Grunden's 🐟 🦀

I kicked off the project with a structured client questionnaire and stakeholder interview to clarify brand positioning, product mix, and growth priorities. That work grounded the UX strategy in how Grundens sees its market today and where they want to grow.

Because the client wanted to invest primarily in build and merchandising, there was no budget for net-new user research. I still delivered full wireframes, but for insights I relied on two sources: Baymard’s ecommerce best-practice library and our agency’s Dovetail research catalog.

I re-architected the global navigation around clear product groupings, with apparel split into Men’s and Women’s. This structure maps cleanly to all four personas, keeps commercial anglers oriented, and deliberately creates space for the growing women’s line.

Product cards are the next critical global component. They appear across the site at the moment a shopper begins to commit to a product. I defined a flexible card that surfaces price range, key badges (Sale, Best Seller, New), and review count without overwhelming the imagery. Because we aligned early on the requirements, the client approved this pattern with no revisions.

With a razor-thin budget for personalization, I recommended focusing on a single high-impact moment on the homepage. Using historical site and merchandising data, I explored several options and aligned the team around a Men/Women best-sellers toggle. It supports the new women’s line while keeping the experience simple to implement.

Once navigation and product cards were locked, I led three rounds of storefront wireframes to cover the end-to-end shopping funnel. I prioritized high-revenue pages—homepage, category, product list, and product detail—and extended the same patterns to the remaining templates.

With wireframes approved, I stayed engaged through UI design and development to protect the UX decisions and unblock the team.

After several months of cross-functional work, we launched the new site and celebrated the milestone as a team. The Slack message below is from our client partner announcing the launch and recognizing the entire project team.