Overview
Gifting at scale — without the spreadsheets
Product gifting and seeding is one of the most operationally messy parts of influencer marketing. A brand sends products to creators to generate organic content. Simple in concept — but at scale, with hundreds of creators, different product lines, different eligibility rules for different creator tiers, and an expectation of accurate on-time fulfillment, it becomes an operational nightmare.
Before Product Fulfillment, Aspire's brands managed this with spreadsheets, manual emails, and a lot of back-and-forth. Product Fulfillment eliminated that entirely: brands connect their Shopify store, build a catalog with rule-based selection logic, and let creators choose through a self-service flow — with fulfillment tracked automatically.
The Problem
Manual fulfillment doesn't scale
- 1.No structured product catalog: Brands had no way to present a curated set of products to creators. They'd share a Google Doc or email a list — which created confusion, version-control issues, and a poor creator experience.
- 2.One-size-fits-all gifting: A macro creator and a micro creator shouldn't receive the same product selection. But brands had no way to configure different eligibility rules for different creator tiers without doing it manually, per creator.
- 3.Fulfillment tracking was external: Once a brand approved a product selection, tracking was handled outside the platform — Shopify, email chains, shared docs. There was no closed loop within Aspire.
- 4.Creator experience was poor: Creators had no clear, branded storefront to browse what was available. The experience of receiving a gifting offer varied wildly between brands.
My Role
Owned the full product — ingestion to creator experience
I was the sole designer on Product Fulfillment from day one. The surface spanned two distinct user types — brand managers (who configure and manage fulfillment) and creators (who select products) — each with fundamentally different needs and mental models.
Designing for two user types on the same underlying system required maintaining two design documents simultaneously — one for the brand-facing configuration UI, one for the creator-facing selection experience — while ensuring they mapped to the same data model.
Key Design Decisions
Designing the catalog and rule engine
One catalog → multiple creator rules
Rather than requiring brands to create separate catalogs per creator segment, I designed a rule layer on top of a single catalog. A brand uploads once, then defines which products each creator tier can see and select.
Shopify-first, CSV as fallback
Most Aspire brands use Shopify. I designed the integration to sync inventory in real time — so if a product sells out, it disappears from the creator-facing catalog automatically.
Creator-facing selection as a branded storefront
The creator-facing product selection was designed to feel like a curated brand storefront — not a form. Creators browse, filter by category, see product details, and make selections in an experience that reflects the brand's identity.
Fulfillment status as a closed loop
I designed the fulfillment tracking view to close the loop within Aspire — showing brands which creators have selected products, which orders have been placed, and which have shipped, without leaving the platform.
Challenges
The complexity underneath a simple concept
- ↳Inventory sync edge cases: What happens when a creator's in the middle of selecting and a product goes out of stock? I designed a live inventory indicator and a graceful 'this item is no longer available' state that preserved their other selections.
- ↳Variant complexity: Products with multiple variants (size, color, style) needed to be selectable at the variant level without the UI becoming overwhelming. I designed a compact variant selector that collapsed by default and expanded on interaction.
- ↳Rule conflicts: A creator might belong to multiple segments with different rules. I designed a clear precedence model and a preview panel in the rule builder that showed exactly what a creator in a given segment would see — before the catalog went live.
Impact
Fulfillment at 1,100+ brand scale
Product Fulfillment became one of Aspire's most broadly adopted features, eliminating a category of operational work that had previously required dedicated headcount at scale.