Chika Obiora | Design

Background

In August 2023, I was chosen for Etsy’s newly formed Future Vision Lab, a small pilot team of Design, Research, and Analytics focused on high-velocity, innovative, and forward-thinking projects. The team was conceived at a pivotal moment when Etsy was shifting the balance of its product portfolio from a majority focus on smaller, incremental changes to more medium term, high-impact projects.

Our first major engagement led to the creation of Gift Mode. The goal was to create new value for both Etsy and its customers by fundamentally reimagining the gifting experience. This effort culminated in a launch that extended beyond product design—integrating with ML, marketing, and even the Super Bowl.

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Context & Opportunity

Gifting is a major part of Etsy’s business, accounting for ~25% of its Gross Merchandise Sales (GMS), yet there was untapped potential in the broader $200B US gifting market.
The challenge: Etsy’s existing experience wasn’t optimized for gifting. While users frequently bought gifts, the site primarily catered to personal shopping.
The vision: Make Etsy an indispensable partner for gifting. This meant improving discoverability, making gifting easier, and positioning Etsy as the go-to marketplace for thoughtful, unique presents.

Approach

User pain points

Customers often struggled with finding the right gift, even when they wanted to buy from Etsy.
Traditional search wasn’t ideal for “I don’t know what they want” scenarios.
Buyers may not even know where to ship purchases to let alone what the recipients tastes are.
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Enter Gift Mode

A tool that reimagines gift discovery by focusing on personas rather than products.

Instead of a search bar, users could browse by recipient type, interests, and curated themes. While this in and of itself may not seem novel, our concepts imagined a larger, more limitless scale. By using a mix of AI, human curation, and the millions of unique products on Etsy, we could create an interactive experience to help buyers find and give gifts that they can't anywhere else.

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Process

6-Week Sprint: With limited time, we conducted an extensive review of past research, a competitive audit, and internal data analysis.
Cross-Functional Execution: While the team's 2 dedicated researchers and analyst consolidated insights, we explored design solutions in parallel.
Executive Engagement: Since this project was presented at the highest levels, we leaned into visual storytelling and high-impact design to spark engagement and discussion.
Long(er) Term Thinking: We approached our concepts as if it would be built over 18 months, which gave us room for creative exploration.

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Finding Our Footing

Early feedback suggested we were being too safe—so we pushed further, prioritizing interactions that were novel to Etsy at the time.
For example, we explored a side-swipe gesture as an alternative to the endless scroll format of traditional Search, moving away from endless browsing and towards a new structure for digestible content blocks and a more curated, guided discovery process, an approach that resonated with leadership, including the CEO.
‍In fact, it resonated so well with the CEO that the discussion very quickly shifted from what if we built something like this in a couple years to how do we build this in a couple months and the idea for a product team was spun up before we left the room.
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Internal Growing Pains

Product teams at Etsy weren't used to working at this ambitious scale and speed. Once the project was greenlit, our focus on the Future Vision Lab was to quickly create a transition plan and deep dive on our thinking so that the newly formed product team could start off on the right foot while we could move onto our next project topic from the CPO.
We had to balance creative freedom with strategic focus, ensuring that Gift Mode served a larger company-wide vision.

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Outcomes

1M+

Visits

$9M

GMS from visits that included Gift Mode

Articles driven by Travis Kelce's mentioning Gift Mode on a podcast

Beyond the product itself, Gift Mode became a catalyst for change within Etsy.

Cultural Shift: Gift Mode helped Etsy move from incremental iteration towards bolder, more confident product development. After this project, we saw a lot more product teams creating their own end state visions to think about stronger customer experiences over longer time horizons.
SEO Fixes with Immediate ROI: One key discovery was that Etsy wasn’t ranking for “gift guides” on Google. Before tackling any major product development, addressing this with optimized landing pages led to real revenue impact.
Marketing & Visibility:
- Featured in Super Bowl and Nasdaq campaigns
- Prominent placement in Etsy’s app navigation
- Enhanced PR and brand storytelling opportunities
Strong Market Performance:
- Etsy’s unprompted association with gifting hit a record high in Q3 (+4 points YoY)
- Etsy reported significant growth in gifting visit intent since tracking began in Q4'23.

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Buying someone a gift is different from buying something for yourself.