as manage their broadcasts and applications.