Kailen Nordhausen-Willcox
Creative Director · Experience Design & Design Strategy
Creative Director and design strategist with 13 years in experience design, service design and brand work for consumer, retail and financial services brands. Currently leading the full rebrand and premiumization of the Suncast brand, the company website redesign and the launch of its first direct-to-consumer product, working directly with the executive team and with an in-house design team built and trained to produce in Figma, Adobe and AI tools. Agency and consultancy depth from Goods & Services, Huge, Razorfish and 22squared, taking work from research and strategy through design systems, prototyping and launch. Dual BFA in Service Design and Industrial Design from SCAD.
Core skills
Experience
Creative Director, Vipertec
- Lead the full rebrand and premiumization of Suncast, a consumer brand of outdoor storage products including sheds, deck boxes, hose reels and storage cabinets, setting brand strategy, identity, packaging and digital expression.
- Work directly with the executive team, setting brand direction, aligning leadership on priorities and presenting the work for approval.
- Built and trained an in-house design team that produces digital assets in Figma, Adobe and AI tools, and set up the AI-assisted production workflows it runs on.
- Personally lead the redesign of the company website, from strategy and information architecture through UX and visual design.
- Lead marketing for the company's first direct-to-consumer product, from positioning through launch creative.
- Designed a cinematic motion logo identity for Suncast, built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with automated image export for web and social sharing.
Associate Design Director, Experience Design, Goods & Services
- Led digital experiences and design strategy for clients including Purple, IEX, Chubb, JPMorgan and Zeiss Microscopy, across consumer, financial services, insurance and life sciences.
- Worked directly with client executives, presenting strategy and design recommendations and guiding decisions on direction and scope.
- Led experience design for client engagements from discovery and research through strategy, design and delivery, partnering with strategy, product and engineering teams.
- Designed an immersive brand experience for Simona America.
Principal Design Technologist, 22squared
- Bridged creative and engineering teams, prototyping and building interactive digital experiences for the agency's brand clients.
- Designed a 5G smart beer tap for SweetWater's Guide Beer, which gives part of its proceeds to river guides, with a fly reel that spins every time the tap is pulled.
- Designed 22squared's own agency website.
- Worked on an immersive experience for the Truist Park Super Bowl activation.
- Designed built-in Pins for The Home Depot.
Senior Interaction Designer and Interaction Designer, Huge
More than four years at Huge designing digital products and services for household-name brands in sports and media, quick-service restaurants, retail, logistics and banking, with a promotion to Senior Interaction Designer in 2016. Worked end to end, from research and service blueprints through interaction design and prototyping, on experiences used by millions of people every day, and helped Huge win Arby's, McDonald's, Zaxby's and Capital One Cafés.
- For Turner, designed the NBA's North American omnichannel experience across web, set-top box and mobile app, and the Boomerang TV app.
- Designed McDonald's global mobile app.
- Designed UPS tracking and shipping experiences.
- Designed the Lowe's app and web experience, and the service and digital experience for Resolve by Lowe's, a home repair management service that connects homeowners with trusted pros.
- Designed the in-bank app implementation of Zelle with Fiserv.
- Created a full customer experience service blueprint for ATB Bank.
- Designed the EchoPark user experience.
- Designed commerce and app experiences for the Under Armour UA Shop app.
- Designed the Coca-Cola Ambassador app and digital experiences for SecureWorks, a cybersecurity company.
Information Architect, Razorfish
- Created UX and information architecture for Delta Air Lines, BlackBerry, Bridgestone and Masco, including wireframes and site architectures for promotional experiences and new-business pitches.
Independent Design Consultant
- Delivered service design, UX and interaction design, branding and web development for independent clients.
Education
Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD)
- Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Service Design
- Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA), Industrial Design
- Minors in Interaction Design, Furniture Design and Art History
- Sponsored projects: service design for Microsoft Studios (2012) and Johnson Controls (2011); a home media product and interface system, designed and prototyped for Freescale Semiconductor (2011)