Creators today hold undeniable influence on consumer spending across industries, especially travel. However they don’t have access to the tools needed to build a sustainable income, relying heavily on one-off, transactional brand deals.

Additionally, creator-led shopping has boomed in the last 2 years, with the introduction and growth of platforms like LTK, Instagram Shops and Amazon Inspire.

Travis wanted to design a platform empowering travel creators to earn from their content and expertise. As Head of Product, I led a team of 8 and worked closely with Design and Engineering from concept to launch within 6 months.

[1] User Research

I designed and conducted user research - through 1-1 virtual sessions with 25 creators, and an online survey completed by 512 creators.

The objective was to identify their most pressing unmet needs and challenges in being financially sustainable as a creator, to inform the design of the Shopfronts.

A few insights emerged:

• 1 in 2 creators wanted to become full-time in 12 months, yet just 15% were monetizing regularly.

• Creators are actively looking for new ways to monetize their content - not create more content.

• Creators who have tried affiliate marketing platforms find them clunky and hard to use

There was a need for a simple way for creators to earn through travel content and expertise they already had.

[2] Design, Prototype & Build

I ran day-to-day roadmap prioritisation and in close alignment with Design, Engineering and Marketing.

Working with Design, we landed on 3 different design options for the Shopfront:

1. Shopping-led

2. Conversation-led

3. Personalization-led

Ultimately, the product was designed to empower creators to establish a new recurring, passive income stream, from existing content and reach. So we’ve decided on option 1 - Shopping-led. This includes enabling creators to:

⚡️ Search for brands to earn from

⚡️ Add hotels to Shopfront

⚡️ Share Shopfront via a single link

⚡️ Earn a commission when followers book

⚡️ Access Shopfront analytics

I worked hand-in-hand with designers and engineers to assess technical feasibility and constraints requiring design refinements.

[3] GTM & Optimisation Experiments

• Worked with Marketing on product positioning, email sequences to drive adoption and re-engagment

• Defined key metrics, implemented tracking and set up analytics dashboards to support weekly reporting

• Ran optimisation experiments both via emails and in-product, to reduce drop-offs, increase number of hotels added per creator, creator sharing, consumer traffic and conversions

• Scaled Shopfronts from 0-4000 creators (10k-1M following) in US and UK

• Power users by Creators who added 50-90 hotels within first week of use

• Increased Creator Shopfront adoption by 360% and GMV by 549% in 6 months

• Secured major partnership with Expedia Partner Solutions with top-tier commission rates across 1M properties globally