My Role: Creative Director
Project Goal: Refresh and improve the existing Birthday Store on Amazon.com. Increase traffic and sales of gift cards and increase and elevate the selection of cards.
Project Description
This project started as a simple page refresh and grew into a very successful gift card expansion. The initial goal was to increase traffic to gift cards via the Birthday store, but in working with the Merchandising Manager, I had an idea for a new product, a printable and foldable gift card (shown above center) and to expand the selection of cards using illustrators. The gift card selection at Amazon was limited, consisting of simple letter ‘a’ cards with different hats, or cards that were text-only. I had experience working at Hallmark and knew that illustrated cards were our best sellers, so I pitched the idea and was given a budget to test my idea.\
Two illustrators were selected, Rachel Riordan and Ed Fotheringham, and we ran A/B tests of multiple themed cards to see if customers preferred one illustration style over the other. Customers responded well to both and sales of gift cards increased. The success of that initial test proved my hypothesis and allowed us to build out a selection of cards for all holidays. The added option for customers to print foldable cards also increased sales. We also used Rachel Riordan’s best-selling birthday card illustration to dress up the birthday store and make it more enticing and fun.
“I worked with Skottie at Amazon for more than five years in different capacities and it was always a pleasure and a treat and professionally rewarding when our paths crossed. Skottie is a colleague who will hear out the problem, ask the right questions, and then come up with a solution that is wildly above any expectation you could have imagined. He finds ways to make the pie bigger, rather than slicing it into smaller pieces, so to speak -- one of the most collaborative people I've ever had the pleasure to work with.”
~ Kathryn Crawford Saxer, Merchandising Manager, Amazon Gift Cards