Industry
Entertainment
Fashion
Toys
Client
Year
2025
This was the Disney team's first foray into custom site design with the Walmart Lightbox Creative team. It was key that my work impressed them so they would come back for more.
But there was one major wrench in the plan: the lead time for custom work is typically 12 weeks; the Disney team gave us only 4. This meant the scope of the custom work had to be limited so our Development team could complete the build on time. It also meant I couldn't reach out to the video team for support. I would need to handle all of the motion work myself.
Thankfully, the Disney team had a large library of assets to use and their goals were very focused:
Integrate Stitch throughout the page so it felt like an extension of their main holiday campaign
Adhere to their rigorous guidelines for characters and toys
Highlight key products in each target category for easy shopping
Easy clickthrough to shop their full catalog of holiday products
I limited the custom work to one tabbed module, which simplified the complex category-based shopping experience. Stitch was not allowed to interact with products, so I included him in the background of the module, as if he's playing on the page itself. The Disney team was also excited to include as much motion as possible. In the flexible custom module, I added themed interstitials that would play when a customer clicked out to the brand shop.
Continuing to maximize motion on the page, I created limited animation cycles to use instead of static images throughout the page. A key behind the scenes part of my work was choosing whether to use gifs or video files for smallest file sizes and optimal load times.
The page performed excellently over the holiday season. Both the Disney team and the Walmart Sales team were thrilled with the results.
Madison Johnson
Manager, Retail Marketing
The Walt Disney Company
While desktop and mobile pages on the Walmart site can have fully custom builds, the in-app experience is limited to standard modules. Because shoppablility was key for this page, having an in-app experience was also essential. I pushed our team to let me explore motion use on the page, and I ended up designing an in-app experience that is now a hallmark example of creative in-app design.
