Reimagining the Creator Experience
OVERVIEW
One Message, Thousands of Creators
"A brief written for everyone is a brief written for no one."
thortful is a two-sided marketplace connecting independent greeting card designers with customers. Simply put: creators submit designs, moderation determines catalogue visibility, and royalties are generated per sale. The model depends entirely on a healthy, high-quality catalogue — which in turn depends on creators who understand what the platform needs from them.
During the pandemic, the platform grew rapidly — and catalogue quality dropped sharply. A creator base of thousands was being treated as a single audience, and the instinctive fix was to ask everyone for more: clearer briefs, stronger direction. But "everyone" no longer existed.
I moved from B2C Content into the creator side of the business, owning strategy end-to-end and working cross-functionally with CX, E-commerce and CRM — the problem was systemic, so the response needed to be too.
My remit was to give creators the clarity and guidance they needed to succeed. What I found instead was a system working against that goal.
01. THE CHALLENGE
A Self-Reinforcing Loop
The pandemic brought a wave of new creators with varying motivations — lockdown boredom and curiosity, a sudden desire for a creative outlet, and a need for a second income in an uncertain time. They were enthusiastic and engaged, but largely inexperienced. Meanwhile, more established and professional creators began to disengage, put off by a platform that no longer felt curated or commercially serious. The creator base had become two very different audiences, pulling in opposite directions. And we were still communicating with them as one.
The business introduced structured design briefs to address declining catalogue quality — a logical response to the problem. But the briefs exposed a self-reinforcing loop that made things worse.
A catalogue gap was identified and new cards were needed. Briefs went out to the entire creator base. Volume submissions flooded in, but not necessarily from creators equipped to fill the gap. The moderation backlog grew and rejection rates rose — typically without feedback. Creators felt frustrated and disengaged. Catalogue gaps persisted. So new cards were needed again.
The briefs weren't solving the problem, they were amplifying it. We were unintentionally training creators to fail by sending them briefs they weren't equipped for.
Even highly skilled creators were not set up for success
This wasn't only a problem for less experienced creators. A designer joined the platform with an online audience of over 100,000 followers — we only found out she had joined after she complained that her designs had been rejected.
The work itself was strong. It simply hadn't been adapted to what a greeting card needed commercially, and nothing in the system had told her that before it cost us the relationship. Moderation was technically correct to reject it. But strategically, we had failed her completely — the system had no way to distinguish "skilled, but unfamiliar with this format" from "not yet capable." It only had one lever, rejection, regardless of why a creator's work didn't fit. The creator experience wasn't built for varying levels of expertise, and it was costing the business top creative talent.
02. THE APPROACH
Designing for Creator Context
The solution required two things working in parallel: a segmentation framework that reflected how creators actually differ, and a targeting logic that could put the right guidance in front of the right creator at the right moment.
The Creator Lifecycle Framework
I developed a four-tier lifecycle model — Prospect, Beginner, Intermediate, Expert — with tiers assigned through behavioural and performance data, and validated against how creators described themselves. Each tier carried different expectations, different support needs, and different commercial value to the platform.
But capability alone wasn't enough. Two creators at the same tier could have completely different motivations, and motivation shapes behaviour more than capability does.
Aspiring Anna
The committed brand-builder
Professional growth and community
Consistent, high-frequency uploader
Loyalty and steady growth
Retention & growth — deep context and mentorship to build loyalty
Side-hustling Steve
The responsive trend-spotter
Quick wins via pop-culture trends
Sporadic; active when trends emerge
Speed and trend capture
Reactive activation — data-led alerts to capture trends as they break
This distinction matters beyond brief targeting. In a broadcast model, Steve looks disengaged. In a segmented model, we understand he's dormant — waiting for the right trigger. That difference protects metric accuracy, and stops retention effort being spent on someone who doesn't need retaining.
Two-layer targeting logic
The logic came directly from my CRM background, where matching content to prior behaviour measurably out-performed generic broadcasts — a rude Christmas card launch email sent to people who'd bought rude cards before consistently beat the all-list send. I applied the same principle to creator targeting: a 'cheeky card' brief sent to creators already strong in humour becomes a personalised invitation rather than a generic call to arms.
Eligibility
Are they capable?
Filter by lifecycle tier, determined by behavioural and performance data. A brief only reaches creators at the right capability level.
Relevance
Are they suitable?
Match brief to creative style, determined by dominant moderation style tags. A brief only reaches creators whose catalogue already aligns.
The goal wasn't exclusion — it was precision. Fewer wrong-fit briefs meant fewer rejection cycles, and a creator relationship that stayed intact.
It's illogical to request modern humour from traditional illustrators. When briefs feel irrelevant, creators stop trusting them — and eventually stop opening them.
03. ACTIVATION
What we actually shipped
The full segmentation model needed cross-functional support — product, CRM, data — that wasn't resourced at the time. The business was focused on the customer experience; creator lifecycle personalisation wasn't the priority.
So I adapted. The goal shifted from perfect segmentation to making the broadcast smarter and applying segmentation thinking within the channels we already had. I consolidated the persona set down to two core and two secondary personas, so that even a broadcast message could be written with a specific creator in mind.
Creator Central
When tailored support wasn't scalable, we built Creator Central: a structured self-serve hub where creators could find onboarding guidance, technical resources, design briefs, and insights without relying on the team for answers. I partnered with customer service to build content around recurring friction points, simplified internal jargon, and ensured consistent terminology across the experience. The aim was to move creators off reactive email pushes and onto a system they could navigate themselves — reducing dependency on ad-hoc support, and giving every tier a place to grow from.
Seasonal Lookbooks
Seasonal Lookbooks gave creators commercial context and aesthetic direction ahead of key occasions — designed to shift creator behaviour from reactive to anticipatory. The intended knock-on benefit was operational: earlier submissions would ease the moderation bottleneck and give marketing fresh content well ahead of major campaigns.
04. MEASUREMENT
Correcting the metric
Before I could measure whether the new system was working, I had to fix a distortion in how we measured creators at all.
When I joined, creator performance was judged on total sales. That sounds logical until you look closely: a single viral card featured in an ad could inflate a creator's standing for months. We were measuring visibility, not reliability — celebrating spikes, not consistency.
I proposed shifting the primary metric to catalogue acceptance rate — the percentage of submitted designs approved for discovery — paired with average sales per approved design. Together they separated quality from luck, and surfaced a problem the old framework had been hiding: several of our "top creators" were one-hit wonders whose designs were mostly never approved.
With the metric corrected, I defined four signals to track whether the new work was actually shifting creator behaviour:
Engagement
Email engagement
Was guidance becoming more relevant to the people receiving it?
Relevance
Lookbook downloads
Were creators actively seeking commercial guidance, or ignoring it?
Quality
Proportion of 4–5 star moderated designs
Was design quality improving across the catalogue?
Behaviour
Upload timing vs. key occasions
Were creators responding earlier, suggesting better commercial awareness?
05. IMPACT
Behaviour Changed Before Revenue Moved
Revenue impact needed a longer measurement window than I had. But behaviour moves first, and early indicators validated the directional shift:
First seasonal Lookbook saw a 40%+ open rate – almost double our usual OR, helped by cross-channel activation and Instagram teasers that primed creators to open and engage.
Briefs and Insights consistently out-performed standard community content. Higher opens, higher engagement – commercial guidance got creators talking, indicating strong content relevance.
Commercially optimised designs rose across the catalogue. The moderation and e-commerce teams reported an uptick in higher-rated, better-fitted submissions.
Seasonal uploads moved earlier, easing pressure on internal teams. Moderation lost its last-minute peak-season crush, marketing received fresh content early enough to include in campaigns, and creators stopped missing the window on their best work.
Recurring support queries decreased, suggesting Creator Central was reducing friction.
Creators told us, unprompted. We recieved positive messages and saw an increase in social media activity.
Align ambition with operational capacity early
Much of what I shipped was the art of the possible, not the plan I began with. I now make sure I sense-check capacity across teams before designing the solution, so strategy and constraints are aligned from the start.
Measure what you need to learn, not what's easy to count
Total sales was the easy number, but it ranked creators on visibility, not reliability. I'm now deliberate about asking what we actually need the data to tell us.
Insight isn't enough — you have to bring people with you
I understood the creator base deeply, but "because I know" wasn't always persuasive. I now build the case on evidence, and bring stakeholders with me.
06. REFLECTIONS
What This Work Taught Me
Three lessons I've carried into every strategy project since: