Abena · Director of Design & Engineering · 2015–2020
A healthy kind of challenge.
Adult incontinence and baby care. Not the categories most designers dream about — which is exactly why we did our best work there.
I led a team of five — two designers, two engineers and one researcher — with one conviction: people who rely on these products deserve the most dignified, most premium shopping experience on the web.
HeatherSenior Product Designer
MelissaSenior Product Designer
GarretSenior Software Engineer
ChrisSoftware Engineer
OliviaUX ResearcherWeb · abenausa.com
Fresh air for a stale aisle.
The flagship storefront, rebuilt end to end on the new design system — guided product discovery up front, calm Nordic art direction throughout.
We rebuilt the storefront around Abena’s Nordic roots — open skies, honest photography, room to breathe — and put guided product discovery where the spec sheets used to be.
Web · The Fitting Room
A fitting room, not a spec sheet.
Web · The Fitting Room
Sizes read like apparel. Absorbency is shown in real ounces, not code names. The product page walks you to the right choice — then subscribe-and-save keeps it coming. Checkout became a conversation, not a form.
The foundation
One system, every surface.
Beneath it all sat a bespoke design system my team built on CSS Grid and Tailwind CSS, layered over Material UI — documented in Storybook, drawn in Figma, iconography via Iconscout. A novel stack for its time, and the reason a team of five could ship like one three times the size.
App design
Filters that speak human.
The mobile experience introduced a novel approach to product selection — an interactive product guide and dynamic filters that ask about your life, not your SKU — wrapped in an all-new UI where finding the right product finally feels effortless.
The brand, in ink.
The same grid, type and color that ran the storefront set the rules for everything we shipped to paper.
Packaging design
The shelf is a touchpoint too.
Bambo Nature’s retail line carried the language into the physical world — soft geometry, honest materials, certification-first labeling. Every box was composed like a landing page: hierarchy, warmth, trust.