Apollo Merchandising System
Apollo began as an effort to create clarity where there wasn’t any. Merchandising teams across Nike were planning high-stakes seasonal assortments using disconnected spreadsheets, siloed workflows, and tools that didn’t reflect how their work actually happened. The result was friction, misalignment, and lost time.
As the Lead UX Designer, I reshaped the system from the inside out—defining workflows, structure, and interaction models that supported global teams with a unified, intuitive platform. This work brought coherence, trust, and efficiency to one of Nike’s most foundational merchandising processes.
Role & Scope
- Role: Lead UX Designer
- Scope: End-to-end experience design for a global merchandising platform
- Responsibilities: IA, workflow design, interaction models, prototyping, research synthesis
- Partners: Merchandising, Product Management, Engineering, Operations
- Outcomes: Unified planning workflows, improved visibility, reduced operational friction
Objectives
The goal of Apollo was not simply to replace spreadsheets, but to create a shared system teams could trust. Success meant improving visibility across regions, aligning merchandising intent with execution, and enabling faster, more confident seasonal planning decisions.
- Create a single, coherent planning workflow across categories and regions
- Reduce reliance on manual spreadsheets and offline workarounds
- Make assortment structure and status visible at a glance
- Support collaboration between merchandising, planning, and operations
Constraints & Challenges
Apollo operated within a complex enterprise environment where process, tooling, and organizational change were tightly coupled.
- Highly customized regional workflows with strong legacy behaviors
- Data dependencies across multiple upstream and downstream systems
- Varying levels of digital maturity across global teams
- High business risk during seasonal transitions
Approach & Key Decisions
I focused on making complexity legible—grounding the design in real decision points and real workflows, not abstract system diagrams. The strongest signals came from how merchandisers coordinated work across teams and how often “planning” really meant reconciliation.
- Mapped end-to-end merchandising journeys across regions and roles
- Defined a clear information hierarchy for assortments and seasonal planning
- Created modular interaction patterns that scaled across categories
- Used prototypes to align stakeholders early and reduce downstream rework
Selected Screens & Flows
Outcomes & Impact
Apollo established a shared foundation for digital merchandising. Teams gained clearer visibility into seasonal plans, reduced manual coordination, and increased confidence in the data driving decisions.
- Improved alignment across global merchandising teams
- Reduced spreadsheet dependency and manual reconciliation
- Created reusable patterns that informed future merchandising tools
- Enabled faster, more consistent seasonal planning cycles
Key Learnings
Large-scale systems succeed when they respect real workflows and decision moments. The most valuable design work often comes from simplifying complexity without erasing nuance—making the system feel predictable, not “dumbed down.”