Omni-channel commerce, from scratch.

The challenge

In 2000, omni-channel commerce was a thesis, not a category. Retail brands were figuring out what the internet meant for them in real time — what to put on a website, how to connect online to in-store, whether email marketing was a real channel or a distraction, what content even meant outside of catalog photography.

I joined OldNavy.com on the launch team at Gap Inc. The job was to build the marketing and content infrastructure that would make the new digital storefront work — and figure out, by doing, what "online" meant for one of the largest specialty retailers in the world.

The work

I led OldNavy.com's content and CRM marketing infrastructure from launch — building the editorial systems, lifecycle email programs, and digital-meets-in-store connections that would let the brand operate across both surfaces as one experience rather than two parallel businesses. This was foundational work: figuring out the calendars, the segmentation, the brand voice for digital, the relationship between what shoppers saw on the homepage and what they saw in the store window. There were no playbooks yet.

The work that started at OldNavy.com was eventually adopted as the internal model across Gap Inc. — used to inform how Gap and Banana Republic approached their own digital channels in the years after.

The outcome

I left in 2004 with four years of operating experience inside ecommerce as it was being invented as a category. The instincts formed at OldNavy.com — that brand and commerce live in the same system, that digital is a channel for the whole brand and not a side business, that lifecycle marketing and content marketing are the same conversation — turned out to be the right ones. They've showed up in every commerce-adjacent piece of work I've done since: at Visa across merchant partnerships and digital products, at Media.Monks across retail media and DTC ecommerce optimization, at Tia Lupita Foods through the founder-stage CPG arc, and inside Craft Batch every time a client asks how their digital surface should work alongside the rest of their brand.

The receipts from this era are mostly in what came later. The foundation was here.