We built Deals & Drops, a key feature of Etsy’s new loyalty program, to boost engagement by giving buyers access to exclusive sales and items.
The idea to create a subscription based loyalty program for Etsy started as a strategic initiative in 2023.
Initially, my involvement was minimal—I was pulled in to create visual assets for the pitch deck. The executive team approved the initiative, but as priorities shifted, the project was put on hold and resurfaced in mid-2024.
In the interim, I had been embedded in the Future Vision Lab, a pilot team exploring off-roadmap, innovation work. Becuaes of this, I wasn't part of the dedicated product team that was created to launch a beta Loyalty experience.
Due to resourcing constraints and fast-moving development cycles, the web and app teams within the Loyalty squad struggled to maintain a cohesive cross-platform experience. Additionally, some of the more engaging and “fun” features of the program were started to feel underwhelming.
As my tenure with Future Vision Lab ended, I rotated to the Loyalty team to lead the design of Deals & Drops, a key feature aimed at providing exclusive access to curated seller listings and sales. My role was to refine the experience for both buyers and sellers while ensuring the feature aligned with the broader Loyalty program strategy.
As the primary designer on Deals & Drops, I had about two months to take the feature from concept to implementation. My focus areas included:
Marketing teams were working directly with sellers to curate listings for the program, and they wanted flexibility in adding and removing items ad-hoc. While it made sense operationally, this led to confusion about when items would be available and made it difficult to express to buyers how they would discover new listings.
I facilitated discussions between product, design and marketing and created a range of concepts illustrating how we could support the current program requirements as well as concepts that showed how a more structured drop schedule could create more excitement and urgency. A pivotal moment was surfacing all these options (and the issue of misalignment) in a VP Design Review, where open discussions led to the decision to simplify the release structure for the beta launch.
With separate teams working on the web and app implementations, the design direction, usability, and brand cohesion were diverging.
I worked closely with both teams to establish shared design principles and UI patterns. Although the app version of Deals & Drops wasn't immediately launched, I designed it simultaneuously with the web version, ensuring that everything aligned.
Deals & Drops successfully launched on Etsy Insider Web in October 2024, providing a dedicated space for exclusive, time-limited listings. Subscribers who do engage with Deals and Drops, and especially who purchased one of the items tended to be highly engaged in general and spent more after joining Etsy Insider vs. subscribers who do not. For the beta, traffic to that area of the site is primarily driven by email and CRM, which is naturally lower. Early analytics as of Feb 2025 highlighted a definite opportunity to further drive visibility to this area within the site, and to refine the attractiveness of the offerings to high value customers. As of writing, Deals & Drops has launched on web and the next phase would involve rolling out the app version, refining based on user feedback and analytics, and integrate more interactive elements like real-time notifications and personalized recommendations.
