Gift Mode

My team rang the Nasdaq opening bell to mark the official launch of Gift Mode, a 0-1 product which I led design from concept to production culminating in one of the largest marketing campaigns, including this bell ringing and the company’s first-ever Super Bowl half time commercial.

 

Impact

Role

$29M Total gifting GMS

10k New buyers acquired

20M Orders marked as a gift

Increase the share of orders with a Gift Teaser by 2.3x

Product design lead

Engineering support

Research support

Stakeholder management

 

Overview

Etsy has long been a destination for unique, thoughtful gifts, but many buyers weren't marking their purchases as gifts — and that gap represented a bigger opportunity than it first appeared. I led the 0-to-1 design of Gift Mode: defining the problem space, aligning stakeholders across product, engineering, marketing, and brand, and shaping a feature that didn't exist anywhere in the product into a platform-level gifting experience.

The insight driving it was simple but consequential: buyers who marked an item as a gift were more likely to return, and recipients became new customers — a flywheel with compounding value. But surfacing that moment in checkout meant introducing a new step in the highest-friction part of the purchase journey, with a hard deadline locked in: a Super Bowl commercial that couldn't move.

Our goal was to increase the number of items marked as gifts without disrupting checkout — and to do it in time to go live on the biggest advertising stage Etsy had ever used.

 

Challenges & Solutions

Complex Checkout flow

  • The biggest abandonment point in checkout was between the shipping and payment steps. Adding more friction, through additional users tasks, could worsen this.

  • The “mark as gift” checkbox was easy to miss, and buyers didn’t realize that marking an item as a gift unlocked special features like a personalized message.

  • Some users checked out with PayPal or Apple Pay, which bypasses parts of the standard flow.

Naming Conventions & Copy Clarity

  • The new feature that allowed buyers to send a digital “sneak peek” of their gift was largely unknown. Many buyers found it confusing or didn’t notice it at all so we paid careful attention to how we framed it.

  • Copy was refined through A/B testing and a sandbox environment for writers to test in real-time.

time sensitive buyers

  • Many users were in a rush and didn’t want to spend extra time filling out additional fields.

  • We carefully tested different placements for gifting options to balance visibility with ease of use.

  • Ensured users could skip the step if they weren’t interested, while still surfacing it later in the purchase journey (e.g., post-purchase page).

  • We worked with engineering to ensure gifting options were still surfaced post-purchase.

Deadlines

  • Since our product will be featured in a Super Bowl commercial, the team has collaborated closely with marketing to develop a comprehensive launch strategy.

  • Given limited engineering resources, we prioritized light, high-impact solutions first and iterated toward heavier changes over time.