Building the essential experience for surfers worldwide.
Vice President of Design
Surfline was a fantastic opportunity to bring my love of surfing together with my passion for design. I’ve reimagined and rebuilt the design discipline for the world’s largest and most innovative brand in surfing—cultivating a culture of leadership, collaboration, and high-quality product design to deliver continual value to our +5M audience of surfers worldwide. Working with other executives, my mission was to reposition design as a pivotal competitive advantage for the business, building trust to integrate it as a core company competency, and ultimately contributing to the organization's overall success—achieving an annual subscription growth of ~26% YOY and reducing churn by 17%.
Building off our core forecasting business, we’ve imagined and designed an ecosystem of services and features, including e-commerce, apparel, gear, and travel—leading to a $3 increase in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and a 36% boost in customer satisfaction. Created and implemented strong design principles, processes, and systems across the product suite.
Most importantly, we established design as an essential component of the company’s success—driving leadership, strategy, and partnerships, showing its ability to meet business challenges.
Crafting the world’s best and most innovative surf app:
Surfline Product Expireince
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We’re building surfing’s most trusted and beloved brand by combining the rigor of science with the boundless imagination, creativity, and artistry that defines the soul of surfing.
Before joining Surfline, I was a dedicated user who saw its limitations through the lens of a product designer. I advocated for a more inclusive surfing experience, with the vision of creating a more personalized surf assistant to aid surfers of all levels. We focused on improving accessibility, clear user pathways, intuitive data displays, and customization.
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Our mission is to help surfers no matter where they are in their journey and present the information, data, and content so that it doesn’t require a science degree or years of surf knowledge.
This initiative resulted in Surfline's massive leap in innovation for the product experience, doubling its audience and subscriptions and fostering a robust ecosystem with e-commerce, surf travel, and stories. Crucially, it elevated customer satisfaction, reshaping Surfline's image as an essential surf brand within the community.
Integrating ML & AI to help surfers perform better:
Sessions 2.0
Sessions is a centralized hub that seamlessly captures personalized clips and surf performance inside the Surfline App. Surfers can watch their rides, share, and improve their surfing. The initial experience was a five-year-old MVP that was ignored mainly so we could redesign and rebuild the core Surfline experience.
Sessions had high engagement numbers with a small but dedicated number of surfers using the feature, and there was ample opportunity to evolve it into a cutting-edge video capture service utilizing new AI and machine learning technology. This reimagining and redesign represents a real breakthrough in how surfers can track and watch their waves more accurately, creating an interactive loop of engagement and value.
A robust ecosystem to serve surfers:
Surfline Shop
Surfline Travel
Expanding the Surfline ecosystem:
Surfline x Kevin Butler Collab
Exclusive products to build the brand and revenue:
After launching the Surfline Gear Shop, we were looking for ways to grow awareness and drive revenue in the shop authentically. Tapping into surfing’s rich culture of artistry and imagination, we developed a program to create ongoing collaborations with artists and the Surfline brand.
Our first artist collaboration featured Kevin Butler—known for his playful and unique take on surf culture. After requisitioning specific art pieces for gear and soft goods, I designed the line with an eye for quality surf essentials and fun, bold aesthetics.
