Amazon Luxury
Redefining how luxury shows up on a non-luxury platform
A signal-driven system that transformed Prime from a static membership into an adaptive, personalized experience.
A signal-driven system that transformed Prime from a static membership into an adaptive, personalized experience.
Amazon occupied almost every retail category - except one. Luxury fashion and beauty, a $264B global market, had resisted the platform entirely. Not because customers weren't interested, but because luxury brands couldn't trust what Amazon would do to their identity. I led the concept, design and execution of Amazon Luxury Stores, a walled-garden experience that gave premium brands what they'd never had on a mass platform: control, curation and presence.
Luxury brands don't just sell products. They sell perception. And Amazon's default experience - dense grids, comparison shopping, algorithmic recommendations- was the opposite of what luxury requires. The challenge wasn't building a new UI. It was building a new operating model that could exist inside Amazon without being consumed by it. Brands needed to trust that their identity would be protected. Customers needed to trust that product was authentic. Amazon needed to enter a category it had historically been locked out of without compromising either side.
The Amazon Luxury experience launched with Oscar de la Renta as a flagship partner and featured in Vogue as a new model for immersive, brand-controlled digital luxury retail. Established a new operating model for premium brands on a mass platform - one that protected brand identity while leveraging Amazon's infrastructure and customer base. Created the foundation for Amazon's expansion into the luxury category.
I owned this from concept to launch. I defined the design strategy, established the walled-garden model, created the visual and interaction language, and worked directly with brand partners to bring their individual experiences to life within the system I designed. This was not an iteration on an existing pattern, it was a net new experience category built from the ground up.
I made one foundational decision early that shaped everything: this would not be designed like a store. It would be designed like a gallery.That single reframe changed every design choice that followed layout density, pacing, navigation, imagery scale, typography weight. Where Amazon typically optimizes for speed and comparison, I deliberately slowed the experience down. Space became a design element. Restraint became a feature. Each brand received a dedicated environment - not a product listing page, but an exhibition space. Brands could set a mood, tell a collection story, and present product the way a physical flagship would. The experience shifted the model from browsing to viewing to selecting.
The walled-garden construct was critical- it allowed the experience to sit inside Amazon's infrastructure (account, fulfillment, trust signals) while being visually and experientially separated from the general marketplace. Customers never felt like they'd wandered into a discount retailer. Brands never felt like their identity had been flattened.Each brand space functioned like an exhibition with editorial layouts, seasonal collection moments, and brand storytelling treated as an artist statement. Navigation was intentionally controlled to encourage exploration over search. The result felt closer to walking through a gallery than scrolling through a catalog.
This wasn’t a UI problem, it was a system behavior problem. I defined a signal-driven architecture that allows Prime to interpret customer behavior, determine what matters in the moment, and respond dynamically across surfaces. By establishing reusable primitives and shared logic, this system enabled consistency across touchpoints, flexibility across contexts, and scalability across global markets
Beyond the frameworks and the design system, I managed and mentored designers across the team and built the operational mechanisms that made our organization more effective - from how we ran design reviews to how we scaled decisions across a complex, matrixed global organization. I believe great design leadership means staying close to the craft while clearing the path for the people around you.
Designing for Prime meant unlearning Amazon's default instincts. Instead of optimizing for speed and conversion, I built systems that interpret context, respond to behavior, and make hundreds of millions of people feel like the product was made specifically for them.
