Festive delights on the Lululemon app

The Challenge - A seasonal App expireince

A mandate without metrics Leadership wanted their "Starbucks Red Cup moment". A seasonal touchstone customers anticipate and emotionally connect with. The brand SVP put it plainly:

"Our app is the same all year round. We need our Starbucks moment that guests can expect from us." — Brand SVP

Finding signal in stakeholder noise

Rather than simply executing on the vague mandate, I partnered with PM to investigate whether this hypothesis had legs—and if so, where we should focus.

Research: Connecting sentiment to behaviour

I conducted a heuristic analysis of the app, deployed social listening through Reddit's r/lululemon community, and reviewed third-party retail sentiment research, and collected data on the customer segments that could benefit for this initiative. Working with product analytics, I uncovered behavioural signals that fed into the final design strategy:

1. Push notification response Exclusive promotions via push notifications moved members to longer sessions and higher purchases.

2. Wish list correlation Purchase conversion was 2× higher for users engaging with wish lists—a passive behaviour ripe for amplification.

These signals (an other insights not listed here) gave me concrete behaviours to connect the emotional design mandate to—not just "make it festive," but specific interaction patterns we could amplify.

Design Execution: Translating brand work to UI

My visual design process started with the brand team. I collected their in-store campaign materials—colour palettes, textures, photographic treatments—and asked: can these brand elements become UI? I identified motifs that could translate to interaction design: iridescence (from their physical campaign), particle effects (evoking weather and wonder), and nostalgic warmth. These became my digital art direction.

Prioritizing with precision

The potential scope was enormous—the mandate could touch nearly every screen. I developed a prioritization framework balancing emotional impact potential against flow disruption risk. The final scope crystallized around three themes:

1. Gifting Moments Flows where guests might be generous in gifting and sharing—wish lists, add-to-bag, product sharing.

2. Member Exclusives Flows that made members feel special—early access pages, countdown transitions, membership pass.

3. Seasonal Products Opportunities to highlight holiday stock with enhanced visual treatments and discovery moments.

Wish List: Encouraging Non-Committal Shopping

Research showed wish list engagement correlated with higher conversion. I festified the heart icon with an iridescent shimmer that responded to device motion, paired with haptic feedback on interaction.

Add to Bag : Celebrating Commitment

I designed a path animation with trailing particle dust that enhanced the usability of the bag action while celebrating the moment of commitment. This subtle celebration drove a 3% improvement in wish-list-to-bag conversion.

Member Exclusive: Making Loyalty Feel Luxurious

Members already responded well to exclusive promotions. I introduced page transitions—something Lululemon hadn't done before—with a frosted glass effect and slowed pacing when entering Early Access flows. The goal was to make members feel they were accessing something special.

Collaboration: A new model for design-engineering partnership

This project required a level of design-engineering collaboration that hadn't existed at Lululemon before. I built interactive prototypes in Play (an iOS-focused prototyping tool) to communicate motion concepts before engineering commitment. For the iridescent effect specifically, I worked directly with iOS Engineering Lead, developing a stack of colours and layers that could be implemented in SwiftUI. We iterated in real-time—I'd give feedback, and within a day we'd have a new prototype on TestFlight. This tight feedback loop pushed my craft while ensuring what I designed was actually buildable. It set a precedent for future ambitious design work at Lululemon.

Impact & Outcome

On a high level the project was a success. Seeing growth in engagement across interaction treatments: time spent, member's holiday exclusive etc. We also saw a $2M sales lift from members during launch period.

Learning’s & Takeaways

I did a few things really well in this project:

• Transformed ambiguous leadership mandate into testable hypothesis. Championing clarity

• Forged new pathways and system for emotional/expressive UI design at Lululemon

• Deepened my iOS systems knowledge (SwiftUI, transitions, haptics)

Theres a few things I'd change about the my approach to this project:

• Scope down—test on smaller seasonal moment first (Thanksgiving, not Christmas)

• Push deeper on fewer visual explorations rather than wide to cover more areas.