Anniversary Sale
The Anniversary Sale, Nordstrom’s biggest sale of the year, offers brand-new fashion and products at sale prices. Or in Nordstrom’s words, “Everything you need to feel brand-new.” The art direction celebrates joyful moments of people coming together inside our stores. Yellow is the connecting thread, serving as a shining beacon of happiness throughout the store.
I was the lead designer for in-store visual execution. This was a roll out to our entire fleet–95 stores–that contributed to our biggest revenue period of the year. Every year Anniversary Sale is a full takeover of every store to create a wholly new experience for both established and new customers. I accentuated the sunshine and happiness inherent to yellow, taking the simple shapes, bold type, and brightness of the art direction and brought them to life with blocks, inflatables large and small, dimensional type, and lighting. The end result was playful and effervescent.
Moodboard
Playful, but not childish. A soft sunshine glow throughout the store. Light-filled, uplifting, and warm. Airy inflatables—easy, flexible, and full of movement. Designed for interaction and discovery. Joyful and approachable.
Mockups
Ideation and testing are essential parts of the process—whether for large seasonal rollouts or smaller in-store moments. This typically includes virtual mockups in SketchUp, scaled drawings in Illustrator, and Photoshop composites placing designs directly into images of the actual store environment. We also review physical samples from vendors to evaluate materials, finishes, and scale in real life before anything goes into production.
Common Area
Escalator
Windows
Interactive Spinner
Execution
Nordstrom isn’t one client—it’s 95. Each store team brings its own interpretation, which means how a design shows up can vary widely. Our job is to anticipate those variations—designing flexible solutions that maintain brand consistency while being straightforward to execute. We aim to solve for a range of scenarios, but more often than not, the store teams surprise us with creative, thoughtful execution that elevates the original concept.
Augmented Reality
I wanted to add an extra layer specifically to the in-store experience, something that only customers who came to our stores could enjoy. I lead a team of designers to integrate Augmented Reality Instagram Filters into our Anniversary Sale trim, something Nordstrom has never done before. Partnering with outside agency Graphiti Associates, we created a fun package of filters accessed through QR codes linking to Instagram. The result was 2.5 million total impressions.
Big shout out to Tiff, Josh, Kelsey and Kevin from Graphiti. It was so fun to partner with other creative thinkers to make these ideas come to life.