I’m a Social Media Strategist based
in NYC working for Deloitte

Thanks for stopping by.
I’m happy you’re here!

Curiosity has taken me through the world of fashion, digital marketing, and most recently, a coworking cofounder + operator. I have a passion for storytelling that inspires innovation and challenges the status quo.

My cross-disciplinary background makes me a resourceful designer with a creative and critical thinking lens to solve problems.

I value collaborative and transparent environments to solve complex problems. I believe in the power of thoughtful human-centered design to delight, deepen engagement, and inspire.

Experience

Social Media Strategist

Deloitte | Remote

March 2022 – Present

Social Media Manager

JCPenney | Remote

May 2021 – March 2022

Freelance Designer

Tiffany Designs Things | Remote

July 2020 – May 2021

Cofounder & CMO

Her.HQ | Dallas, TX

June 2018 – October 2020

Senior Social Media Specialist

JCPenney | Dallas, TX

May 2017 – August 2018

Digital marketing Manager

Bikini.com | Las Vegas, NV

August 2016 – May 2017

Social Media Analyst

Conill – Saatchi & Saatchi | El Segundo, CA

March 2015 – August 2016

Education

B.A. Business Administration/ Marketing

California State University, Fullerton

A.A. Product Development

Fashion Institute Merchandising + Design

Skills

Analytics
Basic understanding of HTML/CSS
Campaign Management
Content Creation and Storytelling
Design Strategy
Market Analysis
Omnichannel Strategy 
Paid Media
Project Management
Website Design and Management
UX Design

Experience

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIST

Deloitte | Remote

May 2022 – Present

Social Media Manager

JCPenney | Remote

 May 2021 – March 2022

Freelance Designer

Tiffany Designs Things | Remote

July 2020 – May 2021

Cofounder & CMO

Her.HQ | Dallas, TX

June 2018 – October 2020

Senior Social Media Specialist

JCPenney | Dallas, TX

May 2017 – August 2018

Digital marketing Manager

Bikini.com | Las Vegas, NV

August 2016 – May 2017

Social Media Analyst

Conill – Saatchi & Saatchi | El Segundo, CA

March 2015 – August 2016

Education

B.A. Business Administration/ Marketing

California State University, Fullerton

September 2012 – May 2015

A.A. Product Development

Fashion Institute Merchandising + Design

June 2009 – March 2011

Skills

Analytics
Basic understanding of HTML/CSS
Campaign Management
Content Creation and Storytelling
Design Strategy
Market Analysis
Omnichannel Communication
Paid Media
Project Management
Website Design and Management
UX Design

WHAT I AM READING IN 2024

Ikigai
The Intersectional Enviormentalist
How to meet your self
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Wake Up
Generation We
Solved
Waste
Screen Shot 2023-01-05 at 8.22.58 PM

WHAT I AM CURIOUS ABOUT

1. Often, we fear simplicity. Letting go of material objects and living life to just live life. Have the bare necessities. Is it really as hard as we make it out to be or could I actually just forget it all and move to a small village in Estonia and be content? 

2. The world is shifting to personalization, and AI is the fuel on the fire. All of a sudden, a “1-on-1” experience is replicable at scale. The major consumer applications of AI will lean heavily into sophisticated recommendations that anticipate your wants and desires before you even know them. We’ll need to figure out how to live with AI and leverage it to amplify human abilities. For industries, will AI be a net job creator or a net job destroyer? How do we retrain workers who are displaced by AI?

3. What would I notice in the world if I got off my phone on my commute to/from work?

4. Avoiding trends is akin to ignoring the zeitgeist – not that fun, very hard, and requires total isolation. Consumerism and its trend cycles are at the crux of culture and thusly unavoidable for the normal person. However, how can trend forecasting be a way for us to pre-process what we will inevitably become influenced by so we can make smarter decisions as consumers?

Contact

You can email me  at hello@tiffanynicolezamora.com. You can can also find me on LinkedIn and Instagram, too.

UX Case Study

Creating A Workflow Feature for Teams on Facebook Business Suite

Facebook Business Suite is a consolidated content management platform, that allows businesses to manage their Facebook and Instagram channels from a single platform, accessible via desktop or a mobile app. As a professional digital marketer with over 7 years’ experience in agency, corporate, startup, and freelance environments, I’ve seen and done it all when it comes to the social media planning process and team workflows. 

For this project, I led the ideation, strategy, and design for a new workflow feature to allow internal and external teams to seamlessly communicate and approve Facebook and Instagram content all in one place.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Facebook. As a freelance UX Designer, I took on this challenge because I’m passionate about social media and design.

My Role

User Research Journey Mapping Wireframing Screen Flows Visual Design

Process

Design Sprint

Timeline

Two Weeks

Project Overview

The Brief

In September 2020, Facebook launched Facebook Business Suite on desktop and through a mobile app. The platform is a combination of a few different Facebook products – Page Manager, Creator Studio, and Business Manager. It is a place for businesses to view key updates and priorities post insights, create ads, manage messages, and draft & schedule feed posts for both Facebook and Instagram. As a professional digital marketer with over 7 years of experience in agency, corporate, startup, and freelance environments, I’ve seen it all when it comes to the social media planning process and team workflows. From sending screenshots via email to after-hours texts from clients to all the content planning platforms I’ve tried truly tried it all. In various attempts to streamline the social media process, what I’ve discovered is that no one wants, or has the time, to be hopping between different platforms. This broken process typically leads to the user back to whatever method is easiest and familiar – a ping on text, email, slack, etc.

The Problem

For the Users

The content planning process typically involves multiple teams, platforms, and software before publishing a single piece of content. This results in an increase of employee hours dedicated to this process, which means increased costs and room for error. 

For Facebook

Lack of clarity on the differentiation between Facebook products as well as complex UI is resulting in users moving away from Facebook and resorting to simpler third-party apps and programs for content ideation, planning, scheduling, management, and reporting. 

The Opportunity

Add communication and workflow approval capabilities to Facebook Business Suite to increase product usage across the content planning phase and satisfy market demand.

Redesign Goal

Make Facebook Business Suite the all-in-one go-to choice for marketers to seamlessly manage their Facebook and Instagram channels from start to finish.

My process started with a simple question for the user – what does your social media planning and publishing process look like? 

I wanted to get a clear picture of how social media teams across a variety of business types and sizes are structured and what their current processes look like. My goal was to better understand the teams behaviors and pain points. Here are some research methods I used for the redesign.

App Store Reviews

The Apple Store and Google Play market currently have over 41K and 1.8M user reviews, respectively.  Sifting through hundreds of reviews and complaints, I was able to identify the challenges and opportunities for the platform.

Interviewing The Users

I interviewed six women who are involved in the management of a social media channel or multiple channels on a day-to-day basis – either within an organization, for their own business, or in some cases, both. I prepared the script, scheduled the calls, and conducted the tests.

Research Insights

  1. Users could not complete the entire ideation, planning, scheduling, approval, live content, and ads management process on Facebook Business Suite. Typically, a team usually requires a minimum of 3 different third-party platforms, leading to a fragmented experience.
  2. With all the different platforms being used, it’s difficult to track changes and activity made to content and workflow status – this creates an annoying back-and-forth process for teams.
  3. Clients and executive decision-makers get overwhelmed with a complicated approval process, they are looking to quickly scan the information and approve or provide feedback.
  4. Flexibility is key. It’s more common than not for a social media team to make quick decisions and last-minute changes to planned content due to crisis management and cultural events.

Based on the data I gathered from the interviews, I was able able to organize my observations and categorize them using an affinity map to give me an idea of the design direction I should take.

User Themes

The Content Planning Journey

Using the information from the affinity mapping exercise I put together a user journey map to help me understand the user touchpoints. The user map helped me identify three design challenges and opportunities within the planning to publishing process:

HMW

reduce friction in the communication and approval process with internal and external teams?

HMW

reduce the use of third-party platforms and create awareness and education on all the FBS features?

HMW

track changes and activities in the planning process for full transparency?

I identified that the friction lied in the middle of the content planning process.  The opportunity for Facebook Business Suite was to add workflow approval and communication capabilities to increase product usage across the content planning phase and satisfy market demand. 

After understanding the current planning and publishing flows and journey for social media teams, as well as their business goals, I set out to sketch out my design solutions for the Facebook Business Suite that could be applied to these three challenges. After countless sketches and iterations I landed on two key ideas:

Team Workflow

At the start of the home screen, you’ll see all your posts and team task reminders. The “Team Workflow” will drive the users to the team’s communication inbox for all Instagram and Facebook content.  The final frame shows the activity and communication for an unpublished post.

Role Assignment Setup

Not all content or campaigns need the same level of approval. Allow the user who is planning the content the option to assign the team flows and approval workflow from the start.

I focused on prototyping the Permission Setting and Team Communication features.  I used my proven hypothesis points as guidelines when building out the proposed features. 

Hypothesis #1 – Permission Setting

Teams want control over user access levels and permissions for quick decision making and account management.

Permission settings for the general account are located in the settings section. Page admins are able to add, remove, and set each user’s permission level.  

Hypothesis #2 – Team Communication

Teams want to seamlessly communicate and track activities and tasks with internal and external partners for an efficient workflow.

The team’s workspace page gives users the ability to comment, track changes, and see activities in a streamlined work process. The content view is dependant on the user’s permission setting.

I identified 5 new target users, led recruitment and scheduling, and drafted a research script to ensure I gathered high-quality and unbiased feedback about the effectiveness, marketability, and usability of the new features.

Permission Setting Results

  • 3/5 users felt the feature would be helpful for their planning process and team communication.
  • Feedback: Users interviewed felt that there was too much information displayed on the activity screen that would most likely  not be used often, if at all.
  • Opportunity: Reconsider where the information is displayed and simplify the actions for the user.
“For me, the flow of the planning experience quickly jumps out at me. Think about keeping it flowing between function and how to simplify.”
Perla H.
Social Media Manager

Team Communication Results

  • 2/5 users felt the feature would be beneficial and streamline communication with their team and clients 
  • Feedback: Users understood the feature but did not feel like it was seamless, felt clunky
  • Opportunity: Rethinking through the user flow and UI. How does it look  for the internal admin team vs. the client with limited access?
“This could save me so much time with all my interns to manage. However, what would this look like from my clients’ POV?”
Destiny K.
Social Media Manager

After reviewing the findings from my user tests, I wanted to iterate my prototype to address the feedback. Here are the iteration questions and decisions we made for each feature.

Permission Setting

HMW allow content owners to control and customize permission settings on a case-by-case basis?

  • Not all content or campaigns need the same level of approval. The iteration update gives the users the option to set up roles and workflow approval by pieces or groups of content in the beginning of the content planning phase
  • Post functionalities for each user are based on their workflow status the content owner sets 
  • Roles are split into two different categories – Admin and Limited Access.  Workflow options are divided up into three different phases – Draft, Review, and Approved.
  • Admin: Perform any action on the content calendar, edit and update unpublished content, view all team activity and view content performance, and manage campaign roles. This is the most access you can grant.
  • Limited Access: Limited view on content performance,  limited content calendar view  – user will only see copy and images but cannot make any edits. Users will be able to make comments but will not be able to see teams activities and comments. 
  • Draft: Content is WIP, not ready for it’s first round of reviews
  • Review: Content is ready to be reviewed and will need to be signed off by the the first round of decision makers assigned (i.e. Social Media Manager, VP of Digital, Project Manager, etc.)
  • Approved: Content is signed off by the final group of decision makers and is ready for to be scheduled or published (i.e. content partner or influencer, CEO, agency partner, etc.)
View Feature On Figma

Team Communication and Workflow

HMW allow users to easily and intuitively track changes and see post activity information?

  • In the iteration, I added the workflow status within the individual post view – besides the team activity screen
  • Team activities, communication and workflow information has been consolidated into the post view, this prevents teams from being overloaded by unrelated information
View Feature On Figma
View Workflow On Figma

Key Learnings

  • All users saw the value in the updated permission setting feature. They unanimously felt it was “easy, intuitive and useful” and would significantly improve team and client communication.  
  • The users universally agreed and stated that the team communication and post activities felt clean, easy to follow, and use. They found it helpful to see both admin and client views, to give an understanding of how it functions. They all believed this feature would significantly reduce back-and-forth communication.
  • Cross-platform usability is crucial for many users. For my next iteration, I will create the desktop and tablet view.

Conclusion

At the start of the project, with my background and knowledge of the space, I assumed it would be easy to come up with a simple feature to solve the workflow situation. I didn’t anticipate how long and complicated the redesign process would turn out to be.

The biggest challenge for me was scaling back on the feature and functions. My idea was definitely challenged in the first iteration as people questioned every word, feature, and flow, but this feedback allowed me to rework my initial prototype to create a useful and thoughtful design that solves a problem.

UX Case Study

Reimagining the Clubhouse Discovery Experience

GreenScene-3-Phone-2048x1365

This new “drop-in audio” app, allows users to host open discussions or hop around and listen in on different conversations. As an active user, I noticed that the spontaneous nature of Clubhouse that made the app so popular was also what made the experience overwhelming to use.

As an independent project, my team wanted to create a feature to give the user greater control over search activities and optimize content discoverability.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Clubhouse, and the views in this case study are strictly my own.

My Role

User Research Journey Mapping Wireframing Screen Flows Visual Design

Team

Timo Wang

Process

Design Sprint

Timeline

Two Weeks

Project Overview

The Brief

Clubhouse gained traction with its high-profile fanbase, in a short time, it has already garnered over 10 million weekly active users and earned a valuation of over $1 billion. Think of Clubhouse as a combination of live podcasts, Twitter, and party line. It openly lets people gather to either discuss or listen in on different conversations, often hosted and moderated by an expert or group of experts in the field. However, unlike a podcast, the conversations are ephemeral – once it’s over, the room is closed, and the conversation is gone forever. Personally, I found the experience of connecting with fresh faces outside of my inner circle to have spontaneous and unfiltered conversations was refreshingly human and interpersonal – just what we needed coming out of 2020. However, I noticed the spontaneous nature of Clubhouses made the experience overwhelming. I kept asking myself:

How does a Clubhouse user expect to form a meaningful connection with their potential community when they cannot locate them?

Purpose

For a user, basic understanding of the algorithm and correlation between their behaviors and the apps’ suggested content is essential to their experience. As the app continues to rapidly scale, the fragmented search features make finding quality rooms a time-consuming task.

Redesign Goals

1

Provide users with more context before committing to join a room

2

Give users more control over their experience within the context of their lifestyles

3

A universal search that organizes content and increases discoverability

Our Team and Process

In February 2021, I met fellow designer Timo Wang in an online UX group. We bonded over our shared sentiment on the Clubhouse interface and opportunities. We decided to make this a personal project and organize a design sprint to quickly and efficiently tackle the problems we were seeing. Due to COVID, we had to do things a bit differently. Working remotely, we relied on Zoom calls, Google Docs and a Figma board to work in real time. Following the design sprint process from start to finish, Timo and I worked alongside each other, both completing each of the steps independently. Then we would regroup to share ideas and findings, using our own skillsets and experiences to refine the finished product.

Our process started with a simple question – how does a user find value on Clubhouse? We wanted to get a clear picture of how users are navigating Clubhouse to better understand their behaviors and motivations. Here are some research methods we used for the redesign:

App Store Reviews

The iOS app store currently has over 415K user reviews and is a goldmine of information that helped us identify and confirm the opportunities and pain points we were experiencing as users.

Interviewing the Users

We interviewed a combination of eight novice and daily users over Zoom – all with varied backgrounds, interests, ages, and reasons for joining CH. After doing our research and examining the data, we identified five common themes.

Research Insights

  1. Not understanding Clubhouses’ algorithm, new users are haphazardly following interests, groups, and people, which leads to a cluttered hallway with irrelevant room suggestions.
  2. It can be overwhelming trying to gain context of the conversation when entering a live room.
  3. The influx of Clubhouse phone notifications can be annoying, excessive, and irrelevant.
  4. Users are discovering people and groups to follow by going down the rabbithole from a user’s bio.
  5. Without a way to quickly eyeball a “verified” user, it’s hard to determine user and room credibility.
Screenshot preview of my hallway feed on 3/21. Notes correlate with the insights and current user experience.

Based on the data we gathered, we were able to organize our observations and categorize them using an affinity map to aid us in determining the best direction to take our design strategy. This exercise allowed us to expose the pain points and areas for improvement –  helping us set the stage for the structure of the design process.

User Themes

The Clubhouse User Journey

Taking the information from the affinity mapping exercise we created our user journey map. This exercise served as a guide as we talked through our ideas. Six user map designs later and we finally landed on a flow where three design challenges emerged:

HMW

help users gain context of rooms as fast as possible?

HMW

help users discover more relevant, interesting content or people?

HMW

help users quickly evaluate a room/conversation’s value?

We identified a crucial point at the beginning of the user flow, with the potential to either make or break the user’s experience. If broken, there is a possibility of the user losing interest or getting overwhelmed.  We decided to focus on providing the user more control over their search activities and discoverability through interest filtering and a room preview, so users can find the content that they need.

Putting it down on paper

Once we gained understanding of the user flows, we independently set out to sketch our design solutions that could be applied for these three challenges. After countless sketches with various possibilities, we each landed on two separate ideas, four in total.

Tiffany’s Sketches

Get a full room preview before making the decision to join – starting with the Hallway. Users will see a chat quality rating (generated by the users currently in the chat) to, discussion description and moderator preview. Once the user shows interest, the second screen will give the user the full room details. Users have the option to also preview the live conversation before joining.

Filter and organize all content by topics to increase user discoverability. Along with what’s currently in the topic pages, additional sections would be live chats and upcoming chats to allow for users to engage with topics.

Include additional information on a user’s profile to show community engagement and aid followers in discoverability and engagement.

Sketches I created for the project. Designs with the blue star indicates our favorite solutions.

Timo’s Sketches

Give users an idea of what they are getting into. Prime users with a short intro/orientation before they hop into conversations so they know the room topic and etiquette and moderators don’t need to worry about resetting the room. Also has a preview of the content of the conversation to help users decide if the room is valuable to them before they commit to joining.

Increase valuable connections through related conversations, events, people, or groups: show related content and resources at the bottom to help users find more topics like this.

Users have the option on their profiles to display the upcoming rooms they are attending or rooms they have recently been in.

Storyboarding Solutions

We evaluated the ideas and worked together to combine and narrow the solutions for our storyboards. Although we pinpointed the moment of friction as being when the user first launches the app, for our storyboards we focused on three key moments:  

1

Filtering and selecting a room to join from the hallway

2

Room/discussion context to determine value before joining

3

Information on user profiles to aid in community engagement 

For the hallway design, I explored various solutions to group the filter functionality. My goal was for users to focus on quickly finding valuable content rather than on learning a new feature. I achieved this by taking inspiration from existing mental models from widely used apps like Airbnb, Facebook, and Yelp that use a filtering system.

We divided the prototype build based on the parts of the solution sketches we created. While we both had a variation of a preview page, Timo wanted to take it on and build the prototype so it would include her Topic Card feature.

I prototyped the Interest Filtering & User Profile Information features and Timo created the Room Orientation, Topic Card, and Eavesdrop features. For the first iteration, we built two different prototypes but decided to not combine them so we could separately test what features would be valuable and resonate the most then regroup. 

My Prototypes

Interest filtering within the hallway allows users to quickly find the live rooms that fit their ever-changing schedules and desired interests.

User profile information that highlights their activity and interests on Clubhouse will drive user discoverability beyond their followers.

We individually identified 5 target users each, led recruitment and scheduling, and assembled a research script to ensure we got high-quality and unbiased feedback about the effectiveness, marketability, and usability of the new features.

Interest Filtering Results

  • 5/5 of the users I interviewed felt that the interest filtering allowed them to quickly find content that is relevant to them.
  • Feedback: However, 2 users pointed out that the use of the emojis was overwhelming.
  • Opportunity: Take UI into consideration and clean the area to avoid the user feeling overwhelmed.
“I like the idea of having the topics at the top because then if there’s something else I want to go listen to then it’s helpful to go find those or whatever it is I am searching for.”
Kristie M.
Clubhouse User

User Profile Information Results

  • 5/5 of the users I interviewed loved the user profile update with the “Currently Speaking In” and “Will be Speaking In” cards because it opens up a chain-link of information.
  • Feedback: Adding the user’s interests on their profile would not be something users would find of value to determine if they would follow.
  • Opportunity: Rethinking through the user flow and mindset, we felt that publically showcasing the user interests was not relevant to help a user decide to follow or not. We removed it altogether.
“I love to see the speaker calendar to get an understanding of what they are involved in. This helps me understand quality of the speaker and whether I want to follow them or not.”
Damien H.
Clubhouse User

After reviewing our findings, we decided to consolidate our ideas, combine our prototypes, and go for a second iteration. Below are the iteration decisions we made for each feature.

Tiffany’s Features

Topic Filtering

  • Simplified the hallway navigation by swapping out the “more topics” to a simple button with a universal filter icon.
  • Created a “Filter room by location” option for users to connect with groups within their area.
  • Organized the filter categories into three relevant sections – “Your Interests”, “Recommended for You” and “See All Topics” to guide the user.

Community Engagement Information

  • To streamline communication within Clubhouse, we added a DM option for direct user communication.
  • Added a website link option to the existing Instagram and Twitter links to create a more direct CTA path.
  • Simplified UI and removed users’ interests section.

Timo’s Features

Orientation & Topic Cards

  • Reorganized the information and focused on the most important information for the users to make a decision on whether they want to commit to joining.
  • Minimized user discord and swapped out obscure icons with more familiar ones.

Eavesdrop

  • The eavesdrop feature would only allow the live room audio preview to be for about 7 seconds—just enough for users to gain context to the room.*

*Privacy is a major concern and something the Clubhouse team is actively trying to solve. Although it is possible that users may record the conversation anonymously, we decided that the majority of positive feedback from the rest of the users still makes a strong case for this feature.

Final Prototype

Key Learnings

  • Participants saw the value in content filtering to quickly and efficiently find quality content and improve discoverability, which created a positive sentiment with the CH experience, likely resulting in increased time spent on app and WOM marketing with their peers.
  • Participants appreciated the orientation screen and eavesdrop feature. They unanimously felt that it would lead to a more intentional experience in the room consideration phase.
  • Participants were excited about the updated user bio and made comments about how it would dramatically improve how they determine user credibility and discover other users and content outside of their immediate connections. This opens up opportunities for authentic and quality business partnerships, collaborations, sponsorships, investments, connections, and hiring.

Conclusion

We believe that our concepts will improve the current user experience to allow for quick searching capabilities for users that are time-constrained, as well as set the stage for monetization efforts and discoverability as the user base continues to rapidly scale.

As places continue to open up more widely, Clubhouse will be faced with scaling and innovation challenges as users go back to their brunch with friends or opt to attend IRL events rather than sitting at home on the app. My plan is to continue to monitor the cultural trends and Clubhouse platform, and adjust these solutions as a new sense of normalcy is defined.

Overall, it was an absolute joy partnering with Timo and utilizing each of own super powers and experiences to actively communicate and come to solutions to ensure the project’s success.

Business Case Study

Cultivating an interactive & influential community at Her.HQ

Cofounded by yours truly, Her.Kind (FKA Her.HQ) was a female-focused experiential workspace in Dallas, Texas. Learn how my partner and I developed an original concept and built a groundbreaking business in two years.

My Role

Cofounder & CMO

Team

Cassi Oesterling

Timeline

2018 - 2020

Project Overview

What was Her,HQ?

Her.Kind was a female-focused community and experiential workspace in Dallas, TX. Our mission was the betterment of women through intentional community and shared experiences.

News Coverage

The Problem

Founded at the beginning of 2018 by Cassi Oesterling, Vanessa De Abreu, and myself – we bonded over our shared experience of moving to Dallas as adults and finding it difficult to form authentic connections and friendships with other like-minded women.

Our Solution

We wanted to create an inspiring space with all the amenities the modern working woman would need to grow their businesses and passion projects while building meaningful relationships.

Once we decided to move forward with our idea, we spent the majority of 2018 tirelessly working around the clock to ideate, research, and build out the business plan and pitch deck. In August of 2018, after countless pitches, networking events, and iterations of the pitch deck, Cassi and I decided to quit our jobs and make securing funds for Her.HQ our full-time job. By November 2018, we partnered with Centrl Office – a Portland-based coworking space, to launch a six-month pop-up within their new coworking concept launching in the Dallas Arts District in early 2019.

By February 2019, we opened the doors to our pop-up space as we continued our search for our permanent home. The goal with the pop-up was to create a preview of what the full experience would look like – we offered open-office space to work out of and monthly programming.

 

Marketing Approach

From the start, Cassi and I utilized our skillsets to ideate, strategize, and execute all of our marketing efforts in-house. We identified Instagram as our primary channel of communication for our millennial female demographic. We approached our prelaunch marketing strategy in three phases:

  1. Create excitement & curiosity for the new community. We achieved this through the release of our influencer-led photoshoot content and through approachable evergreen content to give our new followers a meaningful reason to engage with us. However, we strategically decide not to define what we were to build curiosity and excitement over the concept.
  2. Website announcement & email captures. After a month of building awareness on our social media channels, we launched our landing page with more information about the community and concept and drove each visitor to “sign up” for more information.
  3. Announced events calendar. A week and a half before launch, we announced our event lineup. Our goal was to build anticipation and sign-ups to drive foot traffic starting the moment we opened the doors.

Post-launch we heavily relied on the organic influence of our highly engaged community, partners and influencers, to drive conversation by reliving their favorite moments and experiences from Her.HQ and sharing on their owned channels.

Events & Programming​​

Our goal with our events was to bring awareness and interest to Her.HQ. We held between four to eight events per month centered on health & wellness, creative exploration and career advancement. We utilized Instagram Stories, polls, surveys, and conversations with the community to better understand the type of events and content they wanted to see. 

We partnered with countless of incredible small businesses from our community as well as national brands like Adidas, Lululemon, Bumble, Stella & Dot, Follain Beauty, and Tanya Taylor to host custom events and brand experiences that resonated with today’s woman.

First Her.HQ Photoshoot
One of the first posts published with "coming soon" messaging
Website Launch Announcement
Post published to announce the Her.HQ pop-up space.
Event Announcement
First panel event announcement post published before opening the Her.HQ doors

Events & Programming​​

First Her. Event
Our first event with Bumble BFF
First Her. Panel
The speakers from our first panel event in the pop-up
Her. Headshot Event
Her.Headshot event with Fort Lion Studio
Conference Room
Our private conference rooms
Her. Members
Founding members and Dallasites101 founders Lily and Kara hard at work
Her. Event
Culture Hype Founder, Amber LaFrance and Jencey Keeton, Sweet Tooth Hotel founder for our In Good Company fireside chat
Her. Member
Founding Her.HQ member, Madeline C.
Her. Event
Off-site event with Stella and Dot
Her. Feature
Cassi and I for Tanya Taylor
Her. Event
Let's Talk Money event
Her. Event
Our first New Moon Morning - an ongoing series
Her. Event
Her.HQ event with Tata Harper and Follain
Her. Event
Run, Baby, Run! A Her.HQ X Adidas Women two day event for Global Running Day
Her. Event
Run, Baby, Run! A Her.HQ X Adidas Women two day event for Global Running Day
Her. Event
Our first Summer Book Club - an on going series

In August 2019, with the help and investment from Common Desk, we announced our new home base in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, TX. With the funding we secured, we made updates to the 6K square foot space that was previously occupied by Common Desk.

The new Her.HQ was officially open for business on October 21, 2019. The space offered a flood of natural light and plenty of open-air. Members had access to bookable conference rooms, private offices, unlimited coffee & tea, a mezzanine lounge, washrooms, and a wellness room stocked with clean beauty products and other amenities. 

Her.HQ - 633 West Davis St.

Marketing Approach

Leading up to launch, while the space was undergoing construction, we continued to activate with light events to keep the momentum going.  We also decided to make updates to our branding, website and create an eye-catching new member package to complement the new experience.

Similarly to our pop-up marketing strategy, we continued to rely on our dedicated community to drive authentic conversations about Her.HQ. We then shared UGC content across our channels to create a central hub for community-building.

Her.HQ launched at 8% capacity with an application waitlist of over 60 people. In just a month after launch, we saw an 88% increase in memberships.

Her-Hq.com Landing Page

Photos From Her.HQ

First Membership packages getting ready to be shipped
Rick and his crew putting the finishing touches on the new Her.HQ space
UGC content via Marisa P.
Kitchen & mezzanine view
Kitchen & Mezzanine View
Conference room
Mezzanine area
Community workspace
New member welcome package
Wellness room
New Moon Morning series with Britten LaRue and Simple Sol
Artist Carolina Moua making our famous mural
Her.HQ members for our Book Club series
Her.HQ member, Dani R.
Her.HQ member Ayo, rocking our merch
Her.HQ members at the Dallas Women's March 2020
Her.HQ members for New Moon Morning series
Her.HQ members at wellness event
Her.HQ members at event
Her.HQ members for our Book Club series
Her.HQ member Amber L. rocking our merch
Her.HQ X Rosy event
Midweek Chill workout series with Outdoor Voices
Screen Shot 2021-12-28 at 10.37.23 PM

2020 was off to a great start and business was doing better than we could have ever imagined – our membership was growing month-over-month and we were on track to exceed our projections. This meant hiring our first Her.HQ team member was just around the corner. Our events calendar was fully booked for the next few months with member programming and private events. We were even in the early discussions with Common Desk about our second Dallas location. But then a little thing called COVID came rearing its ugly head and like the rest of the world, our business

came to a screeching halt as we moved into uncharted territory. Being a team of two, we were scrappy and quickly pivoted all of our planned in-person programming to Zoom, we wanted to give our members and community a place to connect, share, and feel a sense of “normalcy” among the chaos, fear, and uncertainty that we were all collectively experiencing. In April 2020, we launched an IFundWomen crowd-funding campaign to help raise the funds needed to stay open. However, after reopening in June, it quickly became apparent things were not going back to “normal” anytime soon. In August 2020, after evaluating the situation and our options, Cassi and I made the incredibly tough decision to permanently close Her.HQ.

Public closure announcement

Our Community​

At the end of September, we made the internal announcement to our members and followed by our public statement a few weeks later. Below is a look back at our community stats at the time of closing. 

Social Followers
0 K+
Active & Waitlisted Members
10 +
Email Subscribers
0 K+
Average Audience Age
25 -34

Friday, October 16 was a lovely day – one of those quintessential fall days where a light sweater and jeans would do. We started the morning with Britten LaRue – our in-house astrologer hosting our monthly New Moon Morning series in person while I captured the session over IG Live for all of our followers. For the rest of the day a group of dear friends and Her.HQ members spent the day sitting at the community table in the front of the space binging on Topo Chicos – sharing stories, laughs, and ugly cries as we reminisced on the journey, people, and memories. At 7PM, we cleaned up and walked out together. This was the day I said goodbye to 633 W. Davis Street and closed the doors to our beautiful space for good.

Key Takeaways

Purpose Driven

With users being increasingly choosy and decisive about what they follow and consumed, we made it a point to understand what did or didn’t work and pivot to ensure our marketing efforts were crafted around meaning, not frequency. Growing our community through intentional partnerships, collaborations, inspirational messaging, and visually pleasing aesthetics.

Authentic Engagement

The quality of engagement within our community was extremely important for our growth. Understanding and implementing what our members wanted to see from us and keep our growing audience happy by delivering value in the membership, workspace, and community was what allowed us to continuously scale.

A Safe Space

From the moment we launched, the need and desire for a positive and safe community was apparent. We created a space for people to gather and feel accepted, validated, make friends and meet others’ they might never have met otherwise – giving users a meaningful reason to be a part of Her.HQ.

Learnings & Reflections

If I could do it all over again, I would do it in a heartbeat. Naturally, there’s a handful of things I would have perhaps approached differently but hey, that’s life and what would life be if we didn’t have failures to learn and grow from. I learned how resilient, resourceful, motivated and persistent I am. I saw firsthand the power and value of a collective community for support, love, personal spiritual growth and social transformation. 

As for our initial problem of wanting to “create a space to form authentic connections and friendships with other like-minded women” that we set out to solve in the beginning? I now have an overabundance of wonderful humans I can call in case of an emergency, so I’d say yes – we succeeded.

I am filled with so much gratitude and appreciation first and foremost for Cassi, my partner in all of this, also Nick Clark, my family, my husband, my in-laws, Andrew O. and Mr. & Mrs. Oesterling. I’d also love to thank Vanessa A., Chad, Darcey, Jeff, Alex, Madison D., Yesi & Josh,  Alaethea H. & McKenzie N. and the rest of the CD team, Matt A., Brie M., Minji, Jahee, Madeline C., Amber, Kara S., Lily K., Jordan P., Taylor M., Tori, Mariel, Candice B., Fallon, Ayo, Alex W., Carolina M., Jennifer A., Giselle, Andrea, Lauren H., Victoria B., Eunice, Carla, Claudia, Katie E., Tori B., Courtney N., Audrey Z., Haley, Britten, Jaleesa, Carolee, Kelsey L., Caitlin C., Amanda P., Becca, Brittani, Kirsten O., Ariel R., Jasmin E., Katelyn M., Bethany H., Meggie A., Kelly B., Victoria E., Lacey,  and ALL the wonderful humans, business, and brands, that supported us unconditionally and made this once-in-a-lifetime experience possible. 💖