IKEA & Adobe
Rest and creativity are produced in the right environment. Research shows that ambient warmth, pleasant fragrance, and nature-adjacent forms each independently shift cognitive state toward creative and intuitive thinking. Most home objects address one lever at a time. Heated addresses all three.
The mushroom form is inspired by mycelial networks, the silhouette reflects a biological logic: every element strengthens the others. The warming system enhances scent distribution. The fragrance shapes mood. The mood shifts cognitive state. The biophilic form signals calm to a nervous system trained to read nature as rest.
A fully realized product concept: CAD-designed hardware, companion app with mood presets and session playlists, and a market research foundation in environmental psychology. Dual-function candle warmer and incense holder with touch-sensitive controls, integrated LED dimmer, engineered ventilation, and smart app sync. Available in Crimson and Onyx.
Position Heated at the intersection of design culture and creative infrastructure. The entry point is Milan Design Week as a fully staged environment. Visitors experience the warmth, the scent, the light, and the form together before they ever read a spec sheet. The room is the pitch.
A joint IKEA × Adobe installation at Milan Design Week. A room demonstrating Heated in its intended context. The experience is intended to sell the concept before the product exists at retail.
Direct-to-consumer through IKEA's e-commerce platform and select flagship stores. Limited bundle with Adobe Creative Cloud. Heated as a physical companion to a digital creative subscription. Price point $149–179, consistent with IKEA's accessible design ethos without undercutting the product's intentionality.
Lead with the science drawing on environmental psychology research translated into language that's felt rather than academic. Short-form content set in real creative environments, studios, home offices, reading corners. Influencer partnerships with designers, writers, and artists who already talk about their physical space as part of their creative process. Success tracked across units sold, consumable repeat purchase rate, Creative Cloud bundle conversion, and press coverage across design, wellness, and consumer tech verticals.
Google & X
4.9 billion people are on social media, and every single one of them is still looking down at a screen to use it. Gen-Z and Millennials expect technology to meet them where they are, but existing AI assistants don't speak the language of social platforms. You can have Siri or you can have your For You page. Nobody built the thing that gives you both. Allude is a keychain-sized device that bridges passive content consumption with intelligent AI assistance without asking you to choose.
The Magic 8 Ball was never about fortune-telling. It was about making decisions
feel playful: a ritual everyone already knows.
Shake → answer. No tutorial needed.
Allude applies that learned behavior to AI. Shake twice for personalized social insights from X. Shake
three times for factual grounding from Google. The gesture removes the friction between "I wonder..."
and getting a response. Two platforms, one device, "what's true" and "what are people saying" answered
simultaneously..
A fully realized product concept: interactive UX prototype, dual-screen hardware architecture, and platform integration spec across X, TikTok, and Instagram. Two LED displays, voice-first interaction, haptic shake feedback, 24-hour battery. Keychain-sized and always-on.
Position Allude as experimental hardware at the intersection of Google's AI credibility and X's cultural currency. The entry point is Google I/O: the right room, the right audience, and a stage that already expects boundary-pushing hardware announcements. Limited beta release follows, seeded to influencers and early adopters already active on X to generate organic discovery through unboxing and use-case content.
Beta distributed through X platform influencers and early adopters. UGC-first launch loop: unboxing content, real-world use cases, organic social amplification before mass availability. The product's social-native DNA makes the launch channel and the product story the same story.
Direct-to-consumer via Google Store. Bundle partnership with X; X Blue subscribers as a natural acquisition channel. Premium price point at $99–149 positions Allude above impulse but below considered purchase hesitation.
Nostalgia-driven creative campaign foregrounding the Magic 8 Ball heritage. TikTok-first content showing real use cases from actual moments of use. Influencer partnerships built around seamless integration, not feature walkthroughs. Success measured by daily active usage rate, session length, social platform engagement lift, and voice command accuracy.
THE UX
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ALLUDE
Givaudan
The niche fragrance market is growing at 2x the rate of mass. Gender-fluid
positioning is the fastest-expanding subcategory within it. And the ingredients driving that growth,
oud, shea, vetiver, incense, all share the same origin story: they migrated from the Global South into
European luxury, stripped of context, sold back at a premium.
Saudade is a fine fragrance house built on that truth. For the consumer who grew up with shea on their
skin and oud in the air and has spent their adult life watching those ingredients show up at Sephora
at 3x the price.
The target consumer is culturally fluent, identity-secure, and luxury-literate.
They don't shop by gender. They shop by feeling, by memory, by instinct. They can smell appropriation;
they know when a brand has done the work versus when it's wearing culture as an aesthetic. Saudade is
built for the person the brand is trying to impress.
The pitch was developed directly against Givaudan's 2025 annual report, aligning the brand to
their growth targets, cultural intelligence mandate, Active Beauty crossover opportunity, and
Sourcing4Good framework.
A complete brand strategy and creative brief: fragrance architecture for Saudade No. 1 ("Home Away From Home"), consumer positioning, Afromodernism framework application, and a full Givaudan alignment deck mapped to their 2030 vision. Delivered as a co-creation pitch with perfumer brief, ingredient sourcing strategy, and market entry recommendation for US and UK niche retail..
Saudade enters at the intersection of niche luxury and cultural intelligence. The entry point is the US and UK niche retail market, the two geographies where diaspora consumer density and luxury fragrance spending overlap most directly. The pitch to Givaudan is a co-creation partnership: Saudade brings the cultural brief, Givaudan brings the creation expertise, the ingredient network, and the commercial infrastructure.
Seeded into US and UK niche retail, target doors include Violet Grey (US), Ulta Beauty (US) and Dover Street Market (US and UK). Creative storytelling built around ingredient origin stories and the cultural migration narrative. No traditional fragrance advertising, earned media through diaspora communities, independent fragrance press, and creator adoption as the primary acquisition channel.
Violet Grey & Ulta Beauty (US) and Dover Street Market (US and UK) as primary retail doors. DTC via direct order as a secondary channel. Deliberate rollout to refelct intentionality, focusing on community origination with premium build. Price point benchmarked against niche category standards. $75 for 30ml, $125 for 50ml & $170 for 100ml.
Earned media through diaspora communities, independent fragrance press, and creator adoption as the primary acquisition channel. Success measured by retail conversion and repeat purchase against niche category benchmarks, cultural resonance score across earned media and community sentiment, and margin performance against Givaudan's 12% free cash flow target.
Ulta Beauty
Digital merchandising across 500+ landing pages for one of the largest beauty retailers in the US, managing product presentation, campaign execution, and weekly performance reporting.
The merchandising team was fielding intake requests manually, no system for tracking, prioritization, or turnaround accountability. The gap wasn't assigned, it was observed and felt by the people inside the process. Interviewed affected team members, mapped the breakdown, and used that data to build a Monday.com automation dashboard. Led company-wide rollout and designed procedural documentation for future members.
Automated intake system that reduced inquiry process time by 15%. Weekly KPI reporting cadence delivered to senior leadership. Co-execution of a national loyalty campaign reaching 35M+ members.
