Cultivator Studio + Shop

Cultivator is a two-sided marketplace that empowers creatives to design, market, and sell custom sneakers directly to their loyal audience of followers. My team and I partnered with our client to iteratively prototype and test this unique offering in-market with real customers, and then brought it to life as a fully functioning e-commerce platform that was later acquired by Nike.

CLIENT

Cultivator x Nike

COMPANY

Supply

ROLE

Creative Director, UX/UI Designer, Illustrator

In 2017, a startup within Nike’s Innovation Accelerator approached Supply with a vision: to empower creatives to design and sell unique sneakers to their social followers, powered by Nike’s sneaker customization service, NikeID. They needed a partner to help them prototype the concept, validate it in-market, and iteratively refine the platform based on user insights. The goal was to build a scalable solution while demonstrating its viability to Nike leadership on a quarterly basis.

Build.
Test.
Refine.
Repeat.

Building the platform required a balance of strategic planning and execution. Over two and a half years, we launched more than a dozen product campaigns, each guided by a “learn as we go” approach. Every in-market release was an opportunity to test assumptions, gather insights, and enhance the user experience. The platform evolved through three distinct phases, with each iteration driving significant changes and improvements.

2017

2018

2019

2017

Sneaker-Lab was the “walk before you run” phase, giving us the learnings we needed to pivot from prototyping to building a proper platform. The first few drops leveraged human power and off-the-shelf tools like Squarespace to quickly prototype and launch, allowing us to learn as much as possible without investing a lot of development time. The brand of Sneaker-Lab was similarly scrappy, with a “street-meets-schematic” vibe.

A New Toolkit for Creators

Insights from initial drops helped us define technical and UX requirements for our first builder. This experience gave Creators full control over designing their sneakers and assets for upcoming drops, replacing the manual production my team was doing up until this point behind the scenes.

2018

A vibrant exchange of human stories, expressed through sneakers.

In 2018, we relaunched Sneaker-lab as Cultivator — a freshly-minted two-sided marketplace featuring a responsive web application (Creator Studio) for Creators to design their sneakers, feeding into a consumer-facing e-commerce platform (Shop) where they could sell them.

Creatives Wanted

A story-driven shopping experience doesn’t go far without its Creators. Over the course of this project we produced multiple rounds of marketing campaigns designed to attract new participants, hype upcoming drops, amplify FOMO as the beginning (and end) of drops drew near, and celebrate our Creator's stories.

Creator Studio

Cultivator’s Creator Studio built on the foundation of Sneaker-lab, offering a mobile-friendly experience tailored to our mobile-first Creators. The platform enabled seamless sneaker design and storefront customization, with each drop followed by feedback sessions to identify and address pain points. We also introduced better guardrails to ensure Creators completed all necessary steps to qualify for upcoming campaigns.

A Story-Driven Shopping Experience

Cultivator’s Shop liberated us from Squarespace, delivering a custom-built, story-driven e-commerce experience. This marketplace allowed consumers to discover Creators, explore their stories, and purchase their story-inspired sneakers. Like Studio, we refined the Shop with every drop, experimenting with themes, curated collections, and Creator spotlights to unlock Cultivator’s full potential.

Built from the Ground Up

We built a comprehensive design system to shape the entire Cultivator experience, working closely with our development team to bring it all to pixel-perfect life. This system was built to be a flexible canvas that reflecting the creative decisions of our Creators (copy, color, etc.) while still providing visitors with a clean structure and expected e-comm patterns.

2019

In 2019 Nike officially acquired Cultivator, rebranding it as Nike By You Workshop. I worked closely with the internal product team to manage this transition, blending the best parts of the Cultivator experience with the crisp minimalism of Nike’s brand and e-comm standards. The output of this effort was a platform that successfully transcended its scrappy beginnings, growing into an experience worthy of the swoosh.

Outcome

Over the course of a two-and-a-half-year partnership, we built a polished two-sided marketplace, launching over a dozen campaigns featuring the work of 100+ Creators. We fulfilled over 3,000 orders, generated ~$3.8M in revenue, and were successfully acquired by Nike.

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