Retail's most advanced in-store marketing platform

Lead Product Designer • Swirl Networks • 2018

The outcome: Hired into marketing. Ended up leading product design. Shipped the platform that turned Swirl from a beacons company into an in-store media network — and that the company was eventually acquired for.

The Challenge

Swirl Networks was an in-store mobile marketing platform for large retailers. Bluetooth beacons and Wi-Fi sensors detected nearby phones; the platform fired personalized offers and product information to shoppers based on where they were standing in the store. Geofences picked them up before they walked in and after they left.

How Swirl worked: Bluetooth beacons and Wi-Fi sensors inside the store detect nearby smartphones, while geofences capture shoppers before they enter and after they leave — **The signal layer.** Beacons, Wi-Fi sensors, and geofences — Swirl’s job was to turn that mess of radio signals into something a marketer could actually run a campaign on.

The Swirl Platform itself was the workspace — used by both agencies running national campaigns and in-store managers running ads for their own locations. Two very different audiences, one tool. Campaign builder, audience targeting, geofence editor, analytics, content management. A lot of surface area for a small team.

When the lead UX designer left, the entire design system left with him — locked inside a single Photoshop file. New projects piled up: an API connector tool, dynamic email reports with embedded charts, weather-triggered geotargeting, the Best Buy digital signage program. None of them could move, because nobody could build on top of a PSD without breaking it.

I was on the marketing side. The CPO asked me to take it on.

The Process

Foundation first. I didn’t crack open the PSD. I rebuilt the design system in Sketch, with proper symbols, shared text styles, and a hand-off pipeline through Abstract — and let the system grow alongside the work instead of stopping the world for a rewrite. The longer version of that decision is its own piece: Killing the master PSD.

A connected workspace for marketers. Once the system was real, the four stalled projects started shipping. The spine was the campaign builder: pick an audience, draw a geofence, attach a creative, set a trigger. Things that had previously taken three different tools and a CSV export now lived in one flow. Weather targeting became a condition builder marketers could compose themselves. The API connector tool gave them a way to spot broken integrations without filing a ticket. And notification emails got treated as a product surface, not a chore.

Swirl platform creatives library showing a grid of campaign asset thumbnails — **Content Builder.** Designing the phone and the in-store screen in the same view — synchronized campaigns became a first-class concern, not a hand-off.

New campaign modal with four campaign type options: Proximity, Scheduled Push, Responsys, and Digital Signage — **Campaign Creation.** Raw CRM fields became point-and-click audience filters — anonymous and aggregate by design.

Locations tab showing Boston store map with floor plan overlay, beacon placement pins, and coverage radius indicators — **Fleet Management.** BLE, Wi-Fi, GPS, and signage pinned to one floorplan, each tagged with the marketing label a campaign would target against.

The Best Buy launch. The in-store digital signage program shipped with Best Buy as launch partner — a multi-tenant signage platform that paired phone notifications with the screens shoppers walked past. The design story behind that — and the line we deliberately wouldn’t cross on hyper-targeting — is here: Making every in-store screen presence-aware.

Swirl main analytics dashboard showing indoor visitor traffic graph, store traffic metrics, and provider integration status panel — **The measurement view.** Test vs control, dwell time, and drive-to-store uplift — the proof brand partners had been buying without.

Beacon health dashboard with pie chart showing beacon status breakdown, coverage map, and historical performance graph — **Beacon Health.** Live status across BLE and Wi-Fi coverage — the operational layer that kept campaigns running reliably.

The Impact

Four major features shipped in two quarters that had been stalled for months. Marketers — agency planners and in-store managers — ran synchronized mobile and signage campaigns from one console. Brand partners got real measurement on in-store media for the first time.

Swirl Networks was eventually acquired by Best Buy. The platform we built during that stretch is what the acquisition was for.

Reflection

Two things I took with me. Stepping up rarely happens with a title — I was hired to make marketing assets; the lead role was never offered. Doing the work was the title. And the foundation decides what’s possible later — every shippable project that year was downstream of the call to throw out the PSD and build a real system instead.

The kicker: the CPO who hired me at Swirl brought me on again as a contractor at Genscape, and then again at Thought Industries. The strongest signal that the work landed was getting the second and third invitations.

Lead Product Designer • Swirl Networks • 2018