My time at Club 21 as the sole designer spanned almost four years and included two of the most distinct website projects I have worked on — each demanding a fundamentally different design sensibility, and each offering its own kind of creative and organisational challenge.

Club 21 Global was the first project I took on after joining the company. A multi-brand luxury fashion retailer known for carrying labels such as Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake, and Paul Smith, Club 21 had a strong brick-and-mortar presence but limited digital footprint. The brief was to change that — to build an ecommerce platform worthy of the brand, in close collaboration with the Creative Director and a wide range of internal stakeholders.

The COMO Foundation project came later — an opportunity to rebuild the digital presence of the COMO Group's philanthropic arm from the ground up. Where Club 21 was complex and stakeholder-intensive, COMO Foundation was a quieter, more considered piece of work focused on storytelling, purpose, and identity.

For Club 21, the design process began with an immersion in the brand — its existing editorial language, the visual identities of the labels it carried, and the aesthetic standards of luxury retail more broadly. The goal was not to imitate what competitors were doing online, but to find a design language that was distinctly Club 21: restrained, editorial, and confident, while being navigable and conversion-friendly as a shopping experience.

Working closely with the Creative Director gave the project a strong creative foundation. The collaboration was genuinely generative — a shared process of testing ideas against the brand and against the practical requirements of ecommerce. My role was to hold both of those things in tension — to be an advocate for the user experience at the same time as honouring the creative vision.

Stakeholder management was its own discipline. With multiple brand partners, internal teams, and senior leadership involved, keeping the design process moving required clear communication, a structured approach to feedback, and the confidence to make decisions and defend them when the room had different views.

COMO Foundation was a different pace entirely. With more autonomy and a cleaner brief, the focus was on developing a visual language that communicated purpose and warmth — a site that felt like the organisation: thoughtful, global, and quietly confident in the importance of its work.

As the sole designer on both projects, my contribution spanned the full design process — from initial creative direction through to final delivery, working in close collaboration with the Creative Director and across multiple stakeholder groups.