Amazon Kitchen
Retail Category Redesign
During my tenure at Amazon Creative Services, I lead the retail design content team, supporting all the categories for North America. One of the key initiatives we took on was helping the Amazon Kitchen category rebrand. The browse experience when we started leveraged third-party photography and imagery and didn’t have an aspirational approach for customers that wanted to discover and unlock their potential in the kitchen.
Our focus was to elevate the Amazon Kitchen store to that of a premium, specialty retailer, allowing brands to feel confident launching their most innovative and premium products with Amazon Kitchen. This overhaul shifted our visual aesthetic from photo art direction to the shopping UX for our top tier browse pages. The new “brand” was really a subset of the global Amazon brand, but leveraged hand-written fonts, hands in shots, purposeful messiness in styling, natural camera movement, and realistic daylighting to create an appealing and aspirational approach for our content to connect with customers. Amazon Kitchen’s premium selection would be featured to appeal across a spectrum of customers casual cooks to seasoned chefs, simultaneously elevating the entire category offering.
“They say home is where the heart is, and the Kitchen is the heart of every home. It’s where families gather to make holiday memories. It’s where the smell of chocolate chip cookies welcomes neighbors through the door. It’s where old friends reconnect over favorite Dishes. It’s where children learn the magic of baking, from measuring ingredients to enjoying The mouth-watering results. It’s where aspiring chefs strive for delicious creativity.
At Amazon Kitchen, we aim to celebrate what is much more than just a room in each of our homes—it’s where science, art, and love all intersect.”
We partnered with top brands and influencers to spark our customers’ imagination and enthusiasm on the many joys of culinary life—through delectable photography, immersive video, and modern design. This category transformation couldn’t have been done without our strong business and content partners.
Creative Director - Hafiz Huda
Associate Creative Director - Marcellus Neel
Senior Art Director - Sarah Jensen
Photographers - Greg Montijo, Mike Nelson
Amazon Kitchen Shorts
On top of the new photo art direction, a video series called Amazon Kitchen Shorts highlighted key products and recipes, sparking new reasons for customers to try new items. My team oversaw the design, execution, and content for the video series as well as expanding the program to partner with key influencers to create seasonal content for featured retail events. Average view duration onsite is consistent with the offsite (YouTube) metrics at 80%. Typically, when watching a Video short, customers are able to see the items featured in the video. The average click-through rate to related items of a customer watching a Kitchen Short editorial video is 9.4%.
Our team partnered with the corporate Social Media team to advocate for the placement of the Kitchen shorts videos on Facebook. In 2015, they posted 80 videos for a total of 5.3MM plays, contributing to a reach of over 22M users. This is the highest single source of engagement metrics for the social media team.
