Figma-based design system
Rakuten Rewards is America’s largest Cash Back and affiliate marketing program, but its creative output had become inconsistent. More than 50 designs looked like they had been designed by 50 different designers.
Upon joining Rakuten Rewards, I taught myself Figma to develop a modern design system and help move the creative team away from saving work on local drives. I helped shift collaboration to Box Drive and Bynder, creating a centralized workflow for shared files, reusable assets and brand-approved components.
I led group trainings and one-on-ones to transition the Creative team from Photoshop and Sketch to component-based workflows in Figma, making it easier for designers to build creative from a shared system instead of starting from scratch.
One example was the email library, which included everything needed to build on-brand emails faster: typography, colors, buttons, patterns, standard modules, components, lockups, grids and templates.
This Figma-based system brought consistency across Rakuten Rewards programs including gift cards, referrals, promotions, credit cards, travel, dining, in-store offers and transactional emails.
Email program reaching 17M members and driving 10% of revenue
The design system enabled me to develop Rakuten Rewards’ email program in Figma, supporting lifecycle, transactional, account, referral and promotional emails across the business.
As a cornerstone marketing channel, email reached Rakuten Rewards’ 17 million members daily and powered approximately 10% of total revenue.
I also collaborated with Movable Ink to automate the Email Solo program using personalization, data and brand fonts. The automated setup accounted for 30% of merchant buy-ins and eliminated two hours of daily production time.
Doubled creative team output with Figma-based templates and workflows
I served as creative lead for a five-designer production team supporting 3,500+ brand partners including Sephora, Walmart and Nike.
To scale production, I coached junior designers and built modular Figma workflows with reusable templates that doubled creative team output. These templates helped designers move faster while keeping work consistent across brands, campaigns and breakpoints.
One example was this carousel template with step-by-step controls for swapping imagery, adjusting brand colors and updating patterns. I also built in-context review frames across desktop, mobile and responsive breakpoints, making it easier to review, QA and hand off production-ready creative.
AI-powered holiday referral campaign driving +12.6% uptick in YOY engagement
As Senior Marketing Designer, I shaped how millions of members experienced the brand across major campaign moments, including the 2025 holiday season.
After training with Superside, an AI creative agency, on AI-assisted campaign design, I led Rakuten Rewards’ 2025 Q4 holiday referral campaign across site, paid social and email.
The campaign visuals featured a “friends” theme, with the referral offer sewn directly into holiday sweaters. I used an “AI to make AI” strategy: ChatGPT helped translate mood board references into precise visual prompts, which I used to art-direct photoshoot-style imagery in Krea AI.
This workflow made iteration much faster. When the campaign needed variations (such as different model poses or updated referral offers on the sweaters), I could generate new outputs through prompt direction instead of scheduling another expensive reshoot or spending hours compositing new images.
Experiment: tested whether showing two friends instead of the historical single-person creative would better communicate the referral concept. Because referrals inherently involve inviting another person, we hypothesized that imagery showing two people would strengthen the message and improve engagement.
Results and learnings: the campaign increased engagement +12.6% YOY. The two-person creative became the preferred approach for referral campaigns, reinforcing the value of matching visual storytelling to the underlying customer behavior. Combined with AI-assisted production, the workflow also enabled rapid iteration without the cost and turnaround time of traditional photoshoots.
Holiday growth campaign with creative testing
Goal: to increase customer acquisition versus the 2024 holiday season during Rakuten Rewards’ highest-volume shopping period.
Audience hypothesis: expanding beyond traditional holiday brand imagery to also include text-only, product-focused and app-focused creative would improve customer response.
Creative variations: I developed and tested multiple concepts across Holiday and Cyber Five campaigns, including:
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App
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App + product
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Product only
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Product + merchant logos
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Merchant logos
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Merchant names (text)
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Text only
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Holiday imagery (adults)
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Holiday imagery (children)
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Welcome bonus
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App promotion
I created the assets in Figma and Krea AI for paid growth channels (Performance Max and UAC shown here).
Experiment: A/B tested text-only versus holiday imagery, and merchant logos versus merchant names, to determine which creative elements actually influenced acquisition.
Results: increased holiday customer acquisition +5% YOY while validating multiple new creative approaches for future campaigns.
Learnings: text-only creative performed as well as image-led executions, adding a new low-effort format to our standard asset library. Merchant names also performed effectively without requiring logos, providing greater flexibility when retailer branding was secondary to the primary message.
Based on those findings, I introduced the new reusable merchant-name ribbon component to our design templates for future growth campaigns.
Drove 60% lift in AOV with Big Deal Reveal campaign
Big Deal Reveal promoted elevated Cash Back offers for popular retailers including Nike, Viator and Columbia.
I supported template development that helped the team scale the campaign efficiently across weekly site, email and paid ad placements. In Adobe After Effects, I used Essential Graphics to create motion-ready templates with editable fields allowing updates to ripple across assets instead of rebuilding each variation manually for offers, retailer names and campaign messaging. The examples shown here include email, site banner and growth ad creative.
What began as a proof of concept became a key revenue and merchant participation tool within six months, driving a 60% lift in average order value.
B2B sales enablement for fintech platform reaching 200M cardholders
I designed illustrated B2B sales enablement materials for Rakuten Card Linked Network, a fintech platform connecting businesses and publishers to a payments and rewards ecosystem reaching 200M+ cardholders.
The materials helped explain how merchants, publishers and financial partners could participate in card-linked offers, turning a complex product story into clear, polished visuals for sales conversations.