Reimagining Chewy Claus
Turning a delayed seasonal initiative into a scalable, high-engagement holiday experience.
OVERVIEW
Chewy Claus is Chewy’s annual holiday experience that invites pet parents to create a personalized wish list for their pets. The program combines holiday fun with giving back, helping provide meals to shelter and rescue pets in need while creating a memorable way for customers to celebrate their pets.
ROLE & DURATION
Lead Product Designer / Chewy
Experience Strategy · UX/UI · Prototyping · Interaction Design · Visual Storytelling
8-week duration
The Challenge
The experience didn’t just need a redesign. The team needed direction.
When I joined the project, Chewy Claus was already moving toward development, but the experience lacked a unified vision. Design exploration had stalled, requirements were evolving, and Product, Marketing, Brand, and Engineering needed greater clarity to confidently move forward. But at the same time, the launch date wasn’t moving. So, my first responsibility wasn’t designing screens; it was creating clarity.
The challenge became balancing three competing needs:
Create something memorable.
Chewy Claus needed to feel more like a holiday experience than a transactional form.
Make it achievable.
The team had approximately eight weeks to align, design, build, QA, and launch.
Design beyond one season.
Instead of creating another one-off campaign, I wanted to establish reusable patterns and interaction models that could support future seasonal experiences.
Where it all started...
The project had individual ideas and screens, but no cohesive experience connecting them.
I audited the existing work end-to-end and identified gaps across the customer journey, content requirements, interaction patterns, illustration needs, technical feasibility, and ownership.
This audit became the foundation for a recovery plan that gave the team a shared understanding of what needed to happen and in what order.
My Approach
Creating clarity, alignment, and momentum
With an accelerated timeline and multiple teams working in parallel, I needed to quickly understand what was blocking progress, establish a clear experience direction, and give the team a framework they could confidently execute against.
Rather than following a traditional linear design process, I focused on three areas that would have the greatest impact: creating alignment, defining the experience vision, and designing a scalable framework.
01
Establish Ownership & Create a Path Forward
I began by auditing the existing experience, design explorations, requirements, and known technical constraints to understand where progress had stalled.
From there, I mapped the end-to-end journey, identified gaps and dependencies, and created a recovery plan that gave Product, Marketing, Brand, Engineering, and Analytics a shared understanding of what needed to happen—and in what order.
This shifted the project from fragmented ideas toward a clear, actionable path to launch.
02
Define the Experience Vision
With the immediate path forward established, I looked beyond individual screens to define what the Chewy Claus experience should feel like as a whole.
I explored previous experiences, customer behaviors, campaign goals, and opportunities for personalization and delight. From this work, I established experience principles that helped guide decisions throughout the project:
Make it personal. Create an experience centered around each customer’s pet.
Reduce effort. Keep participation simple while preserving the magic of the experience.
Connect participation to purpose. Reinforce how each wish helps pets in need.
Create moments worth sharing. Build delight and storytelling into the journey to extend engagement beyond Chewy.
These principles became a shared decision-making framework for Product, Design, Marketing, Brand, and Engineering.
03
Build a Scalable Experience Framework
Instead of designing Chewy Claus as a collection of one-off campaign pages, I created reusable structures and interaction patterns that could scale across the experience.
Common page layouts, content containers, interaction behaviors, illustration treatments, and responsive patterns helped create consistency while allowing Marketing and Brand flexibility to tell the story.
This approach also reduced unnecessary design and engineering complexity, allowing the team to move faster without sacrificing the quality of the customer experience.
04
Prototype to Align & Accelerate Decisions
With multiple stakeholders and an immovable launch date, prototypes became more than a design deliverable—they became a tool for decision-making.
I used interactive prototypes to communicate the complete experience, surface missing requirements, evaluate interactions, and help stakeholders understand how individual decisions affected the broader journey.
Working closely with Engineering throughout the process allowed us to evaluate feasibility early, make informed tradeoffs, and preserve the intent of the experience while continuing to move quickly.
The result was a shared vision the entire team could rally around—and a clear path from ambiguity to launch.
Designing the Experience
Make it personal
Every pet should feel like the center of the experience.
Design decision
Personalized questions and pet-specific content transformed a generic submission flow into a story about their pet.
Clear progression
Customers always understood where they were.
Delight around the task
Animation and illustration added personality without interfering with completion.
Then put the 84% completion rate directly beside that visual. Now the metric is evidence supporting your design decision rather than just a number at the bottom of the case study.
Personal → Effortless → Purposeful → Shareable
Cross-Functional Leadership
ALIGN
Create a shared vision
Prototypes + journey maps + stakeholder working sessions
PARTNER
Solve constraints together
Early Engineering collaboration + feasibility + tradeoffs
ENABLE
Help teams move independently
Clear requirements + reusable patterns + defined dependencies
The Impact
Turning holiday wishes into measurable impact for pets nationwide.
180K
Wishlist Submissions
217K+
Pets Represented
16M
Meals donated to shelters & rescues
Beyond the numbers
Strong influencer engagement • Executive visibility • Company town hall feature
Reflection: Clarity creates momentum
When direction was unclear, my role extended beyond designing the experience. I helped establish the path forward, align teams around it, and create scalable solutions that could move quickly from concept to launch.