REI Co-op · Adventure Travel · 2022–2024
I led the redesign of the front door to REI's most considered purchase — and built the testing infrastructure that let the team keep getting it right.
$2.2M
Attributed revenue from the redesigned hero experience.
113%
Year-over-year click-through rate lift on Adventure Travel.
1.6x
Faster iteration velocity
1 — THE CHALLENGE
When the product is the dream, the page has to do both jobs.
Adventure Travel customers don't browse the way an outdoor-gear customer browses. A four-thousand-dollar trip to the Grand Canyon isn't a transaction — it's a decision people sit with for months, returning to the page to imagine themselves into the experience. The hero of that page is doing two jobs at once: it has to feel like the brand REI stands for, and it has to convert.
The existing experience leaned heavily on one job at the expense of the other. Beautiful imagery, weak commercial structure. Or strong commerce, brand voice flattened. The redesign had to hold both.
2 — THE APPROACH
I built a component system & a process, not a page.
The strategic move was architectural. Instead of designing a hero, I designed a system of heroes — multiple component variants the team could configure in real time, test against each other with A/B analytics, and evolve as we learned what adventure travelers actually responded to.
This shifted the conversation with leadership. We stopped debating which hero was "right" and started measuring which hero was working. The component system became the alignment artifact — a shared object the entire cross-functional team could rally around.
"Kathrine's innovative and flexible design allowed us to iterate REI's Adventure Travel home page rapidly and efficiently. She guided our team in delivering a new user experience that drove products and offerings in new and exciting ways."
— Aaron M. · Senior Engineer · REI Co-op
3 — THE WORK
Brand language and commercial structure, in one frame.
Every hero variant carried the same brand DNA — language pulled directly from REI's editorial voice, imagery sequenced like a magazine spread, white space treated as the most important brand cue. Each variant tested a different commercial hypothesis: how to surface price, how to communicate urgency without losing trust, how to use trip categories as a navigational entry.
The winning combinations weren't always the ones I would have designed first — which is exactly the point of building the system.
3 — WHAT THIS WORK TAUGHT ME
The most strategic thing a design leader can build is an alignment machine.
The Adventure Travel work wasn't really about a hero. It was about giving a cross-functional team — engineering, brand, business, analytics — a shared object to argue around and a shared method for deciding. That's leadership work disguised as design work. It's also why I now believe the highest-leverage thing a senior designer can do isn't to make the final artifact — it's to make the system the team uses to keep getting to better artifacts long after the launch.
