Get Real
A “fresh” brand with a new way to shop at Chewy
Role: UX Lead Team: Product & Content Design, Research, Product, and Tech
Overview
Chewy is a beloved brand in the pet space, known for unmatched customer support and for caring for pets (and their people) throughout their lives. For the launch of a new private brand in the fresh food space, I set out to create an elevated experience that would delight fresh-food customers and stand apart in the market.
Project Goal
Launch a new product line delivering fresh food that meets the needs of dogs regardless of life stage, size, and breed.
Constraints:
- Must be a subscription service
- Launch to a subset of locales
- Customized plans for each pet, using fixed pack sizes
Developing a strategy
I hosted a handful of kickoffs and workshops to help develop a strategic direction. We used customer data to inform our approach and I explored the competitive landscape.
I even became a customer of a few fresh food companies—much to my dog’s delight.
The Chewy Landscape
One key part of building a strategy to solve new customer problems is surveying the landscape across the company. This helped me catalog what assets we had, what was working well, and what could be tuned to fit our needs.
I interviewed product and design leaders across the retail space and incorporated that into our workshops.
This focused our discussions on whether to build on top of existing platforms or start from scratch.
Areas of concern
I outlined the areas this project would touch across the retail space. This was a broad exercise, but not 100% exhaustive.
I chose to focus first on Onboarding because it was one of the most complex areas and required the most zero-to-one technical effort. It was also likely to be the space with the most debates and I sensed design could help drive decisions.
Early sketches
With the groundwork in place, we began exploring how this strategy would translate into the customer experience. My early mocks were purely meant to get raw ideas out in the open and get early feedback when presenting to product and executive leadership. The feedback was invaluable in focusing our work and ensuring we were making the right trade-offs.
Additionally, this was an opportunity to expand our design system beyond the typical colors and type styles in our retail toolkit. I purposefully leaned away from those patterns to push our thinking and give some room for this new brand to flourish. I worked with the design system team to see how flexible it was and where it would need to be extended.
A new brand
Our team had to work closely with the brand team as they developed colors, typography, and packaging. This required nimble work on behalf of us all. Thankfully, because we had extended the design system and set that groundwork for later phases, we were able to stay flexible as the brand evolved and we took the design to the rest of the areas of the retail flow.
A fresh experience for customers
Get Real launched in July 2025, delivering delicious fresh food to dog bowls across the country.
