Culture transformation proved as essential as visual design for engagement success.
The most revealing detail about the Macy's website redesign by Willy Lai and Dave Torres has nothing to do with pixels or color palettes. The breakthrough emerged from an unexpected source: culture transformation within a 160-year-old retail organization. When the design team completed the year-long project in October 2019, Willy Lai, Dave Torres, and colleagues across San Francisco and New York had learned that creating beautiful interfaces for enterprise brands requires changing how organizations think about design. The project drew inspiration from premier fashion media and leading consumer technology products, yet the designers explicitly noted that culture transformation was crucial to realizing and operationalizing the new design. For brand managers considering similar digital journeys, the Macy's case reframes the entire conversation from aesthetic output to organizational readiness.
The research methodology deployed by the Macy's team demonstrates how comprehensive customer understanding produces measurable outcomes. User surveys, formal usability lab testing, A/B testing, and guerrilla-style tests conducted at actual Macy's stores created a feedback loop that informed every design decision. The result: user engagement increased dramatically following launch. The project earned recognition with a Golden A' Design Award in Website and Web Design, acknowledging the work as a marvelous and trendsetting creation. For enterprise brands, the lesson extends beyond retail: fashion-inspired aesthetics can differentiate utilitarian commerce platforms when grounded in genuine customer research. The design team operated across geographic hubs, proving that distributed collaboration can maintain creative coherence when aligned around clear vision and rigorous methodology.
The Macy's redesign offers a template for enterprise digital evolution: research, aesthetics, technology, and organizational change working as unified strategy rather than separate workstreams. Visual sophistication means little if operational practices gradually erode design integrity. What would your organization accomplish with a year devoted to changing culture alongside changing interfaces?
