PayPal
Holiday
Turn a warm-but-vague idea into something concrete enough to pitch.
Edelman had an opening with PayPal and a concept everyone was excited about — a high-end holiday gift-giving destination — but no approach. My job was turning that into a UX design polished enough to hand the visual team and carry into the final pitch. It was also my first time designing inside an agency.
Real interest, no approach yet.
The team had been talking with PayPal about a “Holiday Gift-Giving Experience” — a destination where PayPal users could discover genuinely unusual gifts and pay for all of it with PayPal. There was real interest on the other side of those conversations. What there wasn’t yet was something concrete enough to put in front of the client and say, “this is the thing.”
Because this was a pitch and not a funded build, there were no KPIs and no budget — and the riskiest assumption was baked into the premise: that after all the work, PayPal would say yes.
The hard part wasn’t the wireframes. It was the ambiguity around them.
I was handed a lot of creative freedom — which sounds like a gift and is actually a trap. The idea was abstract and the way it reached me was genuinely vague: a real “I’ll know it when I see it” situation, with no requirements to satisfy and no acceptance criteria to build toward.
Visually interactive
Big, motion-heavy, exploratory. But to a client, that reads as expensive — it risked scaring PayPal off before the idea even landed.
Visually stunning
We scaled from interactive to stunning — a beautiful, art-directed look carrying the pitch instead of heavy interaction.
The way through was iteration and interrogation: get every clarifying question answered, and when the answers run out, let the wireframes do the asking. Show, don’t ask — the wireframe is the question.
The key that gave the whole thing a shape.
The one thing I most needed was concrete: what kinds of giftswere we pitching? The content team developed a list of candidates — and what it resolved to unlocked the whole information architecture. The “gifts” were really experiences: a ski holiday in Aspen or Tahoe, travel, one-of-a-kind outings — not products off a shelf.
Framing the offering as browsable “experiences” organized by category gave the design a spine. The guiding principles narrowed to two — genuinely unique categories, and a visually striking look — and my job was the structure that held both.
A native PayPal destination, end to end.
I built the site to sit inside PayPal’s own chrome so it read as a native PayPal destination — the real top nav with a sub-navigation of Home, a “Cheer Site,” and Travel Partners. The wireframe set covered the full journey, each frame composed to be dressed up into something beautiful rather than to demo interaction.
Highlights, a flexible locations list, Buy Now.
Each experience opened to a detail page — description and highlights, a scrollable Locations list (one experience could be available in many places), related “Other Experiences” for exploration, and a Buy Now to check out with PayPal.
A marquee item, carried by an auction.
Higher-ticket items got a more elaborate layout with an auction / bidding mechanic — a pattern borrowed straight from eBay, a natural move given PayPal’s eBay lineage at the time — so a single marquee experience could carry the pitch.
A Travel Partners landing handed users off to airline and travel partner offers beyond PayPal’s own site — the browsable grid filtered in place, with an additional “by location” filter driven by zip code.
Design when the requirements are vague on purpose.
The work was a full UX design, taken from a vague verbal concept to iterated wireframes, handed off to the visual team ready for PayPal’s final pitch. It taught me what to ask, how far to push for clarity, and when to stop asking and start drawing. And, honestly, that I do my best work inside real constraints.
This was pitch work, so there’s no launch metric — and because I moved straight on to another contract right after, the pitch’s final outcome is simply one I never learned.