ABOUT THE PROJECT:
This case study dives into a framework of processes that showcase the understanding of what it takes to build an in-store customer experience. The Old Navy Style Guides were developed in response to the need for consistency, clarity, and alignment across all field store locations. They are comprehensive, multi-functional toolkits that integrate brand guidelines, design systems, strategic frameworks, product data, end-to-end processes and service blueprint workflows.
The Style Guides serve as a communication vehicle, translating business goals and visual strategies into easy to follow guidelines. This ensures seamless collaboration between corporate and field teams as they work together toward shared goals. Alongside the field Visual Merchandising teams, Old Navy depends on cross-functional partners such as Store Operations, Logistics, Design and Marketing to execute strategies, generate profits and stay current with seasonal brand guidelines.
The Style Guide serves as the anchor for seasonal visual merchandising, best practices and brand alignment, ensuring a cohesive and consistent in store experience. In addition, every detail and product placement is guided by customer research reinforcing both brand and customer expectations.
What the Style Guides include:
Store Layouts and Visual Mapping
Marketing Integration and Seasonal Strategy
Visual Merchandising Guidelines and How-Tos
Product Images/Croquis and Product Information
Key Merchandising Elements and Product Presentation Standards
Beyond making sure in-store rollouts stay consistent, the Style Guides also support operational performance and help drive sales by aligning the in-store experience with Old Navy’s broader business goals across the organization worldwide.
PURPOSE and CONTEXT:
(the problem)
The field Visual Merchandising teams often struggle with a lack of aligned and clear direction from the corporate Visual Merchandising team, particularly when large amounts of new product units arrive in stores. Without guidance, full price products end up sitting in stockrooms instead of being placed on the sales floor, where it could be driving sales and contributing to daily goals.
This represents a significant missed opportunity. Field teams are prepared to execute the visual strategy the moment product arrives, yet they frequently lack the direction needed to take effective action.
(solution)
To address this challenge, the Style Guides were created, with the intent to support in-store teams by providing direction for new products. These instructions communicate how, what, why, when and where ensuring consistency and alignment with the overall brand vision, strategy and business goals. Beyond driving profit and selling full price products, the ultimate goal is to create an exceptional customer experience. We want Jenny, our single mom persona customer, to walk into the store and immerse her family in our assortment discovering what she needs in a space where product feels affordable and easy to shop in.
(how) (the big picture)
Visual Merchandising doesn’t stand alone, it’s part of a larger, cross functional process that begins long before product arrives in stores. Countless teams and decisions shape the outcome, and without a tool to communicate and align everyone, the intent can easily get lost by the time it reaches stores.
The Style Guide bridges strategy and execution, translating corporate intent into actionable direction. It aligns teams on product priorities, placement and storytelling to deliver a cohesive customer experience.
The end-to-end process of the Style Guide’s Journey
Before diving into the Style Guide framework, it’s important to look at the big picture. Understanding the product journey from initial concept to store shelves provides context for where the Style Guide fits and how it supports each stage of creating a cohesive customer experience.
The Style Guides operate within a larger ecosystem that includes merchants, planners, allocators, marketers, and both headquarters and field leaders. Each team plays a distinct role, but alignment across all of them depends on one key factor: communication.
Two major workflows shape how business goals and visual merchandising come to life. The first starts with the Visual Merchandising and Design teams at headquarters, where strategy and direction are defined. The second involves the field Visual Merchandising and Logistics teams, who bring that vision to life in stores. Together, they work toward a shared goal: delivering an accessible, affordable experience for our target customer, Jenny.
(the workflow framework)
The first workflow takes place at Old Navy’s corporate headquarters, where the Visual Merchandising and Design teams collaborate to define brand guidelines and content direction for the Style Guides. This process ensures alignment on product information, visual elements, marketing, product placement, priorities, business goals, and the desired customer experience.
The second workflow happens in the field and focuses on bringing the product to life. Field Visual Merchandising and Logistics Managers partner in stores to execute the visual direction set by the corporate team, ensuring consistent implementation across all locations worldwide.
While corporate teams drive strategic development, field teams manage hands-on execution. Working in parallel, both ensure a seamless, customer-focused experience.
This is why the Style Guides are essential, they serve as a single source of truth for cross-functional teams. By bridging siloed functions, resolving inconsistencies, and connecting strategy to execution, Style Guides create alignment across every stage of the process. The result is a cohesive on-brand experience for Jenny: a busy mom who values ease and style, and affordability for her family.
UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM:
Imagine you get a big box of new toys, but you don’t know where to put them in your room. You want to showcase them to your friends in a way that looks nice, but there’s no one telling you how or where to place them. So, the toys just stay in their box. That’s kind of what’s happening with the stores.
Across the full product journey, from concept to store, two key teams work together to deliver new items to consumers.
The headquarters team decides what products to sell and how they should be presented, while the field store teams turn these plans into reality, arranging the merchandise so customers can see and buy it. Without clear direction, even the best products can sit inside the box, and opportunities to engage customers and drive sales are missed.
But here’s the problem: when the new clothes arrive at the stores, the teams there don’t always know where to put them or how to present them in a way that fits with what headquarters' vision. Without clear instructions, the clothes just sit in boxes instead of being shown on the floors where customers like Jenny can find them easily.
The Style Guide is like a special map or set of instructions that helps the store teams know exactly how to arrange the new clothes. It shows them how to make the store look nice, tell the brand’s story, and help Jenny find what she needs quickly.
Here’s the problem in simple steps:
New products arrive at the stores in big boxes.
Store managers don’t know where or how to put the clothes on the floor.
Without instructions lost and confused, the clothes stay hidden in the back.
This means customers don’t see the new clothes, and the store loses money.
Store teams want to help, but they need clear directions to do it right.
Style Guides to the rescue! This is where the style guides come in with direction to implement and showcase the business visual merchandising strategy. This strategy is designed to target our customer Jenny where it makes merchandising decisions based on researched feedback from our customer. All of this to serve an excellent customer experience.
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In order to understand the problem we are aiming to solve, you need to understand that there is a massive big picture workflow process that takes place behind the scenes.
In the container of the big picture, the two main players making things happen are first headquarters and second the stores, here we have teams working together on two major separate moving parts.
On one side, you have corporate teams partnering up with design to synthesize new product information based on research and business goals. On the other, you have the field teams working together to execute this vision, but most importantly to place the massive amount of units that arrived in stores, the new product that desperately needs to be placed on the floor.
This is when the purpose of the style guide here becomes the vehicle for communication corporate uses to support and solve the problem the stores on the field are facing.
Key Players for every Workflow:
Corporate’s Visual Merchandising Team
Corporate’s Creative Design Team
Field’s Visual Merchandising Team
Field’s Logistics Team
Workflows consist of HQ + Field = context
The Problem Formula:
New Merch get delivered to Stores > Stores sit on new Merchandise > Stores = lost and confused about placement and direction + Stores need updated Brand Guidelines for the new merch + Stores need Direction = STYLE GUIDE TO THE RESCUE > Style Guide packed with Visual Strategy for Jenny > Excellent customer experience
Every New Season Process:
HQ Visual Merch Team Partners up with > Visual Comms Design Team > Design Creates Style Guide > Style Guides > go to > Stores > Store Logistics Manager a + Visual Merchandising Managers receive Style Guides > Merch teams executes visual strategy on a field store level
V comms Designers + Merch HQ Team = style guide
Style guides + Visual strategy =Stores
Stores = Visual merchandising Managers and their teams + Logistics Manager
Hence, the problem we are trying to solve with the style guide is…
The Logistics and Visual Merchandising Managers are sitting on new merchandise that arrived in the amount of many units that needs to be placed on the sales floor. But, Visual Merchandising teams are left scrambling not knowing where to place the new product, or how to display it in a way that represents Old Navy’s brand guidelines, so that Jenny can immerse herself in the store customer experience.
The lack of clear guidance leads to inconsistent product placement, disorganized floor sets, delayed execution, misuse of payroll, and a confusing in-store layouts. Without a cohesive visual merchandising strategy, teams struggle to present merchandise in a way that captivates customers and drives sales.
My Role:
UX Designer / UI Designer / Visual designer
My unique background played a role in joining the design team because it was such a unique environment where this deisnger role required the designer to understand visual merchandising and the process that takes place on the field. I had to understand not only design principles but the backend visual merchandising process. Before I received my degree in design, I used to work for Gap Inc corporate as a visual merchandising manager
I joined the design team just as the COVID-19 pandemic began, and my role quickly evolved to support the Director of Visual Communication in adapting and refreshing the company’s style guide for a fully remote workflow.
The style guide, a key tool used by the visual merchandising and creative team, had previously existed as a physical resource that was updated each season. My first major task was to help migrate this content into digital platforms, ensuring it remained accessible, collaborative, and easy to update.
Using tools like Miro for collaborative brainstorming and Airtable for organizing and managing visual and product data, we restructured the style guide into a digital-first format that could scale across teams. This not only streamlined the update process each season but also introduced a new layer of UX thinking that made the style guide more intuitive and interactive for users navigating remotely.
I also worked on exploring new ways to visually communicate design principles. We used illustrations, mockups, and digital environments to keep our workflows fluid and engaging. These enhancements helped improve cross-functional alignment and ensured that even from home, our visual language remained strong, consistent, and easy to interpret.
CREDITS:
TOOLS USED:
Figma, Adobe XD, Miro, Adobe Illustrator
The Visual Design - Process - Style Guide
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the UX Design process
APPROACH
Design Thinking Process
Discover
User research
Ideate
Usability testing
Visual Design
DISCOVER
UX Competitive Analysis
USER STORIES
USER RESEARCH
surveys & user interviews
Affinity Map
User Personas
Mental Models and User Journey Map
Task Analysis & User Flows
USER RESEARCH
IDEATION
Sitemap
Wireframing
Prototyping
USABILITY TESTING
Goal
Test Objective
Methodology
Usability test results: Findings & Insights
Conclusion
Preference Test
Problem Statement:
In-store visual managers received boxes of shipment with large amounts of units, and now they are sitting on new product that needs to be placed on to the sales floor, but the visual teams are left scrambling, not knowing where to place or how to display the product without a visual strategy to direct them, so that Jenny (persona) can have an exceptional customer experience.
Purpose and Context:
The product Style Guide is a project I worked on with Old Navy’s Visual Communications team in the midst of the pandemic. Our aim was to create a document that was easy to follow, but flexible enough for stores to make their own decisions. The intention was to support visual teams with “how-to” visual tutorials and direction for an immersive customer experience where our persona Jenny could feel, touch and try on the product.
Objective:
The goal of the Style Guide was to have it be the primary source of all truth for Old Navy’s brand. It includes an array of the brand guidelines, best practices with visual direction. During the pandemic I spent most of the quarantine testing different elements to act as placeholders for things we didn’t have access to in the office. I learned how to problem solve in real time by testing for stores, improving my synthesizing skills and implementing user feedback to enhance the customer experience which takes business goals and missed opportunities into consideration.
Tools: Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Lightroom, Miro, Airtable, Figma
My Role: UX Designer / UI Designer / Visual designer
Visual Design - Process - Style Guide