Smash Sports

Smash Sports is a sportswear and racquet sport retailer selling equipment, apparel and footwear from brands including Tecnifibre and Salming. My title was Digital Marketing & E-Commerce Executive and the design side of the role was mine: campaign creative and the visual presentation of the catalogue across Shopify, BigCommerce, Amazon and wholesale partners.

Sportswear customers arrive from a paid ad, a marketplace listing or an email, and rarely from the home page. The brand had to look the same and say the same thing wherever that first contact happened.

Each campaign also had a commercial job to do, whether that was launching a new racquet at full price or clearing end of season footwear, and the creative needed to make that difference obvious.

A launch and a clearance sale are not the same design problem. Launch creative leads with the athlete and the product, holds back the price and gives the brand room. Sale creative leads with the offer, because the customer is scanning for a number and anything competing with it slows the decision down.

Each campaign was designed as a set rather than as single assets. A square social tile, a wide desktop banner, a portrait mobile banner and an email header all carry the same idea, but the crop, the type scale and the amount of copy change for each placement. A desktop banner can hold a headline, a strapline and a product shot. A mobile banner cannot, so it holds one message and one image.

Athlete imagery was used deliberately. Professional players give a product credibility in this category, so the pro sits alongside the product rather than replacing it, with the product kept large enough to be recognised on a phone screen at thumbnail size.

Marketplace templates were the constraint that shaped a lot of the work. On Amazon and partner sites the layout belongs to someone else, so brand recognition has to come from colour, type and image treatment rather than from structure. That meant building a consistent visual approach that survived being dropped into a stranger's grid.

Email performance fed back into the design. Previous send data informed how high the offer sat, how much copy ran before the first call to action and which imagery led, so each campaign was set up from what the last one showed rather than from preference.