INDUSTRY:
E-COMMERCE
CLIENT:
MICHAEL HILL
YEAR:
2021/22
EXPERIENCE:
E-COMMERCE / PLATFORMS
Michael Hill
about.
Michael Hill is a heritage jewelry brand with over 300 stores across Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. While their legacy is rooted in craftsmanship and storytelling, their digital systems were limiting growth.
The existing content platform was rigid and developer-dependent, making it difficult for internal teams to scale content, adapt to regional needs, or deliver campaigns quickly. As a product designer, I was brought in to help reimagine their digital architecture—focusing on flexibility, scalability, and internal autonomy.
challenge.
Michael Hill’s content infrastructure was built on a tightly coupled Salesforce monolith, managing over 1,500 pages across three markets. The system presented significant challenges:
Content updates required developer intervention.
Campaigns could take up to a month to launch.
No support for localization or modular content structures.
Marketing teams had no direct publishing control.
High ongoing costs due to licensing and dev support.
As a product designer on the transformation team, I focused on designing a system that would enable faster delivery, content autonomy, and cross-regional scalability.
my approach
Created a reusable, component-driven content model for a headless CMS.
Mapped regional content needs into scalable localization patterns.
Worked closely with engineers to ensure tight integration with the design system.
Developed modular UI patterns in Figma that mirrored the CMS structure.
Prototyped and validated new workflows with internal marketing teams.
This ensured that the solution was not only technically scalable, but also intuitive and usable by non-technical stakeholders.
results.
We transitioned Michael Hill to a headless architecture using Contentful for content and Vue Storefront for delivery. The outcomes were significant:
80% reduction in new application development costs.
75% savings in platform licensing fees.
90% faster content update cycle.
70% of the roadmap delivered in the first release.
The shift empowered internal teams to manage content independently, reduced delivery times from weeks to hours, and laid the foundation for scalable, regional growth.
